Open Source Bridge

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

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Ever wonder what happens to your data between the write() call and the disk drive? Or feel the need to scrape your bits off the drive after an accident? If so, this talk is for you! Come learn the dark art of how filesystems work.

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A look at the technical and legal issues surrounding home construction
of firearms, focusing on semi-automatic AK-47 style rifles.

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A pluggable type system extends a language’s built-in type system to
confer additional compile-time guarantees. We will explain the theory and
practice of pluggable types.

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This presentation will be of interest to system administrators and developers that want to provide isolated environments for production applications or test machines without the overhead of virtualization.

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

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

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We have come to a point where nearly everyone is expected to have at least cursory knowledge of graphics applications, and rather than shell out $650 for a program you’re primarily interested in using for editing screenshots many in the tech community knows to download GIMP and use that $650 to fuel their caffeine and online gaming addictions. Unfortunately this is not the case with artists. From the moment you enter art school you’re chained to proprietary applications and I know I don’t have to proselytize to you lot about that.

So we end up with one group of people being paid to use a free program for the most rudimentary of tasks and we have a second group of people who could be exploiting the most bleeding edge features of that program, but who are instead spending money they don’t have on products they may not need. There’s also the option to pirate those applications, but that’s a whole other talk.

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

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

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Make your life sweeter by replacing Google Maps with open-source alternatives.

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

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

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Unicode isn’t new, but it still seems hard when your starting at the beginning and haven’t even been told the difference between a glyph, a codepoint, a character and a byte. Every year there are talks and tutorials at conferences about it, but if you haven’t grasped the basics, you can feel frustrated and lost much too quickly. This talk will cover the essentials of Unicode, locale and how they affect things like regular expressions, reading and writing files and sending data out to the world. Perl will be the programming language used to demonstrate these ideas, but much of the content should be accessible to all programmers.

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Have you ever written a nice friendly email and gotten a reply that seems like they read a whole different email?

Textual communication has special problems. This talk will help you mitigate them: ensuring that what you mean to say is what is understood; interpreting messages that seem totally out of whack; and increasing empathic bandwidth.

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We all know about the Android Open Source project and that in theory anyone can make an android device with their very own customised AOSP ROM. But, what is it like to work on something using AOSP. How deep is that rabbit hole anyway?

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Want to be agile? Why bother modeling your data with a static table, declaring classes, and setting up mapping from tables to objects and finally to HTML and back again? The linked data standard presents a more powerful data model, and lets you use your website itself as a database.

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

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Are you ready to take your Open Source project to the next level? Maybe it’s time for a startup.

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Ever wonder why Wikipedia fund raising focuses that much on Africa?

Are you curious about what Open Source means for West Africans? What it is used for and where it is going?

Join to hear real world examples about us trying to build communities and businesses around open source in West Africa.

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Meet the pioneers of the new Indie Web, learn what’s changed, and how you too can reclaim your content, your data, your online identity. Join our panelists as they debate a variety of different approaches and learn how you too can get started and join the new Indie Web.

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Tired of VBScript? WMI? Batch scripts? Tired of scripting and programming in angle brackets and closing tags? Come and learn about the creation, design, and usage of Carbon, my open-source, PowerShell-based setup automation framework.

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

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

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The web was born of a series of deeply audacious hacks that created and transformed the browser into the most important, transparent, buggy and misunderstood software ever. A big part of the credit for this goes to the ability of any programmer to hack the browser itself using the technology of the web itself.

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Luvit is a new open source asynchronous framework. We will dive into what this project does, how it works, and what the goals are for the future.

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

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

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Why isn’t editing Wikipedia as easy as using a word processor? Want to know how to build a reliable rich text editor in a web browser? Learn about how we are building a Wikitext visual editor, and how you can get involved!

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Private cloud computing has become an integral part of global business. While each platform provides a way for virtual machines to be deployed, implementations vary widely. It can be difficult to determine which features are right for your needs. This session will discuss the top open source private cloud platforms and provide analysis on which one is the best fit for you.

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Portland’s user group for all things JavaScript and ECMAscript. The topic for this meeting is Unhosted: personal data freedom.

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Jason Scott, a member of the activist preservation group Archive Team, describes how open source projects and outlook have helped and improved the achieving of the group’s goals.

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

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

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In this session, we’ll talk about strategies for nurturing,
empowering and rewarding community leaders to help scale your open
source community. Most of the examples will come from 10gen’s
experience working with the community around the open source database
MongoDB.

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This presentation is about open source internationalization (i18n) tools and technologies that are being developed and rolled out to support 284 languages for Wikipedia communities that enable millions of users to read and edit Wikipedia content with open source IMEs and web fonts.

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

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Privly lets you post content on the web (Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, Diaspora, …, everywhere) without letting host sites have access to your data. Come find out how to un-send emails and manage your data across many websites simultaneously.

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

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The internet is full of information. Some of this information was made to help people learn. A subset exists under open licenses. These open educational resources (OERs) are used all over the world for learning and teaching. This talk will cover what some of them are and explore ways they have been (and can be) used for mentors and self-learners—both as individuals and in peer-study groups.

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This talk is for application developers who want to get started with Scala and MongoDB. We will discuss how Gilt Groupe’s engineering team adopted Scala and MongoDB. We will demonstrate how you can connect to MongoDB within a Scala application.

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When you code, should you indent 2, 4 or 8 characters? Where should you put the braces? What should your variables and functions be named? Is it worth having an argument about any of this?

This talk offers an analytical approach to deciding which elements of style will benefit your code. We’ll discover which is the “best style” and which is the style you should use.

