Open Source Bridge

Featuring Amber Case, Cyborg Anthropologist, and Kurt von Finck of Monty Program AB.

Rumors of its senescence — at least lack of stylishness — to the contrary, Tcl/Tk is still one of the best scripting environments around. I will show you why.

CodePlex is Microsoft’s open source project hosting site. Get an inside look into how the CodePlex team builds the site using 3-week agile deployment cycles to deliver the best feature set for open source development.

Microblogging lets people share short status messages with their social network. Public Web sites like Twitter, Jaiku and Plurk are wildly popular with consumers, but Open Source programs allow a distributed social graph and implementation inside the enterprise firewall. Evan Prodromou, founder of Identi.ca, will describe the Open Source microblogging tool Laconica and its uses in the workplace and on the Public Web.

CouchDB can serve standalone applications, which can be shared amongst users, putting the source code (and control) back in their hands.

Unlike war, Drupal is good for many things. On the other hand, Drupal is far from a one-size-fits-all solution, and some projects are a much better fit for it than others.

Panel: Organization, coordination, and implementation of a volunteer community open source project: http://rosecityresource.org (by PDX Drupal UG)

How would you teach system administration? What important princples and practices would you want students to learn?

Earning a living from open source software? Yes, we can. Let’s talk about what actually works (and what doesn’t work) for building a service business based not just on open source software, but with an open source philosophy, drawing on real world experience.

“All That Glitters is Not (Only) Code
- Testing
- Localization
- Documentation
- Release Engineering
- User Interface Design / Usability
- User support”

The idea for Code-n-Splode grew out of the Women in Open Source BOF at OSCON 2007. I’ll talk about my original reasons for starting a women-friendly tech group, how the group is evolving, and what I’ve learned.

Rethinking MySQL for the modern web.

You have a really cool open source project and everyone should see it, try it, and use it. But … they don’t seem to know about it. How can you make sure your project gets the press coverage it deserves?

We exist within invisible frameworks of legal and regulatory schema – even if we’re coding in our underwear.

Large-scale web projects use sophisticated staged deployment systems, but the prospect of setting these up can be daunting. Using virtualization and automated configuration puts the benefits within easy reach even for small projects. David Brewer explains how Second Story uses Linux, VMware Server, and AutomateIt to grease the wheels of development on their museum-sector projects.

With the recent surge in JavaScript popularity, and the advances in JavaScript virtual machines, serious applications can and are being built in JavaScript. As the sophistication of these apps grow, so grows the need for verifying that our code continues to work as we expect. We’ll briefly cover the advantages of test driven development, the reasons for pushing it all the way to the browser level, and then explore the options for testing JavaScript, look at some examples, and then integrate the tests into our existing development workflow.

As a freelancer, you must be your own IT department. You are responsible for website hosting, backups, version control, project/time-tracking and invoicing. Finding inexpensive and maintainable solutions for these needs can be quite daunting. In this session, I will present an overview open-source solutions for these needs.

Caching is essential to ensuring that your website will survive a large spike in traffic. With so many different forms of caching, how are you supposed to know what works and why you should use it? The key is layering your site with several forms of caching.

Lessons learned from a successful open source consulting company. This talk is geared towards the open source developer who is considering starting his/her own business, and the entrepreneur who wants to grow the business by leveraging open source development methodologies.

Maybe the edge isn’t as close as we thought it was. Maybe you can do some really funky things with your language without accidentally summoning eldritch spirits.

Or maybe not.

The only way to find out is to try it—or, if you are of the more prudent proclivities, to watch someone else try it.

The closed, proprietary, integrated library systems (ILS) of the last decade have left libraries with no control over features, enhancements, hardware platforms, or support options resulting in an attitude of “learned helplessness” when it comes to their ILS. Open Source Library Systems (OSLS) offer opportunities to empower libraries and library staff to create new kinds of collaborative support and development environments.

This session uses activities that will help participants understand (from the inside) the cultural shift that needs to happen so they can take advantage of their participation in this Open Source project and not just remain passive bystanders.

