Open Source Bridge

Every programming language ever created has some horrible mistakes: your favorite is no exception. We'll talk about some fundamental principles of PL design and how they fail to play out in various real languages.

'Programmer' and 'Manager' are two different titles for a reason: they're two different jobs and skill sets. If you have managerial aspirations (or have had them foisted upon you), come to this session to learn some of the tricks of the managerial trade.

The physical world contains huge amounts of data that are underutilized by most people. The vision is to build a sensor network platform that can act as a hardware extension to a person’s identity — importing data about their environment, activities, energy/resource usage, and others into a personal data locker.

MapBox is a company building beautiful maps and open source tools. At the heart of our work are open software and standards, and at the heart of that is a file format for storing maps called MBTiles. We'll talk about where the need for this format came from, how it was created, and what problems it solves.

How do you transform your site or service into a platform others build on top of? How do you clear the path, lower the barriers, and make it easy for new developers to get started?

The mobile revolution has shown us that our content management and web publishing technologies are entangled and flawed. But by thinking deeply and re-examining the essence of our content, we can help to architect a flexible future for the web.

C2: A declarative visualization library written in Clojure for building interactive, data-driven interfaces on the web

Design has permeated our culture and our tools, but the software you're building doesn't have a graphical interface. That doesn't exempt you from thinking about user experience design! Learn how UX principles apply to even basic command line scripts.

"Open Source, in its majestic equality, guarantees both programmers and non-programmers alike the right to alter and recompile their software." The battle for Open Source Legitimacy is largely over: in many sectors, it's actually the preferred alternative. In the task-focused world that most casual computer users inhabit, however, "open-ness" is a meaningless abstraction and the walled gardens of closed source competitors offer compelling advantages. In this session, I'll explore the reasons that people make their choices, point out why "moral arguments" about open source are unlikely to change those choices, and discuss ways that our communities can further the ideals of Open Source without demonizing Grandpa's iPad.

Learn how Mozilla collects and analyzes three million crash reports a day with Python, PHP, PostgreSQL and HBase.

Github has revolutionized social coding but where does social data stand in relation?

Sick of writing sign-in code? Not sure whether to support Twitter logins, Facebook logins, or both? Try IndieAuth! IndieAuth, built on top of OAuth, is a new way to sign in to websites online using your own domain name. This talk will show how OAuth and OpenID paved the way for IndieAuth, and will provide details about how to use this on your own websites.

Google will release a wearable heads up display this fall, and it may help to usher in a new era of augmented reality and wearable computing. What does this mean for us? How do we build for the next generation of machines? Who was here before us, and how can we learn from them?

At one point it was popular to refer to the eyes as windows to the soul, and common wisdom accepted that you could learn a great deal about a person's inner thoughts by looking at their eyes. Then that notion fell out of fashion, except perhaps in love songs. But once we learned how to track people's eye motions, record them, and analyse the data, we realized that there may have been something to it.

Constraints make good art. Everyone knows the right way to design and implement software — but is the wrong way really so bad? This talk demonstrates unconventional approaches to solving common and real problems and explores their benefits and drawbacks.

You've seen a million best practice talks. This is quite the opposite: I'll instruct you in the ways I've failed over twenty years of software development, and advise you how not to make the same mistakes.

Hiring remote workers is great for filling those holes on the team...but if you don't have the correct infrastructure in place you're just setting yourself--and your remote team members--up for a world of hurt. This session will detail how our engineering department went remote and thrived because of it.

How is Wikipedia designing its user experiences? In a larger sense, how do you design for a collaborative community -- the type of social network where people make things together? Brandon Harris, senior designer for the Wikimedia Foundation, explains.

Building your company's status board is more than just putting charts on a screen - numbers are just data, whether you write out the digits or plot a squiggly line. Learn to transform your data into information, and let that information instruct you.

Sumana Harihareswara gave our opening keynote, "Be Bold: An Origin Story".

Beer, cookies, psychopathy, happiness, regret—these are all things the world's greatest scientists have studied in detail. Learn how humans work, and how to get the most out of interacting with them.

