The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20190506201759/http://opensourcebridge.org/events/2016/speakers

Sessions

Speakers

  • Elfyme

    Howard Abrams

    Biography

    With over thirty years of programming experience from C to Clojure, he enjoys mentoring younger colleagues as well as teaching the next generation. He hosts a local computer programming club at his local middle and high schools as well as mentoring the local robotics team. Oh, and he does have a day job, working on the software defined networking team at Workday.

    Sessions

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    Amelia Abreu

    Abreu Consulting

    Biography

    Amelia Abreu is a consultant who works with technology companies to understand their users and implement trustworthy and innovative product design solutions. Past engagements have included Nike, Mozilla, and Intel, as well as startups and cultural organizations. She holds graduate degrees in Human Computer Interaction and Information Studies from the University of Washington and the University of Texas-Austin. Her writing has appeared in The New Inquiry, Motherboard, and Model View Culture, and she has been featured as a commentator on the BBC and Wired.

    Sessions

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    Kronda Adair

    Karvel Digital

    Biography

    Kronda Adair is the founder of Karvel Digital, a WordPress consultancy and development company. In addition to developing websites, Kronda gives business owners the training they need to own and manage their digital presence.

    She is a regular speaker at WordPress meetups and Wordcamps. She has been invited to speak at Ada Developer Academy, Beyond the Code, Lesbians Who Tech Summit, and others. She has given talks on WordPress deployment processes, successful site planning, starting your own business and more.

    She also writes and speaks about issues of diversity (or lack thereof) in the tech industry. She has been interviewed by sites such as Revision Path and Less Than or Equal. You can read her personal blog at kronda.com or sign up for her weekly newsletter at tinyletter.com/kronda

    Her latest project is a book for business owners on managing your website and other digital assets, to be released in the fall of 2015.

    When she’s not working, she can be found enjoying time at home with her wife and two cats, reading dead-tree books, riding one of her five bikes, or enjoying the postcard vistas of the state of Oregon.

    Sessions

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    Bhaskar Athmanathan

    Biography

    3/4 th Android Developer, 1/4th Electronics hobbyist

    I’ve been doing software development since 1999, working on a variety of technology on the way, but have recently started experimenting with Arduino and wearables. As part of that journey of learning to design a wearable, I have had to learn how to use 3D modelling software to design an enclosure for the project I am working on.

    I plan to open source my projects share my learning as I embark on this journey of electronics and wearables.

    Sessions

  • Julio headshot

    Julio Barros

    Biography

    Julio Barros is a Clojure and ClojureScript developer, trainer and consultant in Portland Oregon. He organizes the Clojure PDX meetup where everyone is welcome to discuss related topics. He enjoys building and helping others build powerful web applications and distributed systems.

    Sessions

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    Josh Berkus

    Red Hat Project Atomic

    Biography

    Josh Berkus spends all day working with Linux containers in Red Hat’s Project Atomic. He was previously known for his role in the worldwide PostgreSQL database project. He also cooks and makes pottery.

    Sessions

    • * Bots Not Cattle
      • Title: Bots Not Cattle
      • Track: Theory
      • Room: B201
      • Time: 4:45 – 5:30pm
      • Excerpt:

        “Cattle Not Pets” got us to the first generation of microservice infrastructures. Now it’s time for a second generation metaphor: “Bots Not Cattle.”

      • Speakers: Josh Berkus
    • * Kubernetes 101
      • Title: Kubernetes 101
      • Track: Practice
      • Room: B304
      • Time: 10:00 – 10:45am
      • Excerpt:

        So you’ve containerized your application, and now you want to deploy it scalably across a cluster. Kubernetes is your tool for container service management; learn how to use it.

      • Speakers: Josh Berkus
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    Lindsey Bieda

    Biography

    Lindsey is a software engineer who makes games and plays with hardware in her free time. She loves tea, cats, and feminism.

    Sessions

  • Curmudgeon x

    M. Edward (Ed) Borasky

    Biography

    Buck Borasky, Frontier Programmer – making space for octothorpes since 2007. Former Boy Genius, Sit-down Comic, Thought Follower, Curmudgeon-in-Residence.

    Sessions

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    Amy Boyle

    New Relic

    Biography

    Amy Boyle is a software engineer at New Relic. She is active in the local tech community as an organizer for the Portland Pyladies group, where she helps plan and lead workshops. Her interests include performance, data analytics, and puppies.

    Sessions

  • Brewer

    Michael Alan Brewer

    The University of Georgia

    Biography

    Michael Brewer is a Web Developer Principal for the Franklin College Office of Information Technology at The University of Georgia. He designs database-backed web applications used by thousands of students and faculty and has served on several college and University-wide committees on Web development, best practices, and application security. In 2005, he won an Advising Technology Innovation Award from the National Academic Advising Association for an academic advising application he maintains; he also serves on the board of the United States PostgreSQL Association. He holds bachelor degrees in both Mathematics and Music from The University of Georgia, conducts Georgia’s oldest continuously-operating community band, is Director of Music at Emmanuel Episcopal Church (Athens, GA), and is a member of ASCAP.

    Sessions

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    Alex Byrne

    Pierce County Library System

    Biography

    Youth Services Librarian for almost a decade, Linux user for longer, player of games of all sorts and wearer of floral print shirts. Very interested in the ways that public libraries can better assist and find the needs of their communities, how open source code can help raise a generation of coders and hackers, and how open technologies can help free public libraries from vendor lock-in and prevent the adoption of technologies that run counter to public library principles just to get at content.

    Sessions

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    Kate Chapman

    Cadasta Foundation

    Biography

    Kate leads Cadasta’s technology team and strategy. She is recognized internationally as a leader in the domains of open-source geospatial technology and community mapping, and an advocate for open imagery as a public good. Over the past 15 years she’s worked on geospatial problems of all kinds, including tracking malaria outbreaks, mapping private residences for emergency response, and even analyzing imaginary items used in geospatial games. Kate strongly believes in the mantra “people before data” which is core to her current work at Cadasta and her previous leadership of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) as the organization’s Executive Director and co-founder. Previous to her work at Cadasta and HOT, Kate worked on the geospatial sharing portals iMapData and GeoCommons. Kate also serves on the board of the Cadasta Foundation and the OpenStreetMap Foundation.

    Sessions

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    Jason Clark

    New Relic

    Biography

    I fell in love with programming as a young boy watching my dad work in Clipper and dBase III (no, really). The obsession sparked there continues to this day. I work for New Relic, and in my spare time contribute to the Shoes project. When not at work, I enjoy cycling, homebrewing, and hanging out with my family.

    Sessions

  • Ndaley 1x1

    Noelle Daley

    Biography

    Noelle is a curious explorer, software engineer and sociology nerd. By day she writes ruby for New Relic, and she spends her free time searching for the world’s greatest hot chocolate.

    Sessions

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    A. Jesse Jiryu Davis

    MongoDB

    Biography

    Staff Engineer at MongoDB in New York City specializing in C, Python, and async. Lead developer of the MongoDB C Driver libraries libbson and libmongoc. Author of Motor, an async MongoDB driver for Tornado and asyncio. Contributor to Python, PyMongo, MongoDB, Tornado, and asyncio. Co-author with Guido van Rossum of “A Web Crawler With asyncio Coroutines”, a chapter in the Architecture of Open Source Applications series.

    Sessions

  • Anne DeCusatis

    Biography

    Anne DeCusatis is currently a Core Engineer at Meetup. Before that, she was the December 2014 Outstanding Graduate for Computer Science at the State University of New York at New Paltz, and an intern with IBM WebSphere Test. In her spare time, she organizes MergeSort NYC, a feminist hackerspace.

    Sessions

    • * More Than Binary: Inclusive Gender Collection and You
      • Title: More Than Binary: Inclusive Gender Collection and You
      • Track: Practice
      • Room: B202/203
      • Time: 2:30 – 3:15pm
      • Excerpt:

        Many people identify their gender in many ways. So why do we build systems to capture accurate gender information with a dropdown that only lists “male” and “female”?
        This talk covers why you might want to consider alternative ways of selecting gender for your users, a brief overview of the current best practices, the case study of the decisions I made when creating my open source project Gender Amender (a library you can help work on right now!), and why more work needs to be done. I’d also like to facilitate a short discussion during the time slot, so that we can share varied perspectives on how to improve the entire process of gender collection, and articulate the lenses through which we can and should view gender (e.g. “what are some other data structures we could use to capture gender identity information?”).

      • Speakers: Anne DeCusatis
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    Ian Dees

    New Relic

    Biography

    Ian Dees was first bitten by the programming bug in 1986 on a Timex Sinclair 1000, and has been having a blast in his software apprenticeship ever since. By day, Ian slings code, tests, and puns at New Relic. By night, he dons a cape and keeps watch over the city as Sidekick Man. In his (heh) “spare time,” he converts espresso into programming books, including the team effort Seven More Languages in Seven Weeks.

