Day one is complete.  Portland is great as always.  Its really day 1 1/2 since we got in at 1PM yesterday.  That allowed us to go to the MySQL/Zend party last night.  Great party by those guys.  Touched based with old friends and made some new ones.

I kind of session hopped today.  Of note, I attended Andi Gutmans PHP Security talk which really had little to do with PHP.  Like Larry Wall's onion metaphor, Andi presented an onion metaphor for security.  I stopped in for a while on the SOLR talk.  It looks neat.  I like that it is a REST interface to Lucene.  If we were not using Sphinx already I might take a longer look.  But, we like Sphinx and, SOLR and Lucene are Java.  Not that there is anything wrong with that, we just don't use Java a lot, so its just one more thing that would be out of the norm.  I admit I spent a good bit of time in what is being called the "hallway track" working on some code.  Work does not stop just because you are at a conference.

I got to hang out with Jay Pipes of the MySQL Community team a good bit.  We talked about the MySQL forums (which or course runs Phorum) and how they want to improve them.  They would like to see tagging, user and post rating and some other things.  Some good things will come out of that.  Hopefully they have some of the tagging stuff done already at MySQL Forge and can contribute that code to Phorum, saving us time.

I hosted the Caching for fun and profit BoF.  It was not packed, but it was a good time.  The MySQL BoF was at the same time, so we lost some folks to that I am sure.  They had beer and pizza.  Brad Fitzpatrick did come by and contribute.  Thanks Brad.  It was mostly the same stuff you get on the memcached mailing list.  "How do we expire lots of cache at once?"  Questions about different clients.  Stuff like that.  It kind of turned into a memcached BoF, but I tried to share the dealnews experience with the attendees including our MySQL Cluster pushed caching.

I have met many readers of both dealnews and this blog (hi to you) while here.  Glad to know that both my professional work and my personal work are of use to folks.  The demographic at this conference is dead on for dealnews.  Maybe I can get them to sponsor it next year.  That would be cool.

I say every year that I want to present "next year".  Something always keeps me from doing it.  Usually its just not having time to prep for it.  By the time I think about it, the call for papers has passed.  I really want to get it done this time.  We shall see I suppose.

We went to the Sun party tonight.  It was a good time.  There was beer that was free as in beer.  More hanging with friends and talking about all kinds of stuff.  Now, all you Slashdotters sit down.  I saw people from the PostgreSQL and MySQL teams drinking beer and having fun together.  OMGWTFBBQ!!!1!!  See, the people that really matter in those projects don't bicker and fight about which is better.  They just drink beer and have a good time together.

Anyhow, I will blog more after day 2.  There won't be a day 3 as I have to catch an 11:30 flight back home.  That is usually how it goes.  Not sure why they book anything on Friday really.  Even O'Reilly has its "after party" on Thursday night.  Its late, and I need sleep.