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Come learn how team Hydrasi is partnering with scientific organizations to combine Open Source technologies and give them tools they never realized they could have. We’ll blend stories of working with organizations such as DEQ, NOAA, and the Army Corps with your own story to explore ways scientists can partner with techies to make the world a better place.

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Ever wonder what your kernel is doing? We instrumented kernels on both web servers and personal workstations, and then measured to see what they’re doing.

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

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

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

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How Pub/Sub helped my IRC bot stop living in the past and live in the moment. Also, special bonus features for polyglots!

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

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How to tame your OpenStack installation for a production environment.

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Using open source hardware and software I will present migration paths from the Arduino to a more powerful architecture without significant cost increase or having to relearn everything.

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

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I heard Will Shortz pose a mathematical puzzle on NPR on a Sunday Morning in January and I thought, “Hey, I can solve that with a genetic algorithm!” In OCaml. I’ll show you how in this talk.

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

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

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In March of 2011 I was named by Drupal project lead Dries Buytaert as lead of an initiative to improve configuration management for the next release. This talk will discuss how I went from lone coder to community leader and some of the lessons I learned along the way.

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

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

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

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Learn about techniques, libraries and patterns useful for building REST APIs using Node.js

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Mobile devices are changing the way we interact with the web, both as media consumers and social beings. We will explore the opportunities and challenges this change brings to users with disabilities.

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

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Meetup for students, mentors, and those interested in learning about Google Summer of Code and the Google Code-in programs.

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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.

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

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

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

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Y’know those “Interactive Fiction” (IF) text-adventure thingies? Inform 7 is a language for writing IF in the style of English prose. It’s also a neat idea for general modeling. Let’s build a simple world together while learning some of what Inform 7 is about.

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Security vulnerabilities can be a source of anxiety and lost sleep, or they can be a carefully managed opportunity to bring communities together, practice safe operational practices, and prevent problems. Join me to discuss how we can all manage our security issues sanely and cooperatively, and lose less sleep!

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Let’s make an IRC bot together. A room of people will either come together, or break up into teams to create an IRC bot within the context of a session. What the bot will do, is up to the people in the room. The outcome is different every time, but it will surely teach us something about technology, and human nature.

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

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Interested in helping others learn to code? How do you help give them a running start, without throwing roadblocks in their way? Come get better at helping other people get better.

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Learn about the magic that powers nodejs and has enabled other projects
to do cross platform non blocking io goodness.

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When was the last time you read a Privacy Policy, or looked at self-signed certs in the browser? How about cookie management? I bet you have awesome passwords! Lets face it, the browser does little to help the normal user in understanding and managing their privacy and security. This talk explores some of those issues, looks at projects Mozilla is working on in the area, and hopes to get developers and user experience people engaged in improving the usability of privacy and security in the browser.

Slides at https://speakerdeck.com/u/mixedpuppy/p/getting-a-handle-on-privacy-and-security

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

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Freedom 4: The freedom to use the program effectively, efficiently and satisfactory.

For a software to truly be free, people need to be able to easily use it without help. A primer to usability testing in a distributed and independent development environment.

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

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Developers, like hipsters are simultaneously dead simple and infuriatingly difficult as marketing targets. Learn how supporting open source can be used as a tool to entice developers into your product’s world.

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

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Learn how to get started in open source. You can help your favorite open source project, even if you don’t think you’re “a good enough programmer”. You just have to know where to start, and here you’ll learn 29 different starting points where you can pitch in and make a difference in the software that you use every day.

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

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

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Learn how to use Dreadnot, an open source deployment orchestration tool creating using Node.js and Twitter Bootstrap, to integrate with a variety of integration and infrastructure tools to enable rolling deployments with the click of a button.

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We all love sprinting with other experts, but how do you design an event effectively to reach out to and train newbies? It takes more work than you might think (publicity, prep, structure, and followup), but here’s how.

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

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What do bananas have to do with censorship? What do polyamorous people have in common with fax machines? How can you help your ideas have cyber-sex?

In this far-reaching seminar, join Social Justice Technologist and free software developer maymay as he explains the 101’s of how to make keeping your content up easy and taking it down hard. More important than merely a crash-course on tools, learn the fundamentals of how to build anti-censorship techniques directly into your publishing process using nothing more technologically complex than copy-and-paste. Whether you’re a non-technical individual or a savvy multi-national organization, you’ll discover how you can put data portability, distributed publishing, and censorship circumvention tactics to use right away in order to stay one step ahead of those who would call you “obscene.”

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Get ready for a whirlwind tour of the current Clojure ecosystem of web app technologies. This talk will demonstrate how fast, responsive apps can be built on this up-and-coming functional language, which is based on Lisp and runs on the JVM.

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Code review is awesome. Do more of it.

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“Open Source, in its majestic equality, guarantees both programmers and non-programmers alike the right to alter and recompile their software.”

The battle for Open Source Legitimacy is largely over: in many sectors, it’s actually the preferred alternative. In the task-focused world that most casual computer users inhabit, however, “open-ness” is a meaningless abstraction and the walled gardens of closed source competitors offer compelling advantages.

In this session, I’ll explore the reasons that people make their choices, point out why “moral arguments” about open source are unlikely to change those choices, and discuss ways that our communities can further the ideals of Open Source without demonizing Grandpa’s iPad.

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

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A web action is the user experience, code, and service for taking a specific discrete action, across the web, from one site to another site or application. You’ve all seen the buttons: Share, Read later, Follow, Like, Favorite, etc.

More than any one social site or service, web actions are the emergence of a whole new hypermedia building block.

This talk will give an overview of the anatomy of a web action, discuss web action user flow, and highlight best practices for both publishers and service providers.

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Learn all about RedHen, an native Drupal CRM designed as a set of lean building blocks.