    Sessions

    • * Little Leaks Sink Your Tests
      • Title: Little Leaks Sink Your Tests
      • Track: Practice
      • Room: B201
      • Time: 1:30 – 2:15pm
      • Excerpt:

        “The tests pass on my machine.” “Wait, it was working a minute ago.” “Oh, that test is flaky sometimes.” Unpredictable tests are toxic for our productivity. They undermine confidence in our code. They encourage us to wallpaper over the immediate problem, rather than fixing the underlying cause.

        In this presentation, we’ll talk about a chief cause of flaky tests: leaky global state.

      • Speakers: Ian Dees
  • Nikhil deshpande headshot

    Nikhil Deshpande

    Director of GeorgiaGov Interactive

    Biography

    Nikhil is Director of GeorgiaGov Interactive, a division within the Georgia Technology Authority (GTA). GeorgiaGov Interactive provides content publishing solutions and strategic counsel to the state of Georgia agencies and elected officials. Nikhil oversees the strategy and operations of Georgia.gov and the Drupal-based web publishing platform which hosts around 75 websites for state agencies and elected officials. Nikhil has 15 years of public and private sector experience in web services.

    Nikhil led the Drupal migration project for GTA to centralize Georgia’s web presence on an open source platform hosted in the cloud. Nikhil speaks and writes about Georgia’s Drupal project hoping to help other state and local governments realize the benefits. Nikhil is an advocate of open source and web standards.

    He holds a master of fine arts in Interaction Design and a master of design degree in Visual Communication. Nikhil is also an adjunct faculty member at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), Atlanta campus, where he teaches Interaction Design and Social Gaming. Reach Nikhil on Twitter @nikofthehill.

    Sessions

    • * Open source on Georgia's mind
      • Title: Open source on Georgia's mind
      • Track: Business
      • Room: B204
      • Time: 4:45 – 5:30pm
      • Excerpt:

        The state of Georgia runs its web publishing platform using Drupal. This was the first open source implementation handled by any state at an enterprise level. Within a period of one year, the state needed to build a Drupal based platform and migrate 55 websites with new interface designs. This talk addresses the costs benefits Georgia saved by implementing open source and showcases some of the challenges and wins the state experienced while moving to open source.

      • Speakers: Nikhil Deshpande
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    Serge Domkowski

    Kavi Corporation

    Biography

    I’ve been involved in making web software for about 22 years. I design and write code, talk about code (much to the delight of my wife), play with my son, ride my bicycle, root for the Timbers, drink beer, and once in a while sleep.

    Sessions

    • * Micro-services provide some benefits, but at what cost?
      • Title: Micro-services provide some benefits, but at what cost?
      • Track: Theory
      • Room: B302/303
      • Time: 10:00 – 10:45am
      • Excerpt:

        Several years ago, there was an architectural paradigm shift toward “micro-services” and away from the “monolithic” application stack. A micro-service architecture comes with scalability and replaceability, among others, but is it worth the time and effort to build it? Is it worth debugging API calls gone wrong? If you’re thinking about making this move, have already started, or have already deployed to production, this is an ideal venue to see what others are doing with micro-services.

      • Speakers: Serge Domkowski
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    Justin Dorfman

    MaxCDN

    Biography

    Justin Dorfman is MaxCDN’s Director of Developer Relations and is responsible for evangelizing the company’s technologies and championing the needs of developers who use the network.

    Justin started BootstrapCDN in 2012 and is heavily involved with the FOSS community contributing to Bootstrap, Font Awesome, Grunt, Ionic, jQuery Foundation, Twemoji, Nginx & GNU Bash.

    Sessions

  • Kyle erf

    Kyle Erf

    MongoDB

    Biography

    In his three years at MongoDB, Kyle has worked on an open-sourced continuous integration system, Evergreen, and on the tools that ship with the MongoDB database. When he’s not hacking away at distributed systems, Kyle performs at comedy shows around New York.

    Sessions

    • * Massively Parallel Testing at MongoDB
      • Title: Massively Parallel Testing at MongoDB
      • Track: Theory
      • Room: B304
      • Time: 3:45 – 4:30pm
      • Excerpt:

        When the engineering team at MongoDB pushes a commit, we have to test it on every platform and configuration that we support. This adds up to hundreds of hours of tests for each commit. In order to make this process efficient, we built Evergreen, an in-house continuous integration tool and leveraged new technologies, such as Go and dynamic host allocation, to streamline the process to minutes. This talk will show you how we parallelize our tests and how you can apply these techniques to your next project!

      • Speakers: Shraya Ramani, Kyle Erf
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    Audrey Eschright

    Recompiler Media

    Biography

    Audrey is a software developer, community organizer, and activist based in Portland, OR. She founded Calagator, an open source community calendaring service, and co-founded Open Source Bridge, an annual conference for open source citizens. She is the editor and publisher of The Recompiler, a magazine about technology and participation.

    Sessions

  • Toby Fee

    Web Dev

    Biography

    Self-taught programmer working as a web dev for Vacasa, currently looking for my next job.

    Sessions

    • * Digging through the logs
      • Title: Digging through the logs
      • Track: Practice
      • Room: B302/303
      • Time: 2:30 – 3:15pm
      • Excerpt:

        Okay, so now it’s time for the really fun part: We’ve removed the duplicate rows from the log, now we need to only show the rows that contain something that looks like an IP address.
        To do this we’ll use a search pattern. These patterns are written in Regular Expressions or RegEx. Like so many other tools in Linux they’re immensely powerful but either don’t work at all or go haywire with a single incorrect character. Let’s write one that looks for a cluster of numbers, then a period, then another cluster of numbers.

      • Speakers: Toby Fee
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    Katherine Fellows

    Simple

    Biography

    kf is a data engineer at Simple in Portland, OR. In her spare time, she serves on the boards of ClojureBridge and Bridge Foundry, helps organize volunteers at Open Source Bridge, makes questionable hair decisions, and posts selfies with her cat.

    Sessions

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    John Feminella

    Biography

    Builder of things, occasional public speaker, and curiosity advocate.

    Sessions

    • * Spelunking with ǝpoɔᴉu∩
      • Title: Spelunking with ǝpoɔᴉu∩
      • Track: Theory
      • Room: B304
      • Time: 3:45 – 4:30pm
      • Excerpt:

        What do a fistbump emoji, Mandarin Chinese, and rocket ships have in common? They’re all represented with entries in Unicode, the biggest, baddest, and most widely-used open standard. In this talk, we’ll explore the messy and conflicting ideas that humans call “text”, and how we represent those ideas in software.

      • Speakers: John Feminella
    • * Distributed Consensus with Raft
      • Title: Distributed Consensus with Raft
      • Track: Theory
      • Room: B304
      • Time: 4:45 – 5:30pm
      • Excerpt:

        Getting people to agree to things is sometimes hard. But implementing consensus with computers is harder. And distributed consensus with computers is ​_really_​ hard. How do we do it? One answer: the distributed consensus algorithm known as Raft.

      • Speakers: John Feminella
  • Ed finkler

    Ed Finkler

    Graph Story

    Biography

    Ed Finkler, also known as Funkatron, started making web sites before browsers had frames. He does front-end and server-side work in Python, PHP, and JavaScript. He is the Lead Developer and Head of Developer Culture at Graph Story.

    He served as web lead and security researcher at The Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS) at Purdue University for 9 years. Along with Chris Hartjes, Ed is co-host of the Development Hell podcast.

    Ed’s current passion is raising mental health awareness in the tech community with his Open Sourcing Mental Illness speaking campaign.

    Ed writes at funkatron.com.

    Sessions

    • * Graph Databases WIll Change Your Freakin Life
      • Title: Graph Databases WIll Change Your Freakin Life
      • Track: Practice
      • Room: B201
      • Time: 1:30 – 2:15pm
      • Excerpt:

        Most developer have worked with relational DBs like MySQL or PostgreSQL, but for many use cases they aren’t the best option. Graph databases have a simpler, more powerful model for handling complex related data. In this talk we’ll work with Neo4j to explore the advantages of graph DBs. Attendees will learn the graph model, how graph DBs let you do things that are practically impossible with SQL, and the best options for integrating one into your application — new or existing.

      • Speakers: Ed Finkler
  • Shauna gordon mckeon

    Shauna Gordon-McKeon

    Biography

    Shauna Gordon-McKeon is an independent researcher and developer who focuses on free technologies and communities. She runs a business, Galaxy Rise Consulting, providing web and mobile development and data science services to individuals and organizations. She can often be found using her skills as a writer, public speaker, and teacher to help free software and open science communities more accessible to newcomers.

