I went to Google for their first Open Source Jam to have a natter with a bunch of other folk working on open source projects, eat some pizza, that kind of thing.
Things I noticed:
- People think Second Life is cool, but no one knows what to do with it yet.
- People work on open source in their spare time. It had better be fun. Most of the under 30s were working on Python or RoR-based projects; the Java coders jumped up and down a bit less and had deeper voices. ;-)
- Django is generating buzz. Either that, or they came in a big group for fear of the Rails folk eating them.
- Quite a few people are finding AJAX UI-design hard. It’s difficult to adhere to the principle of least surprise, when you’re building stuff the like of which no-one’s seen on the web before.