A crash course in applying the principles of open source to the creation of real objects.

Django is a powerful web development framework that is incredibly well-documented. Many tutorials exist for doing simple things quickly in Django… but what do you do after that?

Make the text you see in the Terminal window more legible and readable by finding, customizing and designing your own font!

The open-source Titanium platform allows developers to use their existing knowledge of rich web application technologies – JavaScript, Python, Ruby, HTML and CSS – to build desktop applications. In this presentation we’ll go from start to finish building a desktop application using Titanium.

Talk about strange bedfellows: what happens when you mix one part Lisp (one of the oldest computer languages), one part Java (so young, yet so well adopted), a healthy serving of functional programming, and a state-of-the-art concurrency layer on top? That’s Clojure, which “feels like a general-purpose language beamed back from the near future.”

Learn how to address the unique information security challenges that open source businesses face.

As a Kernel developer I spend alot of my day looking at syslogs and rebooting systems. So, I set off to automate the process and you, the audience, will get an introduction to building ARM software and network device drivers.

Software programming has come a long way for students and younger children since the days of Logo. Syntax has been replaced with connecting blocks and the triangle turtle has been replaced with custom artwork children create themselves. Now, multi-threading and event processing are easier to teach children than functions, and this session discusses these ideas as well as so the edge of kid code.

The strength of your community is the best predictor of your project’s long-term viability. What happens when your community is gradually infiltrated by assholes, who infect everyone else with their constant negativity and personal attacks? This talk will teach you about the dramatic impact assholes are having on your organization today and will show you how you can begin to repair it.

The GNU Compiler Collection keeps getting better. Learn about new functionality and nifty optimizations that have been added in the last couple of years and hear about what’s on the horizon.

This session is for developers who want to learn about the Android platform. Android is a software stack for mobile devices that includes an operating system, middleware and key applications. We’ll discuss the Android toolset and platform API’s.

The amount of information freely available on the internet from sources like
Twitter and Github grows every day. This gives us new opportunities to leverage
the collective consciousness.

Clustering is a wonderful method for finding useful information in large
amounts of data. But it can be an intimidating topic for programmers without a
lot of academic background. In this talk I will introduce and explain some
practical techniques for clustering real-world data.

This discussion will creatively explore the fundamental technologies being used by hosting providers, and bridge these concepts with open source development and application deployment.

Developers attending this discussion will be provided with examples of where failure can occur, and what questions to ask their provider to ensure optimal uptime for their applications.

Do you know the basics of Git but wonder what all the hype is about? Do you want the ultimate control over your Git history? This tutorial will walk you through the basics of committing changes before diving into the more advanced and “dangerous” Git commands.

Spam is starting to infiltrate Twitter and other similar online communities. Learn how to use Perl to filter to garbage from the gold and search for what matters to you.

Navigating the Darkside of the Open Source Development Community. A decidedly sarcastic and hopefully humorous look at the dark under-belly of the Open Source Development Culture.

Deploying your .com behind nginx so you’re ready to handle that flood of users on launch day? Wondering if you should use mod_python, mod_wsgi, or FastCGI to deploy your new Django project? This presentation will present comprehensive and practical benchmarks across a wide variety of metrics to help you make an informed decision.

Do you know a dynamic/scripting language like Ruby or Python, but you don’t know C? Diving down just a little can make you a better programmer in your preferred language! Scripting languages can teach old C hands a thing or two, too. Delve into the benefits of being a multilingual programmer.

The problem: you’re using a modern dynamic language not known for speed, and you’ve identified a bottleneck. Write it in C? Does that give you the shakes? There are other language options available…

A rapid introduction to Hadoop architecture, MapReduce patterns, and best practices with Cascading.

Government consumes lots of technology and, with the stimulus dollars poised to invest heavily in information technology, spending will increase sharply over the next several years. The potential benefits to using open source software in the public sector may seem intuitively obvious. But what if you own a small business or are an independent developer/contractor? Can the little guy do business with a big bureaucracy? And what IS the government doing to pursue open source today?