    Sessions

    • * Free Culture in an Expensive World
      • Title: Free Culture in an Expensive World
      • Track: Business
      • Room: Sanctuary
      • Time: 9:00 – 9:45am
      • Excerpt:

        Money is a common worry, inside the open source community and out, but we often feel uncomfortable discussing it. We’ll talk about why that is and how our social norms around money impact who participates in open source and how they do so. The heart of this talk will be a series of case studies based on interviews with community members covering various economic models for open source, including worker co-ops, grant-funded and academic projects, for-profit business models, crowdfunding campaigns, and all-volunteer projects. We’ll explore the sustainability of each model as well as how they deal with the social pressures outlined in the first part of the talk.

      • Speakers: Shauna Gordon-McKeon
  • Miguel

    Miguel Grinberg

    SDVI Corporation

    Biography

    Miguel Grinberg is a Software Developer at SDVI Corporation, where he applies his knowledge of Web and API development to the creation of innovative services for the video broadcast industry. He blogs at http://blog.miguelgrinberg.com about a variety of topics including web development, Python, robotics, photography and the occasional movie review. Miguel is the author of the O’Reilly book “Flask Web Development”. He lives in beautiful Portland, Oregon. Follow @miguelgrinberg on Twitter.

    Sessions

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    Carl Hall

    Biography

    By day, I am a Cloud Mechanic for Cloudability. I like to pick fights with computers, and I’m a bit of a pet hoarder. I love a good joke.
    Open source evangelist. Education advocate. Portlander.

    Sessions

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    Jesse Hallett

    Galois Inc., Tozny, Portland JavaScript Admirers

    Biography

    Jesse Hallett is a founder and organizer of the Portland JavaScript Admirers users group. Jesse works at Galois as a research engineer, and at Tozny. These days Jesse is excited about

    - React, and functional patterns around application development
    - JS apps everywhere with React Native and Electron
    - Democratizing the social web

    Sessions

    • * Take back social media with Poodle
      • Title: Take back social media with Poodle
      • Track: Culture
      • Room: B301
      • Time: 11:00 – 11:45am
      • Excerpt:

        Social media has tremendous power to enrich our lives – but social media services are largely controlled by private companies. An alternative is to replace centralized services with federated protocols. HTTP and email are examples of federated protocols that demonstrate that federation not only works, but can thrive and give rise to cultures and technologies that the protocol authors never imagined. Poodle is a prototype that I hope will bring those qualities to social media.

      • Speakers: Jesse Hallett
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    Jennie Rose Halperin

    Biography

    Jennie is the current Communications Manager for Creative Commons. She is a veteran of both Mozilla and O’Reilly Media, where she worked on product, community and growth marketing, as well as User Experience Research. From 2006-2013, Jennie worked in a variety of museums and archives, including a feminist Zine Library, a medical library, an Appalachian folk music archive, and an “Animal Anatomy Theater.” In 2014, Jennie served on the SCHOSS (Supporting Cultural Heritage Open Source Solutions) working group and has spoken widely on open technology solutions in the cultural heritage and publishing sectors.

    Jennie is based in Boston, where she can be found riding her bike, doing yoga, eating vegan ice cream, and engaging with Boston’s rich cultural environment.

    Sessions

    • * Free Culture, Free Software
      • Title: Free Culture, Free Software
      • Track: Culture
      • Room: B301
      • Time: 4:45 – 5:30pm
      • Excerpt:

        I gave a similar talk at LibrePlanet 2015 and would like to reprise it with updated information on the current state of FOSS for Cultural Heritage. I’d like to discuss how to get involved with FOSS projects that are related to the Cultural Heritage space and what kinds of projects currently exist. I’ll end the session by talking about what kinds of projects could and should exist as well as community building and awareness in FOSS for Cultural Heritage Organizations.

      • Speakers: Jennie Rose Halperin
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    Leah Hanson

    Stripe

    Biography

    Leah is a software engineer at Stripe, building tools. She previously worked at Google (making networks go fast), Jane Street (building tools), and Fog Creek (working on Kiln). She spent the Spring of 2013 at Recurse Center1, where she started learning Julia2 and wrote the Websockets.jl package3. Since then, she has spoken at several conferences, including Code Mesh, Strange Loop, Strata NYC, and YOW!.

    1 http://www.recurse.com/

    2 http://julialang.org/

    3 https://github.com/JuliaWeb/Websockets.jl

    Sessions

    • * Inside Websockets
      • Title: Inside Websockets
      • Track: Theory
      • Room: B301
      • Time: 11:00 – 11:45am
      • Excerpt:

        Protocol design is about tradeoffs, and if you pick the wrong tradeoff, you may regret it for a very long time. Any time you have one part of a program talk to another part of a program, you have a protocol. In this talk, we’ll dig into the details of how WebSockets work and what decisions the designers made.

      • Speakers: Leah Hanson
  • Hannes

    Hannes Hapke

    renooble, inc.

    Biography

    Hannes is a senior developer at CrowdStreet, Inc. and a co-founder of the Subtle Gear Project, where he consults for- and non-profit companies on machine learning.

    Hannes is a Pythonista by heart. He presented at PyCon Uruguay 2013, PyDX 2015 and various Python meetups in Portland, Santiago and Berlin. Hannes also co-founded renooble, inc., an investor-backed start-up which uses machine learning to identify new solar customers.

    Sessions

  • Elana Hashman

    Biography

    Hi! I’m Elana. Sometimes I like to hack on systems infrastructure with the University of Waterloo Computer Science Club (we run http://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca) and teach women systems administration with the Women in Computer Science Undergraduate Committee, which I founded in 2013. I’m formerly a core maintainer of OpenHatch, dedicated to getting more, diverse people involved in free and open source software.

    Sessions

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    Tiberius Hefflin

    Biography

    Tibbs recently graduated from the University of West of Scotland with a degree in computer security. She has relocated to Portland, OR, where she evangelizes for privacy and security while contracting as an open source Security Evaluation Engineer at Intel. She is passionate about encouraging small children to take the plunge into STEM and about laughing at cats on the internet.

    Sessions

    • * Security Starts With You: Social Engineering
      • Title: Security Starts With You: Social Engineering
      • Track: Theory
      • Room: B304
      • Time: 2:30 – 3:15pm
      • Excerpt:

        Virus? There’s an app for that. Malware? There’s an app for that. Social engineering? It’s a little more complicated. These techniques, used by hackers to gather information on their target, are hard to combat without education – so why don’t we talk about them more often? Aimed at the average user who could be targeted by such an attack, this talk discusses the tools of social engineering, how it can be combated and why so many companies fail in preparing their employees for such an attack.

      • Speakers: Tiberius Hefflin
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    Chris Higgins

    Biography

    Writer. See my stuff on This American Life, Mental Floss, The Atlantic, The Magazine. I also wrote The Blogger Abides, which is cheap and you should buy.

    Sessions

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    Frances Hocutt

    Biography

    Frances Hocutt has taken part in the science-to-tech branch of the great STEM reshuffling. In the process, she’s written, spoken, mentored, and co-founded Seattle’s first feminist hackerspace/makerspace. She prefers elegance in her science and effectiveness in her art and is happiest when drawing on as many disciplines as she can. Hocutt jumped into F/OSS development with work on the Dreamwidth journaling platform and the MediaWiki web API and expanded into work on MediaWiki and associated Wikimedia-ecosystem contributor tools. Her current interest is applying tools from one discipline to another area entirely, with an eye to offering others the space, tools, and community that they need to change and live in this world.

    Photo used under CC-BY-SA-3.0. “Hocutt, Frances March 2015”, by Myleen Hollero.

    Sessions

  • Cole Howard

    Biography

    Explorer and writer in the backwaters of Neural Nets.

    Sessions

  • Me

    Bryan Hughes

    Biography

    Bryan Hughes is a Node.js engineer at Microsoft. Bryan is the creator of Raspi IO, a Raspberry Pi plugin for Johnny-Five, a JavaScript robotics library. He also runs the NodeBots SF robotics meetup in San Francisco. Bryan is an active member of the Node.js Inclusivity Working Group and Node.js Hardware Working Group. Outside of tech, Bryan is an amateur photographer, a once upon a time pianist, and a wine aficionado.

    Sessions

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    Emma Humphries

    Biography

    Emma works on problems ranging from UI to identity. She believes that while Power Pop, Coffee, Hockey, Bicycles, JavaScript, and Feminism may not save us, they make the world better.

    Sessions

    • * The Folk Knowledge of Bugzilla
      • Title: The Folk Knowledge of Bugzilla
      • Track: Practice
      • Room: B302/303
      • Time: 1:30 – 2:15pm
      • Excerpt:

        It’s good to know if a bug is a regression, and if I want to mark a bug as a regression, there’s a keyword for that. (searches on regression keyword.)