In the 1980s, my grandfather reached onto the bookshelves of his cigar-smoke-seasoned garage laboratory and pulled down a three-ring binder that would change my life. Come hear how a 50-year-old introduction to binary logic has managed to stay relevant after all these decades, and what it means for our own efforts to teach and document technical subjects.

Musicians tend to demand specialized tools for computer-aided music generation. Come listen to me dissect a tool I wrote to satisfy my needs.

Machine learning and data mining methods underlie many exciting products and services, but their underlying workings remain opaque to many, even developers. I will provide a brief tutorial on some of the most important concepts and methods from machine learning and data mining, with motivating examples and illustrations from open source tools. Particular emphasis will be placed on learning methods and their appropriate use.

As the #2 most popular web server, NGINX has gained attention because of its performance, scalability and ability to manage concurrent requests. What are the basics that every developer needs to know about NGINX? Why would you choose Nginx over some other web server? What are typical deployment scenarios?

"If it's open source, that means it's public domain, right?" "Well, it's fair use if you only copy 5% of it." "I know, let's get a trademark and then nobody can use our idea!" A discussion of common myths about intellectual property and how it applies to open source.

What kind of open source music can you make? All kinds! Let's get our feet wet and jam!

Esoteric programming languages never really get the attention they deserve in the mainstream programming culture. We'll examine idioms from several exotic languages and explain how they can improve the quality of more common codebases.

Code review is awesome. Do more of it.

How thinking about operations can help you make your code better, stronger, and faster.

What do you do when you have to parse weird message formats? You write parser! Or, in this case a regular expression. See how I make a moderately challenging problem easy for everyone.

How a partnership between the Oregon Department of Education and Oregon State University is using open source technology to help Oregon's K-12 teachers.

Have you ever written a nice friendly email and gotten a reply that seems like they read a whole different email? Textual communication has special problems. This talk will help you mitigate them: ensuring that what you mean to say is what is understood; interpreting messages that seem totally out of whack; and increasing empathic bandwidth.

Your project won't be successful if people can't use it successfully. There are a lot of tricks to good tech support that won't break the bank.

Conditions are rough for an aspiring DJ. More and more venues are starting to care if their performers have a license for their music, and the cost of software, hardware, and music is often more than they would care to spend. Thankfully one does not have to sacrifice on quality when replacing two of these with gratis components.

When you code, should you indent 2, 4 or 8 characters? Where should you put the braces? What should your variables and functions be named? Is it worth having an argument about any of this? This talk offers an analytical approach to deciding which elements of style will benefit your code. We'll discover which is the "best style" and which is the style you should use.

For centuries we have learned to solve problems with a linear approach. This originated with Isaac Newton in the sevententh century and assumes that everything in the world is connected through cause and effect. Systems thinking throws away that assumption and examines the universe as small pieces connected into a complex network. You will learn how a systems thinking approach can be used to create robust groups that don't have leaders.

Many Linux desktop environments try to be easy to use for the average user, but that's not you. You're at your computer all day writing code; you don't want to mess around with *dragging windows* or (ugh) watching *animated transitions*. David Brewer will demonstrate how by using xmonad, a tiling window manager, you can free yourself from the tyranny of the mouse.

A web action is the user experience, code, and service for taking a specific discrete action, across the web, from one site to another site or application. You've all seen the buttons: Share, Read later, Follow, Like, Favorite, etc. More than any one social site or service, web actions are the emergence of a whole new hypermedia building block. This talk will give an overview of the anatomy of a web action, discuss web action user flow, and highlight best practices for both publishers and service providers.

You have a great idea, perhaps the best idea ever, but you work with a bunch of know-it-alls, scaredy cats, well poisoners and lazy asses. You need a project management cycle that praises, emboldens, listens and inspires. You need a project management cycle that works.

We ask for a lot of things under the heading of 'project management'. This leads to pain and suffering when we are not clear for what we are asking for, or we're not set up to support what we're asking for. This is particularly special in open source companies and projects.

The Federated Wiki offers a new form of conversation well suited for charting our collective future.

You use wireless technology every day. Do you want to know how it works?

