Preparing for POSSCON

POSSCON is approaching fast, and I've taken some time to figure out what I'd like to do for the days that I spend there.  I replied to the email sent to us to confirm that I'm attending, and I will be attending for both Thursday and Friday.

I realize now that when I emailed them in reply, I said that I would be going for the Education track.  However after looking over the website in detail, I think I'm going to stick to mostly the technical sessions. Currently, I've been wrapped up in web development, so hearing about FireHost's Web Hosting, PHP applications, and MySQL server development are the most appealing to me.

SQL is one of my favorite programming languages, and I've gained some experience using MSSQL, but  very little with MySQL.  I'll probably want to speak with Dave Stokes (the Community Manager for MySQL).  I'm sure he'll have some interesting things to say.

Thursday:

Most of my web development has been server side programming (using Microsoft's .NET framework along with MSSQL), but I've had little experience with PHP in the database class offered here at CofC.  I would like to know more about PHP (mostly because I want to tackle a web project of my own this summer -- and I would love to take the free route).  I'm sure John Metric (Software Engineer for SugarCRM) will have some great things to say during his session at 1:15 on Thursday.  I'll be sure to come up with some questions for him after hearing what he has to say.

Although I don't consider myself much of a gamer anymore, I'm still somewhat interested in gaming.  I've never had any experience with any game programming (except for a few small games back during Programming I here at CofC).  I'll be sure to attend the open source gaming talk at 10:45 on Thursday.  I'm sure I'll come up with some questions for John Diamond (the speaker of this presentation).


Friday:
Depending on how Thursday goes (and what I tend to like the most), I'll make my decision on which workshops to attend.  At the moment, I would probably go with John Metric's "Your Next Business Application" at 9:45.  The history of Linux also sounds quite interesting, so I'll probably be attending John Hall's "History of Linux" workshop at 1:15.