        But there’s also a whiteboard tag for that (searches on whiteboard tags containing ‘regression’.) Oh dear, and let me unique that out and there’s how many ways to say “this is a regression.”

        If you’re a release manager, how do you find out what bugs may be regressions and that you want to follow up on with your engineering leads?

      • Speakers: Emma Humphries
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    Trey Hunner

    Teacher at Truthful Technology, LLC

    Biography

    Trey Hunner is a technical trainer and teacher specializing in Python. In addition to on-site Python training, Trey teaches online and at his local Python study groups in San Diego.

    Trey has been contributing to open source projects sporadically for over a decade. He has maintained projects and has contributed to a variety of projects, both big and small.

    Sessions

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    Rishi Jain

    Biography

    I spend most of my time working on ruby and angularJS. I also helps maintains medium_editor. And blog whenever I find something interesting, and speak at conferences.
    In my spare time, you can find me ranting on twitter about Manchester United whenever they don’t play well. Also, Fan of gaming at workplace :).

    Sessions

    • * A programmers guide to Music.
      • Title: A programmers guide to Music.
      • Track: Culture
      • Room: B204
      • Time: 2:30 – 3:15pm
      • Excerpt:

        Imagine a place where Ruby meets Music, its called MAGIC LAND.

        Music is not a lot different from programming. In this talk we will see how.
        I will talk about this amazing piece of open-source software called SonicPi. SonicPi is a new kind of musical instrument. Think about it, you write code to make music. And it gets even better, code is written in a ruby DSL. Also I will talk about notes, samples, synth and other musical things SonicPi lets us do it.

        Don’t worry if do not get these terms. When I started, I did not either. But at the end of the talk, you will know how to make music.

      • Speakers: Rishi Jain

  • Rebecca Jennings

    Biography

    Director of Deaf and Hard of Hearing Services/Associate Director, Office of Access and Services for Individuals with Disabilities at Teachers College, Columbia University. Sign Language Interpreter for the past 15 years in monologic and dialogic settings, primarily corporate and higher educational environments. An uninitiated member of the Open Source arena, but looking forward to soaking in all I can.

    Sessions

    • * The Ability to Disable: Who Did You Forget When You Designed Your UI?
      • Title: The Ability to Disable: Who Did You Forget When You Designed Your UI?
      • Track: Culture
      • Room: B201
      • Time: 2:30 – 3:15pm
      • Excerpt:

        While the increased use of technology has in some ways improved the lives of those with disabilities, there is a gap that still needs to be filled. Uncaptioned or poorly captioned videos leave the deaf and hard of hearing community out of the loop, untagged photos leave blind users unaware of integral information, and poorly coded webpages are too much of a hassle for individuals using screen readers.

        But what if this was this was different? What if we thought about all of the potential users of our technology and developed programs intentionally allowing access for everyone? How could we make a programmer’s work truly inclusive, truly open to everyone?

        Experiential learning often provides those ‘a ha!’ moments, so together we’ll enjoy some mis-captioned videos, have a ‘listen-along’ to what a screen reader sounds like when a page is not coded correctly, and take a look at the end users’ experience when software is not programmed with a disabled audience in mind. Then, we’ll talk about what we can do to improve the current offerings and answer, “what next?”

      • Speakers: Rebecca Jennings
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    Noah Kantrowitz

    Biography

    Noah Kantrowitz is a web developer turned infrastructure automation enthusiast, and all around engineering rabble-rouser. By day he builds tools and teaches, and by night he leads the Python Software Foundation infrastructure team. He is an active member of the Chef community, and enjoys merge commits, cat pictures, and beards.

    Sessions

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    Rabimba Karanjai

    RICE University / Mozilla

    Biography

    Full Time Graduate Researcher, part time hacker and FOSS enthusiast.

    I used to write code for Watson and do a bunch of other things at their lab (mostly deals with algorithm,NLP, Ontologies,reading papers among other stuff). At present intern at Almaden Research Center. And crawling my way towards a PhD at RICE University.

    My present interest deviates towards security. Primarily static analysis and marginally towards systems.

    Sessions

  • Dcfemtech awards 2016 richkesslerphotography (24 of 157)

    Jackie Kazil

    Biography

    Jackie is a Technical Fellow at Capital One. She is also one of the authors of Mesa, a Python-based agent based modeling library. She loves data, teaching, and coding. She is currently working on her Ph.D in Computational Social Science at George Mason University. She has worked in finance, government, and journalism, with a general focus on public service. She is a co-founder of 18F, was a Presidential Innovation Fellow, and has worked at The Washington Post. She is the co-author of the O’Reilly book, Data Wrangling with Python, and she leads Women Data Scientists DC and PyLadies DC. She lives in Washington, DC with her husband and three dogs.

    Sessions

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    Hailee Kenney

    Puppet

    Biography

    Hailee interned at Puppet when she was in college and joined full time after she graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering in Spring 2014. She has worked on various development teams at Puppet, all focusing on the open source core components of puppet. She’s passionate about open source software and likes sharing that passion with others. Outside of work she loves video games, tabletop games, bubble tea, and enjoying the outdoors. She also likes spending time with her cats Tali and Atton.

    Sessions

    • * Enabling Open Source Contributors at Puppet
      • Title: Enabling Open Source Contributors at Puppet
      • Track: Culture
      • Room: B301
      • Time: 3:45 – 4:30pm
      • Excerpt:

        As open source software developers and community maintainers, fostering an inclusive community and giving contributors the tools they need to succeed is incredibly important, but not always easy. This is especially true when you have a complex distributed codebase and contributors without a background in software development. Through our attempts to enable our contributors we’ve encountered many challenges and iterated on many solutions with varying levels of success. Our hope is that by sharing the stories of our successes and failures, as well as the lessons we learned, we can help other community maintainers lower the barrier to entry for contributors.

      • Speakers: Hailee Kenney, Morgan Rhodes
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    Benjamin Kerensa

    Glucosio Foundation

    Biography

    Benjamin Kerensa is Glucosio’s Project Leader and is responsible for overall management of the Glucosio Project including governance, technical vision, community building, and is a board member of the Glucosio Foundation.
    Benjamin started Glucosio in 2015 and is heavily involved with the FOSS community contributing to Mozilla, Ubuntu and various smaller projects and is also a columnist for Opensource.com and member of the City of Portland Innovational Panel.

    Sessions

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    Jean de Klerk

    Pivotal

    Biography

    Jean is a consultant and open source evangelist at Pivotal helping companies achieve success through agile process, moving to cloud-ready apps, and enabling developers on technologies and extreme programming. Jean’s open source experience includes work on projects such as React.js, Spring, several ruby gems, and many of his own projects – including npm modules, grunt plugins, ruby gems, and many tutorials and demos.

    Sessions

  • Smilingsherri

    Sherri Koehler

    Samatha Yoga

    Biography

    In December 2013 Sherri made the rather abrupt decision to leave tech and pursue her dream of teaching yoga. She’s well acquainted with all the physical bad habits associated with working at a computer for hours on end, having had all of them herself during her 17-year career in tech.

    Sherri has a passion for teaching Classical Hatha, Restorative, and Gentle Flow Yoga styles, as well as Pranayama and Meditation. She is ardent about attention to the breath and use of props to support an accessible practice. She believes it possible for everyone to experience joy & ease in practice, even while staying at the edge of intensity in asana. Sherri is dedicated to fostering compassion, loving-kindness, equanimity, and empathetic joy on and off the mat.

    Sessions

    • * Great Asana!
      • Title: Great Asana!
      • Track: Culture
      • Room: B202/203
      • Time: 5:45 – 6:30pm
      • Excerpt:

        Bring your stiff shoulders, sore wrists, tight hips, aching back, and busy mind and explore how Yoga can help bring you relief, rest, and focus. Leave with ideas on how to incorporate 5 minutes of practice into your busy day to care for your body and mind.

        This class is accessible to all levels of ability.

      • Speakers: Sherri Koehler
  • Bkuhn 400x400

    Bradley Kuhn

    Software Freedom Conservancy

    Biography

    Bradley M. Kuhn is the President and Distinguished Technologist at Software Freedom Conservancy, on the Board of Directors of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), and editor-in-chief of copyleft.org. Kuhn began his work in the software freedom movement as a volunteer in 1992, when he became an early adopter of the GNU/Linux operating system, and began contributing to various Free Software projects. He worked during the 1990s as a system administrator and software developer for various companies, and taught AP Computer Science at Walnut Hills High School in Cincinnati. Kuhn’s non-profit career began in 2000, when he was hired by the FSF. As FSF’s Executive Director from 2001–2005, Kuhn led FSF’s GPL enforcement, launched its Associate Member program, and invented the Affero GPL. Kuhn was appointed President of Software Freedom Conservancy in April 2006, was Conservancy’s primary volunteer from 2006–2010, and has been a full-time staffer since early 2011. Kuhn holds a summa cum laude B.S. in Computer Science from Loyola University in Maryland, and an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Cincinnati. Kuhn’s Master’s thesis discussed methods for dynamic interoperability of Free Software programming languages. Kuhn received the O’Reilly Open Source Award in 2012, in recognition for his lifelong policy work on copyleft licensing. Kuhn has a blog, is on pump.io and co-hosts the audcast, Free as in Freedom.

