This year I decided to go to Froscon. I had planned to go the last couple of years, but I never actually did it. And I must admit that I like it very much. The differences with for example Fosdem are huge. The developer tracks are really of the level of Getting Things Done instead of talking about it. Also the location is quite ok. The rooms are tidy, I can sit perfectly (something I can’t say about Fosdem), the heat in the rooms is bearable and also the acoustic is very good. Most tracks are in German, but some are in English. Just the right ones.

The rest of this blog is about the presentations I saw, so if you don’t need those details, skip the rest ;-). The first presentation I saw was about the Spider engine for MySQL. Most of you know MyISAM and InnoDB. Spider is another one. This one makes it possible to store tables on different servers. The spider enabled server forwards the request to the remote server and passes it back to the requester. Not so useful you might think. Well, it also has the ability to forward sections of a table to different servers. Say you have 2000 records, you can store id 0-1000 on one server and 1000-2000 on another one. When a client requests id 1500, it will be passed on to the right server. As that server only holds 1000 records, the record is easily found and returned. For the client this whole process is transparent. You can imagine that searching for a keyword on two servers with half the records in parallel is much faster than searching it in one server which holds all records.

The second talk was about phpunit. This framework makes it possible to make unit tests for your php applications and libraries. He talked a lot about the reasons to do it and best practices. As I work on quite some php applications during day time, I think it makes sense to start using such a framework when possible. I think it also tells a bit about the matureness of an application when it contains unit tests. There are also some tools that can show which lines of your code are unittested. Something I did not know existed. I wonder if such a tool exists for C++ and if it does, what amount of lines are unittested within KDE libs.

After that I attended the keynote about Cloud Computing. Simon Wardley is a prefect keynote speaker. He brought statistical graphs, fighting cats and Tom Cruise together in something like 369 slides, without getting boring for a second. Although the topic was about Cloud Computing, it gave a good insight about the evolution of a technological invention. From the invention through a product until it reaches a service and about how that cycle has all the room for improvements, related inventions. I think I’m going to watch the video of the presentation to get a good understanding of everything he explained. Presentation of the day in my book.

After that the only possibility is disappointment of course. And it was. The presentation about a new mysqltuner was not so good. She arrived late, the beamer would not cooperate nicely, the laptop had issues with the mysql server and the presentation was largely about what the current mysqltuner script is doing wrong and at 5 minutes before the finish line she started to very quickly show the version she has written. I don’t consider the new version so much better, the mysqltuner script gives a nice summary of the state of your mysql server, after that you can start investigating what to do to make the thing faster. I don’t think any script can give a complete overview about how to tune the mysql-server best. Ah well, she has improved the output of some things, so it’s not that bad, I just expected more. Like output in html, a database which stores results over time, a deeper analysis of the most common queries, or whatever.

After that I returned to the main track where Alexandra Leisse had a talk about Community Building 101. It was something completely different and that was nice. I enjoyed the presentation very much, I think she used 5 slides for the whole presentation and they mostly contained pictures, hurray! She talked a lot about the aspects of maintaining a healthy community within a project. Some of that was really obvious, at least for me, but it’s nice to have it spelled out, some things are not so obvious and I learned some new tricks. Maybe I’ll now manage to create a community behind RSIBreak or Mailody ;-).

Finally I ended with a presentation about common mistakes in php unit testing. unfortunately it contained quite some overlap with the earlier presentation about phpunit, but that one too contained some things I did not know and things to remember when I ever start using testcases in PHP.

So tomorrow will be day 2. I’m looking forward to that. I made a list of things I want to attend, now the challenge is to not forget that list, like i did today.