Open Source Bridge

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

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

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.

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?

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.

"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.

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.

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

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

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

Code review is awesome. Do more of it.

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.

Android 3.1 and beyond

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

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

Do you generate, manage, or analyze a lot of data? Do you develop software? Do you like pretty pictures? If your answer was "yes" to zero or more of these questions, this talk is for you.

Imagine an open source project was an actual place: a place where people volunteer to make something better; contribute their time, knowledge and resources; a place to share ideas or just to get work done. Hacker Dojo is for hackers and thinkers and this session will describe how the open source ethos can successfully be applied to a physical space.

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

Many geeks are uncomfortable interacting IRL with clients or audiences but you don't have to be. There are some simple physical tricks to keeping an audience (of 1 or 1k) engaged and not undermining your skills and yourself.

"Yoga for Geeks", sometimes known as "Yoga for Long-Haul Travelers", 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.

Anyone can show how to save the world. We tell how to receive unsolicited love letters while doing it.

It took me two years to get a master's in tech management. I save you $40K and give you the short version.

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

The last year has shown the Internet and computers to be a major force for freedom and self-determination around the world. The presenter discusses his work as a hacktivist. Working with Anonymous and Telecomix, he has helped organized protests in support of WikiLeaks, provided communications support to Egypt and the Middle East, and generally fought the good fight.

There's more real open source going on at Microsoft than you'd think.

Parrot is an ambitious and long-lived project that aims to be a VM for interoperable dynamic language implementation. We'll take a look at what Parrot's developers have been doing of late, what kind of awesome goodies we've plundered from the OSS world and where we want to go in the next year.

Are you tired of null pointer exceptions, unintended side effects, SQL injections, concurrency errors, mistaken equality tests, and other run-time errors that appear during testing or in the field? A compile-time tool named the Checker Framework has found hundreds of such errors. Oracle plans to include it in the Java 8 javac, but you can use it today to improve your code and avoid errors.

Tricky to master. Sometimes the last thing you care about. (Let me code already, dammit.) However, a small amount of work on your sales-fu will pay off. So let's do this thing.

So you love open source? Spend more time doing what you love: go into business for yourself.

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