    Sessions

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    Zoe Landon

    Biography

    Author, programmer, drummer, internet rabbit.

    Sessions

  • Joshua Lifton

    Crowd Supply

    Biography

    Josh received his doctorate from the MIT Media Lab and holds a BA in physics and mathematics from Swarthmore College, which is to say he’s devoted a significant amount of his time learning how to make things that blink. As head of Crowd Supply’s project efforts, he is helping others do the same. Prior to Crowd Supply, Josh worked in a variety of technology settings, from instrumenting thousands of audience members with custom wearable computers for a Cirque du Soleil performance to, most recently, serving as head of engineering at Puppet Labs.

    Sessions

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    Josh Lim

    Wikimedia Philippines

    Biography

    Josh Lim is currently a community manager at Happy Team Check, a Polish HR startup. He is also a longtime Wikipedia editor, having edited since April 2005, and is currently the President of Wikimedia Philippines, the Philippine local chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation.

    Since 2011, he has taken interest in analyzing social relations on the Wikimedia projects (and, since then, with online communities and Internet research in general), and hopes that he can contribute something meaningful to the discipline somehow.

    Sessions

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    Bethany Lister

    NTEN: The Nonprofit Technology Network

    Biography

    Bethany is the Community Program Manager at NTEN: The Nonprofit Technology Network, a membership organization which strives to help nonprofits use technology more effectively. She has the pleasure of working with NTEN’s in-person Nonprofit Tech Clubs, online Communities of Practice, and education programs. Basically, Bethany spends her day laughing and learning and helping community members do the good work they want to do.

    Bethany is all the time trying to be a better advocate for diversity and inclusiveness in tech. Her latest extracurricular adventures include: learning Spanish, knitting her first sweater, and dragon boating (not simultaneously). Bethany likes cats.

    Sessions

  • Clarissa Littler

    Biography

    A former CS researcher who’s spending her days trying to make technology more accessible

    Sessions

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    Azure Lunatic

    Dreamwidth

    Biography

    Specialist in Yelling as a Service. New contributor orientation specialist, code tour guide, and spamwhacker at Dreamwidth.org. Reader, writer, crocheter, geek.

    Sessions

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    Kiera Manion-Fischer

    npm, Inc.

    Biography

    Kiera Manion-Fischer has successfully made a career transition from newspaper journalism to tech. She is an experienced writer and communicator. Kiera now works as a support tech for npm, Inc. She loves “Star Wars” way too much, but not enough to use it as a metaphor in her talk.

    Sessions

    • * Supporting your Support: Give your Support Team Flowers, Chocolate, Money, and Stock Options
      • Title: Supporting your Support: Give your Support Team Flowers, Chocolate, Money, and Stock Options
      • Track: Business
      • Room: B301
      • Time: 10:00 – 10:45am
      • Excerpt:

        How to support your support team

        1. Pay your support staff a living wage. There are many reasons why you should pay your support staff a living wage, including reduced stress and higher quality work. We don’t expect support staff to be paid on par with engineering, but they should receive the same benefits & perks as engineers.
        2. Listen to your support team. Your support team has valuable, data-backed insights about your customers’ pain points. Prioritize support needs in terms of product improvements.
        3. Support your colleagues’ career ambitions. Some people who work in support are interested in becoming engineers. You can encourage this by giving them time to learn coding or work on projects during work hours, or paying for educational materials or tech conferences. Respect the fact that not everyone wants to be an engineer as well. Support should be a viable career path in its own right.

      • Speakers: Kiera Manion-Fischer, Stephanie Snopek
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    Gregor Martynus

    Biography

    Unsatisfied with the status quo of how we build apps, Gregor dreamed up a world were we can stop thinking about backends – and has been building it ever since with his friends at [Hoodie](http://hood.ie/). Along the way they created a diverse & inclusive community, started Offline First and are really into automating all the JavaScript things with semantic-release and Greenkeeper.

    Sessions

    • * Welcoming Communities
      • Title: Welcoming Communities
      • Track: Culture
      • Room: B204
      • Time: 3:45 – 4:30pm
      • Excerpt:

        A lot of people enjoy contributing to Open Source projects. And Open Source projects love contributions. And yet I keep seeing newcomers struggling to contribute and project maintainers struggling to find contributors. What’s the catch?

        There is a gap. A gap between the desire to contribute to a community and the ability to find one. A gap between what contributions are welcome, and what people think is wanted. A gap between what people wish they could contribute, but don’t know how, or are afraid to try.

        In this talk, I’ll share our learning from building the Hoodie Community, which is recognized as one of the most Open Source’s most diverse and inclusive.

      • Speakers: Gregor Martynus
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    Bart Massey

    Portland State University

    Biography

    Bart Massey has been geeking around with community computing for 35 years, and has been involved in Free Software and Open Source since its inception. For the past 15 years, he has been a CS Prof at Portland State University, where he works in open tech, software engineering, artificial intelligence and low-level software development.

    Bart’s titles include Member of the PSU MCECS Innovation Program Board and past Secretary of the X.Org Foundation Board. Bart is the architect of the X library XCB, a modern replacement for Xlib, and the author of the XCB image extension. His current open tech interests include Haskell, open hardware and building bridges between pieces of the open tech community. He was one of the original participants in the Open Source Bridge conversation.

    Sessions

  • Meghan

    Meghan McClelland

    Biography

    Meghan is an angel investor in Portland, Oregon. She loves talking about technology and working with early stage companies. Her background is in computer science and she currently works as a product manager at Seagate Technology.

    Sessions

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    Nick McClure

    Biography

    Nicholas McClure is a senior data scientist for the Zestimate group at Zillow, where he works on data cleaning projects including predicting listing fraud, entity resolution and Zestimate quality. Prior to joining Zillow, he worked at Caesar’s Entertainment in Las Vegas as a gaming statistician and data scientist. He has worked on everything from casino game design to optimal slot machine placement and predicting customer worth. His team received the 2013 Chairman’s Award in Rigor for their work on table game optimization. He received a National Science Foundation Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship fellowship for studying infectious disease while working on his master’s and Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the University of Montana, where he studied the role of mutation in cystic fibrosis lung infections.

    Sessions

    • * Introduction to Neural Networks with Tensorflow
      • Title: Introduction to Neural Networks with Tensorflow
      • Track: Theory
      • Room: B301
      • Time: 1:30 – 2:15pm
      • Excerpt:

        I intend to introduce Neural Networks as a very simple concept. This can be achieved with Google’s newest open-source library in Python called Tensorflow. I want to dispel the myth that Neural Networks are hard to understand and implement. I also want to introduce the current state of Neural Networks as they are continually changing the landscape of visual recognition and natural language processing.

      • Speakers: Nick McClure

  • Joe Meyer

    Biography

    Education:

    Undergraduate Study, 1980-1983 DePaul University

    Masters in Physics, 1986, Brown University

    PhD in Physics, 1990, Brown University

    Awards and Fellowships:

    American Physical Society Summer Research Fellowship, 1983, Bell Telephone Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ

    Sigma Chi Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award, 1990, Brown University

    Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship, 1992-1994, University of Ulm, Ulm, Germany

    European Research Fellow, 1994, Denmark Technical University, Lyngby, Denmark

    Experience:

    Project Manager, Fox River Learning, Fox River, IL, (1997-1998)

    Director of Quantitative Research, Fox River Financial Resources, Fox River, IL, (1999-2000)

    Full time Dad, (1999-2015)

    Owner / Operator of the Sports Data Web Site SportsDatabase.com (1999 – present)
    http://SportsDatabase.com

    Author of the Sports Data Query Language
    http://SDQL.com

    News Reporter and Public Affairs Host at Portland Radio Station KBOO (2010 – present)
    http://kboo.fm/search/node/joe%20meyer

    Author of the Pythonic Query Language
    http://PyQL.org

    Physical Education Instructor, Reed College, Portland, Oregon, (2015 – present)

    Sessions

  • Andrea

    Andrea Middleton

    WordPress

    Biography

    As a community organizer for the WordPress project, my goal is to support the volunteers who organize official WordPress community events and help them plan events that inspire people to do more with WordPress, connect the WordPress community, and contribute to the WordPress project. I also read lots of scifi/fantasy, knit, cook, camp, hike, mother 2 kids, and pursue the dream of a feminist utopia.

