Life in Balance: Amit Chaudhary’s Blog
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The talks at Open Source Conference (OSCON 2009) by O’Reilly are 45 minute sessions. This year, the conference is in San Jose, CA from July 20 – 24, 2009.

I would like to see the following ones this year.

These ideas were triggered from my own search fora proposal and have some link to my own background of a Web services backend engineer on Linux.

On Grid Programming

• Real life MapReduce examples using Apache Hadoop with Java & Streaming API

This would cover pseudo and real code for actual real life examples for Map Reduce, going beyond what is there at the end of the Google Map Reduce white paper. These would be projects powered by Apache Hadoop.

• Tour of Facebook\Apache Thrift

This would cover different aspects including serialization across same language, data transfer using their transport API & across different languages

• HDFS setup and access from Java\Rails

This would be for those considering using it as a DFS without Map Reduce. Leo touched on the topic in the blog entry, Rearchitecting Twitter

General Programming

• Java web frameworks and how they fit in together?

Unlike say Rails, Java has a wide array of web frameworks, see Wikipedia’s list in Java enterprise platform category. It might make sense to highlight a few like Raible did earlier, Comparing JSF, Spring MVC, Stripes, Struts 2, Tapestry and Wicket, however showing different ones as used in the Terracota Exam App.

• Python libraries and packages you were not aware of

The title says it all.

• Becoming a better Python Programmer

Something beyond the coding standards and idioms in the PEPs.

Desktop & Tools

• Linux desktop applications you might not know about
  

Again the title says it all, for example, for me, this would cover Amarok for playing music files, TakeNote or Tuxcards for outline note taking, Freemind for mind mapping and more, this would begin where the Linux Journal Readers‘ Choice Awards 2008 end.

• Top Open Source Personal productivity tools

The title says it all

• Best Open Source Developer Tools

This is a tricky one and would require multiple programmers to come up with a complete list, a Kernel programmer would be happy using vi\emacs, while a Java one would use Eclipse or Netbeans and so on.

If you are interested in presenting these, do consider making a proposal at the OSCON 2009 Call for Participation. The last date is Feb 3rd 2009.

Presenters get a free pass to the regular conference.

I ran some queries to get a feel for salaries and job openings for different programming languages in the SF Bay Area aka Silicon Valley.

Number of Job openings as per Craigslist:

• Java: 352
• C++: 113
• Python: 114
• PHP: 371
• Rails: 48
• C#: 88
• Perl: 180

Observations:

The above comparision has some bias including the fact that Perl & Python are regarded as Scripting language and only in some case get a job on their own, unlike say Rails or Java.

Right now Craigslist is the best Job search website for Tech Jobs in the bay area

Average Salaries from Indeed.com:

Observations:

Rails & PHP average salaries are about 5% lower than all others and they drop further if paired with Developer instead of Engineer.

I picked Mountain View, CA which has a fair share of different companies and the radius will pick up San Jose, Redwood city, etc.

Nation-wide Salary Trends from Indeed.com:

Observations:

The top four programming languages are PHP, Java, Perl & Rails. Caveat, Due to the fact that indeed.com searches other job sites, the duplicate posting rate might be high, however it would apply to all postings.

For a different view on the same topic, see my earlier blog post, Top Programming Languages as derived from book sales and TIOBE Programming Community index.