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by Daniel Berger.
Original Post: Don't go to what you already know
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From The Daily Ack (Alasdair Allan), a Perl programmer who attended an OSCON tutorial called "Taming Legacy Perl":
"I'm actually a bit disappointed, while Peter is a good enough speaker and the material is solid enough, he's been talking for an hour and a half and he hasn't said anything I don't already know. I'm starting to wonder whether I should stop going to the Perl track here at OSCON and branch out and do other stuff, either that, or actually organise myself a couple of months earlier and submit some tutorial ideas."
I think it's a mistake for any full time programmer with 3 or more years of experience in a language to attend a major conference like OSCON and go to sessions on that same language. Unless it's some highly specialized area that you've never had the chance to get into (such as concurrency, database interaction, etc), you're going to experience what Alasdair experienced here - the feeling that you've already learned, through research and experience, what the presenter is trying to teach you.
Had I gone to OSCON this year, I would NOT have gone to any of the Ruby sessions or tutorials. I would have spent most of my time going to anything related to concurrency and parallel programming, PostgreSQL or VR, just for kicks.
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