The best part of OSCON for me wasn't actually part of OSCON. The guys at Twitter put together a Cassandra hackfest on Wednesday night, with much awesomeness resulting. Thanks to Evan for organizing! Stu Hood flew up from Rackspace's Virginia offices just for the night, which normally probably wouldn't have been worth it, but Cliff Moon , author of dynomite , showed up (thanks, Cliff!) and was able to give Stu a lot of pointers on implementing merkle trees . Cliff and I also had a good discussion with Jun Rao about hinted handoff--Cliff and Jun are not fans, and I tend to agree with them--and eventual consistency . I also met David Pollack and got to talk a little about persistence for Goat Rodeo , and talked to a ton of people from Twitter and Digg. I think those two, with Rackspace and IBM Research, constituted the companies with more than one engineer attending. The rest was "long tail." Back at OSCON, my Cassandra talk was standing room only. Slid...