    Sessions

  • Erik Moeller

    Biography

    I was Deputy Director of the Wikimedia Foundation from 2008-2015 and have since been working on new projects, including “Passionate Voices”, a series of interviews with people in the free culture / open source space and beyond, and “Free Your Stuff”, the subject of this proposal.

    Sessions

  • Timothy Morgan

    Blindspot Security

    Biography

    As an application security consultant and vulnerability researcher, Tim has been taking deep technical dives in security for over a decade. In that time, he has been credited with the discovery and responsible disclosure of numerous security vulnerabilities in a variety of software products, including: IBM Tivoli Access Manager, Sun Java Runtime Environment, Google Chrome Web Browser, OpenOffice, Oracle WebLogic Application Server, and IBM Websphere Commerce. His current research interests include applied cryptanalysis, XML external entities attacks, and network timing attacks. Tim develops and maintains several open source forensics tools in addition to Bletchley, an application cryptanalysis toolkit.

    Tim works to secure his customers’ environments through black box testing, code reviews, social engineering exercises, security training, and a variety of other services. Previously, Tim worked at for a Boston-based security consulting firm as a lead security consultant and researcher. Tim has also worked on security teams at financial services companies and as a software developer. Tim has worked in a variety of roles in the information security field including incident response, digital forensics, and risk analysis, giving him a broad set of experiences to draw upon. Tim earned his
    computer science degrees from Harvey Mudd College and Northeastern University and currently resides in Portland, Oregon where he leads the local OWASP chapter.

    Sessions

  • Bracken Mosbacker

    Lumen Learning

    Biography

    I’m a development manager of a small team that enjoys learning and mentoring new developers.

    Sessions

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    Julia Nguyen

    Biography

    Julia Nguyen is a web and mobile developer, writer, speaker, and computer science student. Born and raised in Toronto, she writes, speaks, and organizes communities focused on embracing empathy, diversity, inclusion, and mental health.

    Julia organizes mentorship events and workshops at the University of Waterloo Women in Computer Science Undergraduate Committee (WiCS). She also volunteers with Write/Speak/Code, an organization empowering female thought leaders in technical writing, conference speaking, and open source.

    As a co-op student, Julia has worked for companies and organizations of all sizes in consulting, open source, and e-commerce. She also leads an open source project called if me, a community for people to share their mental health experiences with loved ones and trusted peers.

    Sessions

    • * Exploring Mental Illness With Open Source
      • Title: Exploring Mental Illness With Open Source
      • Track: Culture
      • Room: Sanctuary
      • Time: 9:00 – 9:45am
      • Excerpt:

        Julia Nguyen leads if me, an app to share mental health experiences with loved ones. In doing so, she has explored her insecurities with mental illness, learned how to engage diverse contributors, and developed better software practices with Ruby on Rails and JavaScript. She’ll share the lessons she has learned from transforming a passion project into an open source project.

        Inclusion takes on many forms in an open source project, including supporting contributors from all types of backgrounds, being empathetic to their project goals, and trusting them to take lead. As a mental health project, if me must also accommodate its contributors who face their own mental health challenges. All open source projects should do the same. Managing people is just as important as managing technical contributions in software.

      • Speakers: Julia Nguyen

  • Terri Oda

    Biography

    Terri has a PhD in horribleness, assuming we agree that web security is kind of horrible. She stopped working on skynet (err, automated program repair and artificial intelligence) before robots from the future came to kill her and then she got a job in open source, which at least sounds safer. Now, she gets paid to break things and tell people they’re wrong while working towards more secure open source and open web standards. She doesn’t get paid for her work on GNU Mailman or running Google Summer of Code for the Python Software Foundation, but she does those things too.

    Sessions

    • * Taking no for an answer
      • Title: Taking no for an answer
      • Track: Culture
      • Room: B202/203
      • Time: 1:30 – 2:15pm
      • Excerpt:

        Open source (like many fields) rewards people who are confident and even a bit pushy. So we give talks encouraging folk to get over imposter syndrome, lean in, say yes to more things. But self-improvement shouldn’t focus only on our most vulnerable members, but also our most powerful. So let’s talk not about saying yes, but about hearing no. Learning to take no for an answer can transform efforts such as security, diversity and mentoring where we have few experts or volunteers and great need. Let’s talk about accepting “defeat” with grace, and how to take “no” for an answer while still moving forwards.

      • Speakers: Terri Oda
    • * Sparkle security
      • Title: Sparkle security
      • Track: Practice
      • Room: B201
      • Time: 10:00 – 11:45am
      • Excerpt:

        “Agent Sparkle, you have been recruited as a security expert to use your skills to protect the kingdom of Project Rainbow. You might not feel qualified yet, but Project Rainbow has great faith in your ability to learn.” Web security is perhaps one of most fun types of computer security to master: exploits can be constructed quickly and without many tools. But sadly, while there are many tutorials, they simply don’t have enough rainbows and sparkles and the practice exploits tend to focus on the basics without flourishes. Project Sparkle is a set of “training missions” designed to make learning web security more kid-friendly, but we think the audience of Open Source Bridge will also enjoy exploiting the web to add more rainbows and sparkles!

      • Speakers: Terri Oda
  • 1

    Walé Ogundipé

    Biography

    Walé Ogundipé is a software developer based in Seattle. He enjoys cultivating the programming community at large and as co-organizer of SeattleJS, one of the largest Javascript meetups in the United States.

    Sessions

    • * Wiping Away the (Bad) Lines in the Sand in the Software Developer Community
      • Title: Wiping Away the (Bad) Lines in the Sand in the Software Developer Community
      • Track: Culture
      • Room: B202/203
      • Time: 4:45 – 5:30pm
      • Excerpt:

        Think of a shibboleth as a proverbial line in the sand that determines who belongs and who is an outsider. There are a lot of arbitrary shibboleths in programming. Text editors (emacs vs. vim vs. sublime), paradigms (object-oriented vs. functional), languages (everyone vs Java), type systems, are all topics of… to put it lightly, “vigorous conversation.” In set theory terms, the developer community does not do enough to encourage seeing different developer groups as unions instead of intersections. To a newcomer, this situation sets up too much of a danger of alienation. If someone makes fun of the language that you use to learn how to code, then you’re less likely to want to keep learning.

      • Speakers: Walé Ogundipé

  • Denise Paolucci

    Dreamwidth Studios

    Biography

    Denise Paolucci is the co-founder of Dreamwidth Studios (www.dreamwidth.org), a blogging and community platform. She’s been working in open source for sixteen years, and will talk your ear off about accessibility, disability, diversity, creativity, community, privacy, and knitting, although probably not all at the same time.

    Sessions

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    Aaron Parecki

    IndieWeb

    Biography

    Aaron Parecki is the co-founder of IndieWebCamp, a yearly conference on data ownership and online identity. He is the editor of the W3C Webmention and Micropub specifications, and maintains oauth.net. He has spoken at conferences around the world about owning your data, OAuth, quantified self, and even explained why R is a vowel.

    Aaron has tracked his location at 5 second intervals since 2008, and is the co-founder and former CTO of Geoloqi, a location-based software company acquired by Esri in 2012. His work has been featured in Wired, Fast Company and more. He made Inc. Magazine’s 30 Under 30 for his work on Geoloqi.

    You can learn more about Aaron at aaronparecki.com, and you can follow him on twitter at @aaronpk

    Sessions

  • Caterina Paun

    Biography

    Caterina is a developer, designer, and entrepreneur. She spent several years as a software engineer for a major tech company, she launched a startup, and she is currently working as a consulting, specializing in building prototypes in code.

    Sessions

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    Jon Pincus

    A Change Is Coming, O.school, Get FISA Right

    Biography

    Software engineer / entrepreneur / strategist / activist, currently Tech DIVA (Technical Diversity, Inclusion, and Values Advisor) at O.School and Architect – Integrative Technologies + Communities at OPTYVA, also consults for and advises companies interested in software engineering and/or diversity. Previous positions include CTO and VP of Engineering roles at startups, Architect and Researcher at Microsoft Research, and leading the oppression-theory based Ad Astra project as GM of Strategy Development at Microsoft. With my activist hat on, I’ve worked with a broad coalition on Stop Real ID Now, as one of the organizers of Get FISA Right and Voter Suppression Wiki, started #p2 (the largest progressive hashtag on Twitter) with Tracy Viselli, was a board member of Bill of Rights Defense Committee, and am currently active in several Indivisible groups.

    More here

    Sessions

    • * Supporting diversity with a new approach to software
      • Title: Supporting diversity with a new approach to software
      • Track: Theory
      • Room: B302/303
      • Time: 10:00 – 11:45am
      • Excerpt:

        It’s time for a new approach to software, one that embraces differences (not just tolerates them), and sees diversity as a strength. The industry is primed for change, and there are huge opportunities to do better by valuing emotion, intuition, compassion, purpose, empowerment, sustainability, and social justice. This highly-interactive session includes discussions of current “best practices” and emerging ideas from projects that have focused heavily on diversity, issues and problems in today’s environment, imagining how things could be different, and figuring out concrete steps to make it happen.

