Open Source Bridge

What are the qualities you need more of in your open source community?

So you've had an idea, or noticed a gap that needs filling, or wondered why no one's talking about an issue you care about. Like the motivated and competent person you are, you start working, or writing, or talking. People start noticing you, listening to you, even asking for your opinion about their own projects--and one day, you realize they're treating you just like you treat your own role models. You find this unsettling. Surely motivation and competence aren't that special, you think. You, a leader? Can't be. And if you actually are a leader, what do you do now?

Nothing fancy here, just several tips that help you work effectively with Python. This talk is licensed CC BY; please feel free to reuse it at your company or conference.

Javascript is a necessity for modern web development. Whether it is to add more interactivity to your user interface, or provide a client to interact with your API, chances are, even if you're trying to avoid working in javascript, you're working in javascript. Projects like Coffeescript and Opal, while useful, still do not help understand the javascript outputted by these compile-able languages. One growing concern in this realm is that an application's javascript can sometimes be a security concern, easily exploited by a malicious user. In order to catch these concerns, you must know what your javascript does, inside and out. This talk will illustrate concepts to make sure your client code is secure, while still giving your team the flexibility it needs to keep building your stellar app!

Now that you know how important it is to ask for want you want, come learn how to negotiate in a way that will get you what you need. For everyone of any gender identity who works at a company or freelances, who feels like a newb or an expert, this presentation will teach you effective, practical skills to improve your negotiations and deal confidently with conflicts.

As a project's public IRC channel or forum grows, it's hard to keep it friendly. People get frustrated with each other, people have "different" senses of humor, disagreements escalate...oh goodness, it can be a mess. This isn't great for retaining community members or welcoming new ones. I'll share my strategies for dealing with problems, learned at the scale of hundreds of forum threads, tens of thousands of forum visitors, and dozens of IRC chatters every day.

Good data visualization allows us to leverage the incredible pattern-recognition abilities of the human brain to answer questions we care about. But how do you make a good visualization? Here's a crash course.

Few people today are not concerned with the way data is used to enhance or subvert individual privacy. This is especially true on the Web, where open source technologies are behind much of what we interact with and use on a daily basis. As the most fundamental aspects of our lives become networked -- social relationships, work, finance, and even how we get our food -- how can we make sure that open source technologies foster a sense of trust with users, protect their privacy, and still give data scientists the tools they need to gain insight?

This is the story of how the mobile web engineering team at the Wikimedia Foundation became an extremely high-functioning and successful agile team: by embracing - rather than shying away from - a distributed model. This talk will explore the agile team's journey and how we cope with the inherent tension of remoteness and the agile principle, 'The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation'.

Open Source suffers from a lack of diversity. Underrepresented populations, for systemic reasons, might never show up unless Open Source communities 'hack' themselves through explicit invitation & removing barriers to participation. Mozilla is funding two pilot studies designed to explicitly reach out to underrepresented groups in open source today. Seeking people who like to solve problems and then engaging them in a 6 week, full time accelerator program we hope to explore the question: Can we seed our communities by hacking the social/cultural/systemic issues in order to gain technical contributions from a more diverse set of minds and give to participants an experience in tech that might have long term benefits to them?

The Geek Feminism wiki is one of the central resources for feminist activism in geek communities ranging from open source software to science fiction fandom. Learn how the GF wiki started, how it's run, and what we've learned about doing activism the wiki way.

Cloud hosting is cheap. Cloud hosting is easy. What compromises are you making when you deploy to the cloud, both in terms of your security and in terms of your dependency on proprietary software?

Yoga returns to Open Source Bridge! Come with your stiff shoulders, sore wrists, tight hips and aching back. Leave with ideas on how to incorporate 5 minutes of practice into your busy day to care for your body and mind.

Scala is an up-and-coming language, used by companies like Twitter and LInkedIn. This talk will give an overview of Scala and introduce basic language features.

It can be hard to focus on your love of coding when you are regularly battling invisible issues like insecurity, anxiety, and lack of confidence. This talk will identify invisible issues programmers struggle with, talk about their impact, discuss personal experiences dealing with them, and share some tools useful in fighting back.

Yeah, you've seen us knitting during talks. I promise we're paying more attention than the people with their laptops open. Well, now learn how we do what we do... the programmer way. I'll start with the topology of individual stitches and go through geometry to design patterns, and by the end of it you'll know how to knit a sweater.

Lisp is a wise sage atop a snowy mountain, waiting for students to climb and level up their programming prowess. Pray tell, how does one scale such lofty peaks? This session introduces Lisp for twenty-first century programmers.

Almost all the books and articles out there about taking Agile methods into your personal life seem geared to people who have control over their schedules. What about those of us who have childcare, eldercare, or other incompressible schedule demands?

WordPress turned 10 years old in May of 2013. On that day, the main repo didn't contain a single tool to make it easier for developers to work with and contribute code. Over the last year, this is how and why we changed all that.

There are opportunities for open source to help save the day for libraries, ending many of librarians' and library users' woes.

Don't leave IP law to the lawyers! Intellectual property law is a minefield wrapped in straightjacket sprinkled with arsenic-laced gumdrops. Invented for lawyers by lawyers, IP law makes many engineers resentful and dismissive. And yet most of us don't know enough about the details to protect ourselves and our own creations. This session will increase your understanding of how copyrights, patents, trademarks, trade secrets, and open source licensing protect you, your code, your company, and your community.

If you want to understand randomness better (and you should), this is the talk for you.

In Python, overwriting builtin functions is fairly easy. You can even do it in the interpreter! But can you overwrite a statement, like import, just as easily? Let's go on an adventure, discovering how the import statement works, and how Python statements are defined in the CPython source code. We'll face some consequences of bootstrapping, and, to get our custom Harry Potter-themed Grammar to work, we'll have to compile a Python to compile a Python.

Do you wish that you were better at getting people to do what you need them to do? Do you keep getting put in charge of things and then get stuck wondering how the heck you're supposed to get things done? Do you keep getting into conflicts with other people because of stuff you've said, and you aren't entirely sure why? Fortunately, Slytherin House has you covered. Come to this talk and learn the basics of how to hack human relationships, using the tools of cunning and ambition to achieve inter-House harmony. As long as you promise not to use these techniques to support the next Dark Lord, of course.

SQL is an incredibly powerful language, but it can be difficult sometimes to advance beyond the basics. In this session, we will go over several tricks and tips to expand your SQL tool kit.

It's often said that "given many eyes, all bugs are shallow" and open source proponents love to list this as a reason that open source is more secure than its closed-source relatives. While that makes a nice sound bite, the reality of security with many eyeballs doesn't fit so nicely into a tweet. This talk will explore some of the things that surprised me in going from academic security research to industry security research in open source and open standards.

Ever thought about ways to use your open source skills to improve your city? In this session we'll talk about successful models for working with people in government, from pitching your project, communicating effectively, finding experts, tracking down data, to launching in the community.

As a member of the open source community, do you contribute only code, or also words? Writing about programming benefits yourself and others. This talk outlines solid article structures, suggests topics to write about, explains how blogging about programming is special, and inspires you to write articles of enduring value.