Jesse talked about Prophet, our latest toy that we started to hack together in hawaii back in April this year, it's essentially a toolkit or platform for building distributed application that can synchronise without a central server. Our first sample use case is a bug tracker, which can sync bidirectionally from rt and hiveminder, so we can fiddle with tickets offline, and also in hiveminder's upcoming slick project management UI (sorry, you can't have it just yet, but soon!) Ironically, this Chinese article translated Tim's quote of Jesse from Best Practical Solutions: "Web 2.0 is sharecropping" into something clashing and literally "The Best Solution is Web 2.0".
And of course, the Cloud is making a lot of noises despite our (presently) seemly futile attempt to build distributed application. But, there's always more than one way to do it! (and your is probably wrong!) This reminds me back when I work in fotango, we were trying to build a utility computing platform with server-side javascript. The one thing that makes very much sense is that this platform should be open-source, or at least an open-standard, which Simon Wardley had more discussion. The problem with sharecropping is that when the landlord finds better uses of the land, byebye farmers. A platform of openness is essentially enabling the "farmers" (in this case people relying on hosted computing or API consumers) to hyperjump around onto other platform with the same skillsets they have.
Anyway, so incidentally Brad Fitzpatrick started to hack on the Perl support for Google App Engine, which I had some minor contributions making the CGI environment of the sandbox server working (Gosh I did feel 15years younger once my script gets all the CGI variables!), and hooked up the Moose guys to do help with clean meta-programming for the protocol buffer support in perl. The churning of a baby project just really amazed me, especially in the perl land. The last time I felt the same is probably back when Audrey started pugs.
I gave a talk about the Pushmi project, for multi-site subversion support (and found out WanDisco is putting google adwords for pushmi!) with the upcoming fancy admin UI. I also gave a lightning talk, "the secret of success in open source", which is essentially a parody of Tom Lehrer's Lobachevsky (slides). I think the singing bit wasn't so well-practiced, but it was well-received ;)
In summary, portland is a nice city, and Vault is a fabulous Martini Bar, the conference is fantastic in all aspect, thanks to the excellent effort from Allison & all other people from O'Reilly.
