For the last couple of days I have been at the Open Source Developers’ Conference in Taipei, Taiwan.  This is the second technical conference I have attended this month.

I always mean to write up the interesting talks I hear but it’s actually quite hard to explain a talk in a blog post.  For example my notes from Martin Fowler’s QCon talk on Domain Specific Languages contain 1500 words and a couple of diagrams.  This is probably far too long for a blog post.

I will, however, try to write up something about each conference.  This would be easier if I had a working Internet connection.  I didn’t have a connection at QCon and whilst OSDC.tw has one it’s so slow it’s basically useless.  I have attended many conferences in the past without a computer and didn’t care that I had no Internet connection.  But here in Asia, since I understand only a little Japanese and no Chinese, there are many talks that I can’t understand.  It seems acceptable at a technical conference to use a computer during a talk but I think the speakers would find it off-putting if I read a book.