Your brain is really good at surviving in neolithic Africa, but not because of our powers of higher levels of thought; they're much too slow. Humans are so successful as a species because we're champions at automating things, including our own thoughts and behaviours. What's fascinating is that we're profoundly unaware of just how much our own lives run on automatic, and just how much our own behaviour is influenced by external factors. Join internationally acclaimed speaker Paul Fenwick as we examine the fascinating world of the human mind.

If you can't reproduce your work reliably then you can't maintain it. You may get by for a while with ad-hoc build/release/deployment processes, but sooner or later they'll bite you. We'll present a new practical approach to assembling both software products and installed systems, drawing inspiration from sources including the functional programming community, commercial software projects, large IT deployments, and Linux distributions like Debian. Slides available at http://apters.com/osbridge2011.pdf

Almost every web application relies on cookies to authenticate each request after the user logs in. Cookies are vulnerable to cross-site request forgery and session hijacking. It is time to explore better, more secure alternatives that are now possible thanks to practical in-browser cryptography.

Optimize your productivity by keeping your body healthy. Learn how to prevent 'laptop back' and RSI; extend your workday by taking care of your body.

Many open source projects participate in college mentorship programs, but what about younger students? Should we be cultivating the next generation of contributors from an earlier age?

Leave rigid tables behind, and work with your data as a graph, using standard web data schemas.

Why do so many technical presentations suck? Make sure that yours doesn't. Josh Berkus and Ian Dees will show you how to share your ideas with your audience by speaking effectively and (when the situation warrants it) showing your code.

Have a project that just needs some cash to get off the ground? Need someone to fund beer and food for an event? Have a great idea and want to get paid for implementing it? Come find out how we did it.

How many times have you received an email or phone call from a potential client who describes their project in a few sentences and expects a formal proposal the next day? This session will address this seemingly impossible task by going over the method we have created at OpenSourcery to estimate web projects. This method has helped us work with clients to prioritize functionality, set realistic schedules, and has improved our ability to close sales.

Overview of Apache CouchDB, who is using it, and how you can too.

Have you ever wanted to automatically turn on your lights when you get home, or turn them back off when you leave? What about controlling your lights by SMS or IRC? This presentation will teach you how to automate your life with location-based hacks and SMS.

Come join me as I dispel some of the clouds of pollution which obscure the name of marketing, show how it can help your projects, reveal how--whether you realize it or not--you already use marketing every day and how that's a very good thing indeed.

Improvements in Perl 5 over the past several years allow great programmers to do great things with less code. You too can turn your Perl 5 code from mere scripting into powerful, clear, and modern programming--with help from a few tools the world's best Perl programmers already know and love.

In order to keep a tree healthy, you have to prune its branches. This too is the case with an organization’s websites and projects. Let’s look at how Mozilla handles the end-of-life portion of a website’s life-cycle.

Not sure what queuing system to use for your next project? How about the differences between broker vs direct queue services? What is a good fit for cloud vs your own data center? This session gathers information from open source queuing projects to help answer these questions and more. Queues are part of almost every scalable website and application, it's time to find the best fit for yours.

Read the Docs is a documentation hosting site for the community. It was built in 48 hours in the 2010 Django Dash. In January 2010 it had 100,000 page views, and increases daily. I will talk about all of the code to deploy and run a sizable Django site. We will go through the highlights and interesting parts of the code, as well as some of the lessons learned from the site being open source.

When kids get hands on experience with the source code of a program, they get excited!

Tests are great - except when they aren't. Learn how to avoid writing tests that are more trouble than they're worth.

Disruptively low-cost real-time transit displays

A holistic approach to design for people through sketching, product blueprints, and team overlap (used by Apple and others).

What's going on in the mind of the user as they use your system? Did they choose it, or was it chosen for them? Do they like it or hate it? How can you tell? This talk discusses the types of users that exist, and their motivations.

A look at the tools and practices used at Facebook to support the #2 site in the world.

Agile processes can be very successful for both clients and developers, but the rapid pace and the lack of detailed long-term plans can make it difficult to design and build high quality user experiences. We'll talk about good ways to do that.

Wikis are easy as pie to install, edit, and even to develop. The real challenge they present is in bringing together the right people in the right way to make things happen. There are ways to tackle that challenge that can give your open source community a fighting chance.