      • Speakers: Jon Pincus, Tammarrian Rogers

  • Mindy Preston

    Docker

    Biography

    Mindy is a recovering C programmer who now writes a lot of OCaml. She likes cats, justice, strong types, snow, compile-time errors, sunlight, explicit guarantees, board games, making better operating systems and networks, and bicycle tours.

    Sessions

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    Shraya Ramani

    Biography

    Shraya is a Go developer on the Server Tools team at MongoDB. She has worked on the tools that ship with MongoDB and is currently one of two engineers developing and maintaining Evergreen, MongoDB’s open source homegrown, highly distributed continuous integration system. She is currently working on optimizing Evergreen’s task scheduler to ensure that we are making cost-efficient use of hosts while scheduling tasks and providing test feedback as fast as possible. When she is not programming, she enjoys traveling and practicing yoga.

    Sessions

    • * Massively Parallel Testing at MongoDB
      • Title: Massively Parallel Testing at MongoDB
      • Track: Theory
      • Room: B304
      • Time: 3:45 – 4:30pm
      • Excerpt:

        When the engineering team at MongoDB pushes a commit, we have to test it on every platform and configuration that we support. This adds up to hundreds of hours of tests for each commit. In order to make this process efficient, we built Evergreen, an in-house continuous integration tool and leveraged new technologies, such as Go and dynamic host allocation, to streamline the process to minutes. This talk will show you how we parallelize our tests and how you can apply these techniques to your next project!

      • Speakers: Shraya Ramani, Kyle Erf
  • Self

    Amjith Ramanujam

    Biography

    Software engineer, Command line junkie.

    Author of pgcli and mycli.

    I like Python, Go, Javascript.

    Sessions

  • Morgan rhodes

    Morgan Rhodes

    Puppet

    Biography

    Morgan started working as a module engineer at Puppet in Spring of 2014 and joined the release engineering team in October 2015. Before that she had been part of the Puppet community for over four years, largely using Puppet as a system administrator. Outside of work, she can be found biking, cooking delicious vegan fare, curling like a boss (or Canadian), and hanging out with her cats.

    Morgan has given presentations at PuppetConf 2014, ConfigMgmtCamp 2015, PuppetConf contributor summit 2015, and an internal speaker workshop.

    Sessions

    • * Enabling Open Source Contributors at Puppet
      • Title: Enabling Open Source Contributors at Puppet
      • Track: Culture
      • Room: B301
      • Time: 3:45 – 4:30pm
      • Excerpt:

        As open source software developers and community maintainers, fostering an inclusive community and giving contributors the tools they need to succeed is incredibly important, but not always easy. This is especially true when you have a complex distributed codebase and contributors without a background in software development. Through our attempts to enable our contributors we’ve encountered many challenges and iterated on many solutions with varying levels of success. Our hope is that by sharing the stories of our successes and failures, as well as the lessons we learned, we can help other community maintainers lower the barrier to entry for contributors.

      • Speakers: Hailee Kenney, Morgan Rhodes
  • Tammarrian rogers

    Tammarrian Rogers

    OPTYVA, Microsoft, Ada Developer's Academy

    Biography

    Tammarrian brings over 25 years of experience in the tech industry. Driven and inspired by her curiosity, she enjoys exploring and learning new things whenever opportunities arise. Her passion is inspiring, mentoring and witnessing others make heart-born life goals and achieve or surpass them.

    Tammarrian has spoken at several events, including Seattle’s Women In Tech event titled, “In Their Own Words: Stories of Underrepresented Voices in Tech,” ChickTech’s High School Program Kickoff event as a keynote speaker, and several panel discussions including Ada Developer’s Academy, Microsoft and SM Diversity events. Also, as a Manager in Engineering at Microsoft, she’s had many speaking opportunities on business related topics.

    She is excited about this event and the subject matter because it is a phenomenal resource to accompany what she believes is imminently ahead – a complete rebirth of the programmer and the tools and languages used such that only through diverse thought, background and experiences can it be born, live, and thrive indefinitely.

    Sessions

    • * Supporting diversity with a new approach to software
      • Title: Supporting diversity with a new approach to software
      • Track: Theory
      • Room: B302/303
      • Time: 10:00 – 11:45am
      • Excerpt:

        It’s time for a new approach to software, one that embraces differences (not just tolerates them), and sees diversity as a strength. The industry is primed for change, and there are huge opportunities to do better by valuing emotion, intuition, compassion, purpose, empowerment, sustainability, and social justice. This highly-interactive session includes discussions of current “best practices” and emerging ideas from projects that have focused heavily on diversity, issues and problems in today’s environment, imagining how things could be different, and figuring out concrete steps to make it happen.

      • Speakers: Jon Pincus, Tammarrian Rogers

  • Jennifer Rondeau

    Capital One

    Biography

    Technical writer for public facing APIs at Capital One

    Sessions

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    Gary Rozanc

    Biography

    Gary is an assistant professor of graphic design at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and the Education Director for AIGA Baltimore. Gary also hosts Design Edu Today, the podcast series discussing topics concerning the state of interactive design education at institutions of higher learning.

    Gary has presented his interactive and user experience research and findings at international and national peer-reviewed conferences including AIGA’s bi-annual National Conference “Head, Heart, Hand” and the “International Conference on Design Principles & Practices.”

    Sessions

    • * Open Source is Key for Innovating Pedagogy and Curricula
      • Title: Open Source is Key for Innovating Pedagogy and Curricula
      • Track: Culture
      • Room: B304
      • Time: 2:30 – 3:15pm
      • Excerpt:

        This talk will discuss how a closed loop in education—across all grade levels and disciplines—contributes to the stagnation of a profession and how an open source approach and platform is necessary to break the inward cycle of our current pedagogy. It will also show examples of collaboration in the creation of curricula leading to the generation of new, innovative pedagogy and review current methods for educators to open source and call for new methods and platforms to aid educators.

      • Speakers: Gary Rozanc
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    Kevin Scaldeferri

    New Relic

    Biography

    Kevin Scaldeferri is a software developer specializing in scalable, high-performance server applications. He spent several years at Yahoo building ad serving systems, and at Gilt Groupe, maintaining the core e-commerce and order processing components, as well as development tools, infrastructure, and architecture. He currently works on distributed data storage and query engines at New Relic.

    He has spoken at OSCON, Open Source Bridge, Lambda Jam, CUFP, YAPC, several user groups, and given internal tech talks on a variety of topics such as “How to Serve a Billion Requests a Day with Perl”, “Beautiful Concurrency with Erlang”, SBT, Continuous Deployment strategies, and more.

    Sessions

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    Amye Scavarda

    Red Hat

    Biography

    Community Lead who feeds and waters Gluster.

    Sessions

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    Dana Scheider

    Renew Financial

    Biography

    Dana Scheider is a quality engineer at Renew Financial, where she works on testing back-end microservices. Her other interests include opera, math, languages, Star Trek, and uncomfortable shoes.

    Sessions

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    Andy Schmitt

    Parthenon Software Group

    Biography

    Andy is the founder and CEO of Parthenon Software Group in Portland Oregon. Parthenon employs around 40 people and is celebrating 10 years in business building web apps, mobile apps, and custom software. In 2013 Parthenon was recognized by the Portland Business Journal as being one of the top 20 fastest growing companies in Oregon.

    Andy enjoys system architecture, computing history, and late nights spent programming.

    Sessions

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    Davey Shafik

    Biography

    Davey Shafik is a full-time developer with over 15 years of experience in PHP and related technologies. He is a Developer Evangelist at Akamai Technologies and has written three books, numerous articles, and spoken at conferences the world over. He is best known for his books, the Zend PHP Certification Study Guide and PHP Master: Write Cutting Edge Code, and as the creator of PHP Archive (PHAR) for PHP 5.3.

    Davey is passionate about improving the tech community. He co-organizes the Prompt initiative (mhprompt.org), dedicated to lifting the stigma surrounding mental health discussions, and has worked with PHPWomen since its inception.

    Sessions

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    Alolita Sharma

    Unicode Consortium

    Biography

    Alolita is a board director of the Unicode Consortium which serves a vital role in language standardization and bridging the digital divide. Alolita is also senior manager for internationalization engineering at PayPal. She leads development of i18n tools and infrastructure for globalizing PayPal’s products and content. Previously, she led the i18n/L10n engineering team at Twitter and Wikipedia’s language engineering team supporting more than 300 languages. Alolita contributes actively on open source, language technology projects, multilingual content communities as well as i18n standardization. She holds Masters and Bachelors degrees in Computer Science and practices diversity with action as a mentor for women in computer science and engineering.

