Line 16: Preparing for POSSCON

So POSSCON is just around the corner, and while I am a member of Team Obsidian, I also have my own interests in the talks that will be happening. I have been browsing the POSSCON website, looking at speakers and the talks they are going to give, trying to decide who I should go hear. The goal of course is to pick topics that interest you personally, and to be able to interact with the speaker in a meaningful way after the talk.

With this in mind, my first pick for a talk was incredibly easy. Roel Van de Paar will be giving a talk entitled From Crash to Test Case: A Debugging Primer. He is a QA lead at Percona, which is a MySQL services company. His talk will focus mainly on what to do with the information you receive from a server crash, and how constructing test cases will allow you to quickly isolate and repair the problem.

Since I have been working on a Unit Test Implementation Generator for nearly the whole semester, I am eager to see what an industry professional like himself  has to say about constructing useful test cases. I am even more interested in what he will think of Obsidian however. It is my hope that his talk will prove both informative, and give me some new insights into Obsidian. My best case scenario is that he is able to impart advice about how to further improve the project, which will give us some direction to take it in the future.

The next talk I want to attend is Javascript: The Language Every Developer Should Know, which is being given by Tom Wilson. He is the president of Jack Russell Software, which is a local company that develops mobile and web applications for HealthcareIT. I am interested in this talk mostly because of the company's relative proximity to me, but also because I know very little about Javascript. I hope to go to his talk and become more educated on this language, especially if it is truly one that every developer should know.

The last talk I am going to is called How Open Source Helped Win the 2012 Election, and it is given by Harper Reed. He was the CTO on Obama's 2012 campaign, and is also the CTO for Threadless, a democratic shirt printing site. I am interested in his talk because of its proclamation of helping win the 2012 presidential election. It is really cool to think that community driven software has such a large impact on the world. I hope to talk to him more about his experiences during the campaign, and working for a website that I have used on more than one occasion.

Most of the conference though, I will probably be attending the Obsidian table, collecting members for our Google groups, and passing out stickers to attendees. I look forward to meeting all of the speakers, but I am personally more excited about meeting anyone who comes by our table and introducing them to the project I have been working on.