Adam Christian

Every year I like to make myself a road map of how I will be spending my time during OSCON. As there are so many interesting possible talks, gatherings and social events it’s tough to get to all the things you care about.

At this point in my career my focus is on Web Development, Test Automation (specifically for the web & browsers), and social networking. Obviously on a moment by moment basis your interests are pulled in varying directions, but that sums up the bulk of my attention.

If you are interested in the full schedule grid, it can be seen here: Oscon 08 Schedule Grid.

Wednesday

• 8:45 AM: Welcome
• 9:30 AM: Keynote
• 10:45 AM: “An Introduction to Ruby Web Frameworks” (It’s going to be tough to convince me to move away from Django)“Changing Education… Open Content, Open Hardware, Open Curricula” looks more interesting today.
• 11:35 AM: This one is tough, either “Web Graphics and Animations without Flash”, “Beautiful Concurrency with Erlang”, or “Beyond REST? Building Data Services with XMPP PubSub”, “CouchDB from 10,000 ft” apparently thats the thing see, or “What Has Ruby Done for You Lately?
• 12:20 PM: Really important, LUNCH!
• 1:45 PM: Probably “Thunderbird 3″, maybe “The Open-Source Identity Revolution”
• 2:35 PM: “Caching and Performance Lessons from Facebook”, never know when this one might come in handy working for Slide inc.
• 4:30 PM: “Open Source Community Antipatterns”, I’m really looking forward to hearing Ted Leung explain how to NOT run an Open Source Project…
• 5:30 PM: Probably “Give your Site a Boost with memcached”, or “Shell Scripting Craftmanship”

Over the past ten years I have started in on countless business startup ideas. This is a great example of how low percentage ‘my spaces’ and ‘facebooks’ are in their survival. These different ideas have been in many market spaces and targeting totally different groups of people, yet somehow none of them turned into the ‘next big thing’. Some made it to a usable web site status, some just a prototype, others just an idea and a photoshop mockup. Each time I switch to a new startup idea to be working on I archive all the work I had done on the previous one incase I have all kinds of ‘extra’ time at some point to go back and finish it just for fun.

At this point it looks unlikely that I will be going back and resurrecting these projects from the dead (especially at the rapidly evolving rate of change in todays technology industry). So I am going to start sharing them with the world, and if you have an inspiration — feel free to go ahead and use it. You can even feel free to send me huge gobs of money for the great idea I inspired..

My plan at this point is to start as far back as I can date wise, and do an entry a week on a different business (or variation of a business). This way I can recap what was good about them, what killed them, and maybe learn a bit from this whole process.

There are a few stealth things that I probably won’t be sharing, and many of these were in collaboration with other people so if I accidently post your inner most secret project you are still working on from seven years ago — please let me know.

To give you a small preview it looks like the next entry will be a few of my very early ventures lumped into one.. because when you are 15 it’s hard to concentrate on any one thing for too long. Upcoming startup recaps include (coronix.net and boxbay computers), stay tuned!