Touchscreen is a platform for creating interactive kiosk and dashboard displays. It powers presentations for visitors to the Open Source Lab's data center and the network operations center. Come learn how touchscreen works and how to use it for your own display screens.

Interested in setting up your own test automation infrastructure? This is what you need to know.

Creating functional requirements as a part of the planning process is like creating a treasure map. You want to get compensated for the value your cool built-with-open-source-thing is providing to your clients. Your clients want it to work better than what they originally had in mind. If you do the work upfront, you'll know when you've hit the X marks the spot.

Why do so many technical presentations suck? Make sure that yours doesn't. Josh Berkus and Ian Dees will show you how to share your ideas with your audience by speaking effectively and (when the situation warrants it) showing your code.

API design, parallelism, automated testing, parallel automated testing, deployment, build tools, meta programming, GUI design and construction, hardware interfaces, network protocols, databases, change tracking, file formats, and why simple software becomes an epic journey.

As a "software person," I found the hard technologies of building with steel and wood made for a very different creative and hacking process. At the same time, I discovered many parallels to software development, embedded hardware, and even open-source philosophies.

Writing quality software is a worthwhile challenge. Learn how to harness the magic of testing to create better software. This presentation will provide you with an overview of the different kinds of tests, show code using different testing tools, and help you decide when and how to apply these to your projects

Dropbox, the leader in online storage and synchronization, is good, but not good enough. Find out how you can hack together your own equivalent that's more flexible, secure and convenient.

Learn how to manage your infrastructure as source code - from provisioning to application deployment and everything in between.

MongoDB is an open source, high-performance, schema-free, document-oriented database that is rapidly gaining in popularity among web developers. In this talk we'll introduce MongoDB and the features that make it great choice for your web applications.

I've been looking for an affordable, flexible, easy to learn robotics platform for years that I could use to teach kids the basics of programming/electronics/robotics. Last Fall, I finally found it.

Best practices for employers, employees and open source projects to coexist without legal conflicts.

Node.js is one of the most exciting things to happen to server-side development in the last few years. Here you'll find out why Node.js is a perfect fit for your next project and a better fit than existing languages for modern web development.

JavaScript is a unique and powerful language. Its ubiquity in the browser and its elegant concurrency model make JavaScript an ideal tool in a number of situations. Learn about the best ways to use and to understand this language from a full-time JavaScript professional.

What kind of database do you need? Thanks to new database projects like CouchDB, TokyoCabinet, Solr and others, there are more non-relational database options available than ever for developers. Yet good information on how to choose what kind of database you need is still scarce. We'll cure that in this talk.

Ever wanted to create your own printed circuit board? There are open source tools for that. This session will take you step-by-step through the process of creating a printed circuit board using the gEDA suite of electronic design automation tools. Beginners are welcome, no previous hardware experience required.

You have so much you want to teach, how do you structure it so that your training course is both interesting and challenging? How much theory can you squeeze into an hour before your attendees have forgotten where you started? How do you structure your course to account for classes which move slower or faster than average? This talk will cover all of these answers and more.

"Do you watch television? Is your furnace loud? Do you have $2?" My 7-year-old's marketing suggestions aside, building custom gadgets to improve your life is remarkably simple, and I'll prove it by building something on stage that you can duplicate at home.

Location and mapping are making a huge impact on the web and mobile. Open Source is right there. Learn the elements of the geo stack, from mapping APIs to geo databases.

What motivates us as developers? How do we define success? Throughout the development of Spaz, we've learned a lot about what works, what doesn't, and what really matters. Come to hear the story, and participate in the discussion of how we define success in open source.

Co-conspirators Jamey Sharp and Josh Triplett get up to a lot of miscellaneous hacking mischief together. Much of this hacking occurs while staring at the same screen, and tag-teaming the keyboard. Sometimes this happens with the two of them in different places. We'll demo our favorite tools and invite audience contributions to the discussion.

Since 2001, Perl 5 has undergone a renaissance. Modern Perl programs are powerful, maintainable, and understandable. Come learn how to take advantage of perl circa 2010.

Many people see project management as the art of trying to please everyone and pleasing no one, while trying not to go too far over deadline and too far over budget. It doesn't have to be that way. Good project management can be so predictable and reliable that it's almost boring. Here's what works in real projects.