I arrived in the midst of EuroFOO, hence as a FOO alumni, was tempted to compere the US and European editions. So I snuck upstairs to the floor of the Hotel Le Plaza where EuroFOO was taking place. My first day of EuroOSCON was actually a pair of tutorials:
- Marcel Molina’s Ruby On Rails was immensely useful, albeit I was unable to follow tutorial exercises without an installation of Ruby. With my recent adventures learning MySQL and PHP, the contrast with the simplicity of Ruby was sharp. Both Ruby and Rails seem to be richer development mechanisms for th work I’m planning to do.
- Damian Conway’s The 7 Principles of better API Design was useful in places, with guidelines for architecting APIs (e.g. design the code that calls APIs before creating the APIs themselves) though focused heavily on Perl development…I don’t know Perl 🙁 Strangely the curtains and slide colour were reminiscent of Apple’s recent Showtime event.
During the lunch break, I met Daniel Erasmus, Founding Partner of The DTN and Scenario Thinking. Daniel helps clients execute scenario planning and develop early warning systems and forecast processes; essentially helping to predict the future. Daniel described some fascinating work he’d been doing with some mobile operators and recounted Peter Schwartz’ the Greening of Russia; the story of how Shell modelled the decline of Soviet Communism and predicted the rise of Gorbachev even before he jointed the Politburo!
I approached my time at O’Reilly’s 
My Dad just told me Pakistan’s first astronaut, Namira Salim, would be flying with NASA in 2009. I quipped ‘only if she’s not carrying any liquids, gels, shampoos or lip gloss‘.