    Sessions

    • * The Rise of Emoji
      • Title: The Rise of Emoji
      • Track: Culture
      • Room: B201
      • Time: 4:45 – 5:30pm
      • Excerpt:

        Emoji is taking over the Web! We will look at how the phenomenon of Emoji has taken the Web by storm, explore how people are using Emoji on their favorite platforms and implications. We will also examine how these online platforms are benefiting from Emoji.

      • Speakers: Alolita Sharma
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    Sarah Sharp

    Otter Tech LLC

    Biography

    Sarah is the founder of Otter Tech, a consulting company offering open source training, software development, and diversity consulting. http://otter.technology
    Sarah Sharp is a Linux and open source developer, and has been running Debian-based Linux systems since 2003. She was a Linux kernel developer from 2006 to 2013, and is the original author of the Linux USB 3.0 xHCI host controller driver.
    Sarah is also a co-coordinator for Outreachy, a paid internship program for increasing diversity in open source programs. Applications are open to women (cis and trans), trans men, and genderqueer people, and United States residents of any gender who are Black/African American, Hispanic/Latin@, American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander.

    Sessions

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    Brian Shirai

    Rubinius, Inc

    Biography

    I have been “writing code” since my first encounter with an Apple IIe in 1985. My first serious encounter with open source came in the mid 90s, browsing the sunsite add-on CD with the Slackware Linux distribution. Through this I discovered many interesting things, including Erlang and Ruby, neither of which I took seriously. Years later I rediscovered Ruby in the era Before Rails and used it extensively. Since 2006, I’ve contributed to Rubinius and in 2015, founded Rubinius, Inc, one of the goals of which is to make Rubinius development sustainable. Computer languages are the most powerful tools of the digital information age, and my focus is bringing the ability to build and manipulate those tools to the widest audience, especially to people who have been excluded from dominant social structures.

    Sessions

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    Kendra Skeene

    Director of Product for GeorgiaGov Interactive

    Biography

    Kendra is the Director of Product for GeorgiaGov Interactive. She oversees the state’s enterprise Drupal platform, directing product strategy and working with development partners to create new products for the platform’s customers. She has managed several initiatives with the GeorgiaGov Interactive team, including the responsive and accessible platform initiatives.

    Prior to leading the product team, Kendra led support and training for the GeorgiaGov platform, where she kept a close pulse on user issues and platform health. Kendra has more than 15 years of web design and development experience and has been involved in web-based training for nearly as long. Kendra has worked as a designer, developer, and content manager with six different CMS systems over the years.

    Sessions

    • * Accessible By Default
      • Title: Accessible By Default
      • Track: Practice
      • Room: B302/303
      • Time: 3:45 – 4:30pm
      • Excerpt:

        Making your website accessible for users with disabilities isn’t flashy, but it’s necessary. Websites built for universal access benefit all users, not just users with a disability. They’re also more SEO friendly, and are generally built to be more user friendly. From generating increased revenue, to providing better access to services, the benefits of developing accessible websites are real and measurable.

      • Speakers: Kendra Skeene
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    Stephanie Snopek

    npm, Inc

    Biography

    Stephanie Snopek is a professional problem solver with extensive experience working in advisory and supportive roles in the field of Education. She transitioned into tech in 2015 because of the career opportunities this industry offers, and she’s passionate about creating space for other people coming from non-technical backgrounds.

    Sessions

    • * Supporting your Support: Give your Support Team Flowers, Chocolate, Money, and Stock Options
      • Title: Supporting your Support: Give your Support Team Flowers, Chocolate, Money, and Stock Options
      • Track: Business
      • Room: B301
      • Time: 10:00 – 10:45am
      • Excerpt:

        How to support your support team

        1. Pay your support staff a living wage. There are many reasons why you should pay your support staff a living wage, including reduced stress and higher quality work. We don’t expect support staff to be paid on par with engineering, but they should receive the same benefits & perks as engineers.
        2. Listen to your support team. Your support team has valuable, data-backed insights about your customers’ pain points. Prioritize support needs in terms of product improvements.
        3. Support your colleagues’ career ambitions. Some people who work in support are interested in becoming engineers. You can encourage this by giving them time to learn coding or work on projects during work hours, or paying for educational materials or tech conferences. Respect the fact that not everyone wants to be an engineer as well. Support should be a viable career path in its own right.

      • Speakers: Kiera Manion-Fischer, Stephanie Snopek
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    Emily Stamey

    Biography

    Emily is a developer at NC State, supporting the College of Engineering. She learned PHP in 1999 and discovered a whole new world of fun and programming. This was the beginning of her passion for Open Source! In her free time she enjoys music, legos, making things, playing games, and socializing. She is an active volunteer in the community as an Organizer of TrianglePHP and TA for Girl Develop It. She really enjoys helping people share ideas and learn together, which has led to her speaking at conferences.

    Sessions

    • * Pulling up Your Legacy App by its Bootstraps!
      • Title: Pulling up Your Legacy App by its Bootstraps!
      • Track: Hacks
      • Room: B301
      • Time: 1:30 – 2:15pm
      • Excerpt:

        Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to support an application built on an older framework. What would you do if changing the code broke everything? The application functionality is too large to be replaced in one release. What can you do? You can bootstrap it, replacing the application in sections as time allows. When all functionality is replaced, you can put your new codebase into a newer framework or a standalone application.

      • Speakers: Emily Stamey
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    Hanneli Tavante

    Biography

    Hanneli (@hannelita) is a developer addicted to code, learn new programming languages, blow capacitors, do some C programming and commit useful (or not) code for random Open Source Projects that she finds at Github. She likes Math, Lego, dogs, hardware and Coffee.

    Sessions

    • * Type Theory 101
      • Title: Type Theory 101
      • Track: Theory
      • Room: B202/203
      • Time: 4:45 – 5:30pm
      • Excerpt:

        Have you heard about type theory and always wanted to understand the principles behind it, but always thought it was too complicated since it has a lot of Lambda Calculus and algebras? This talk will approach these concepts in a friendly way.

      • Speakers: Hanneli Tavante
    • * Cassandra - an introduction
      • Title: Cassandra - an introduction
      • Track: Practice
      • Room: B304
      • Time: 1:30 – 2:15pm
      • Excerpt:

        Built mostly in Java, Cassandra is a powerful open source NoSQL database, based on the model of a partitioned row store. This talk will provide general use cases for Cassandra, explain Cassandra’s architecture and its benefits, feature tools for accessing and administering Cassandra, and demonstrate how to integrate Cassandra with existing Java applications.

      • Speakers: Hanneli Tavante

  • Jennifer Tu

    Biography

    Jennifer Tu enjoys learning about all aspects of software development, whether it’s improving code, pairing with designers on user interviews, or something else entirely. Besides refactoring and rewriting, her most recent software interests include giving better feedback and sketch noting. Jennifer currently writes software for doctors, patients, and everyone in between at One Medical Group.

    Sessions

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    Lacey Williams Henschel

    Biography

    Lacey is a developer for the University of Texas at Austin and works remotely from Portland, OR. She’s organized several Django Girls workshops to teach women to code, and is the conference co-chair for DjangoCon US.

    Sessions

    • * Hogwarts is a Terrible Learning Environment: Discuss
      • Title: Hogwarts is a Terrible Learning Environment: Discuss
      • Track: Culture
      • Room: B202/203
      • Time: 2:30 – 3:15pm
      • Excerpt:

        Like many young Muggles of the early 00’s, I dreamed of receiving my Hogwarts letter. But re-reading the series with an eye toward learning lessons about creating a positive learning environment, it’s clear that Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry contains some unfortunate lessons in what NOT to do. When it comes to crafting an environment that encourages asking questions, fosters cooperation, and ensuring the success of its developers — I mean, wizards — we can learn a lot from the mistakes of the Hogwarts faculty. In this magical talk, you’ll learn how to be a better mentor and help your workplace become a place where your junior developers can flourish.

      • Speakers: Lacey Williams Henschel
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    Darrick Wong

    Biography

    Darrick has been cranking out patches to the Linux kernel for the past twelve years. In that time he has worked on many areas of the kernel, most notably ext4, storage drivers, energy management, firmware hacking, and environmental sensors. He is now attempting to bring about the future of data storage, whether that means adapting existing filesystems to new kinds of storage, making versioning cheap, or teaching the computer how to automatically repair damage.

    Before that, Darrick mostly wrote software toys (compilers, interpreters, even operating systems) for fun, and nosed around inside a computer more than he admits. He has yet to find a computer that he can’t crash.

    Off-line, Darrick enjoys dancing, exploring exotic back-country with a camera, and belting out songs.

    Sessions

  • Jason Yee

    Biography

    Community Manager, developer, traveller and chef. I like putting people, ideas and ingredients together… and whiskey. I really like whiskey.

    Sessions