Damian Conway

I love Oslo. Apart from the sheer beauty of the place, the truly civilized society, and the delicious fish and potatoes, the Open Source community in Norway is one of the most active and successful anywhere on the planet.

So, after a fantastic visit last August, I was delighted to be invited back to Oslo next month. There will nearly a full week of public events, all of which are open for anyone who wants to be involved.

First up, Oslo.pm is running three more Perl courses at Redpill Linpro's great training facility in Storo from Wednesday April 18. Two of those three courses are world premieres (of my brand new Testing and API Design classes), and the third is one of my all-time most popular classes: the ever-evolving "Productive Programmer" seminar. All the classes will be in English, and if you're interested in taking part, registrations are now open.

During those three days (probably on the evening of Thursday April 19), I will be giving a free seminar for Oslo.pm. The title will be "Temporally Quaquaversal Virtual Nanomachine Programming In Multiple Topologically Connected Quantum-Relativistic Parallel Spacetimes...Made Easy!" which, as you can see, will have something for everyone. We haven't confirmed the date, venue, or time yet, but I'll definitely be giving this talk at some point during my visit, and I'll update this blog when I know the precise details.
[Update: We now have full spacetime coordinates on the event. See Salve's blog posting or the Oslo.pm homepage for details.]

Then from Friday night until Sunday, Oslo.pm and Redpill Linpro are hosting a Perl 6 hackathon. These face-to-face meetings by the Perl 6 development team are all too rare, but incredibly valuable for thrashing out critical details of the Rakudo compiler. This time we're privileged to have so many of the key developers gathering for the event. Hopefully, we'll be able to announce significant progess as a result of our discussions and work over the week-end. I know we'll definitely be able to announce that we had a great time together: it's always a remarkable experience to be in a room with such an extreme concentration of intellect, ability, and humour. This is not a private or closed-door meeting, so if you're in Oslo that week-end and interested in helping make Perl 6 better, please come along.

Immediately after the hackathon, on Monday April 23, it's the Go Open conference, where I'll be presenting a keynote on "The Other S.E.T.I." ("Successfully Exploiting Techno-Innocence"). I've heard amazing things about past Go Open events and I'm really looking forward to participating this year. The programme looks great.

So that's six straight days of Open Source awesomeness, in one of the most beautiful and civilized cities in the world. I can't wait!

(My deepest gratitude to the board and members of Oslo.pm, the team at Redpill Linpro, Jan Ingvoldstad, the NUUG Foundation, the programme committee of Go Open 2012, and to the many other supporters and sponsors of these events. Most especially, to Salve Nilsen, who has been a force of nature in devising, negotiating, planning, and/or arranging every one of the abovementioned events. Thank-you all for making this amazing week possible.)