This is a yoga workshop for anyone who sits and works on computers a lot. You will learn breathing exercises and physical postures that can be done at anytime to help maintain a healthy body and clear mind. Suggestions will be included for how to modify stretches to protect injuries and provide gentle opening.

Portland Plone Users Group will host the Plone BOF.

Ask the main Puppet developers about the state of the software, its roadmap, or anything else you’re interested in.

BOF to go with the “My Grand Experiment” Talk. http://opensourcebridge.org/sessions/115

Using the symfony PHP framework or just curious about it? This BOF is for you.

Do you run, or are you thinking about starting an open source software company? Come meet and talk with like-minded entrepreneurs. Hosted by the Portland Open Source Software Entrepreneurs (POSSE)

OpenConferenceWare is the application running this site. The software is themeable, customizable and open sourced: anyone can use it to run their own conference site. OpenConferenceWare’s developers would like to talk with users about making the software better, organizers about using it for other events, and with those interested in joining the development team.

People involved in the Google Summer of Code 2009 and those interested about Google Summer of Code getting together and hanging out!

Featuring Mayor Sam Adams and Ward Cunningham

Given that the database, as the canonical repository of data, is the most important part of many applications, why is it that we don’t write database unit tests? This talk promotes the practice of implementing tests to directly test the schema, storage, and functionality of databases.

Idealist.org’s mission is to help change the world by providing proactive people, communities, and organizations with a forum to connect and communicate.

How the Linux kernel development model works.

Scala is a functional/object-oriented hybrid language that runs on the JVM or the CLR. Scala is fully compatible with Java and brings many powerful features to the JVM, features such as: the ability to easily create DSL’s due to Scala’s ability to define methods for most operators, easily target multi-core hardware as Scala’s types are immutable by default, access to the Actor based concurrency model, and expressive and concise code due to Scala’s type inference and expressive syntax. All this without much of the boilerplate and cruft code that is so common in Java.

Building novel and robust applications with Firefox

This talk briefly explains the overall architecture of Parrot and teaches the skills needed to get started hacking in Parrot.

quick and dirty operational best practices that should be baked into your development and deployment plans.

RubySpec is a project to write a complete, executable specification for the Ruby programming language. If organizing Ruby programmers is akin to herding cats, imagine what it’s like to organize Ruby language implementers. We will talk about the history of RubySpec, how it works, challenges along the way, and the current status.

Code sprints are events where developers quickly complete coding tasks in a collaborative environment. A panel of skilled developers will share their experiences for organizing effective code sprints so you can better participate and organize your own. The panel members have organized and participated in over a hundred sprints (ranging from Django to JRuby) and used sprints as the primary way to develop community-oriented projects (e.g., Calagator). While most of the discussion will be about volunteer-run open source code sprints, many of the ideas will be readily applicable to improving development at your workplace. The panel will offer practical, actionable advice that you can use and answer your questions.

The open source ecosystem operates at human scale, and yet the most popular social networks today are mammoths, where an open source citizen has limited agency with little to no ability to change her environment. Furthermore, efforts like OpenSocial serve to further limit what independents can build outside of the major networks, culminating in a threat the very essence of what makes the open/open source community thrive: choice and marketplace competition guaranteed through the ability to fork.

Adding real-world location to mobile applications on the Android platform takes users out of the ethernet and into the world.

Everyone has a different reason to love virtualization: security, configuration isolation… the list goes on. But containerization offers many of the same goodies as virtualization, alongside an efficiency and performance advantage. Just what you need, more options. There’s no wrong answer. Andy de la Lucha and Irving Popovetsky help you ask the right questions about what’s right for your environment.

We’re using a variety of gems to build an ambient sensing tool to watch user activity over urban environments. The acts_as_solr gem to help provide faceted search, carrot2 to perform clustering and topic analysis, the twitter gem to fetch user activity in the first place.

As a developer, what you really need are some simple recipes for how to think about designing your SQL databases so that they are simple, maintainable, expandable and easy to troubleshoot.

In this session we will explore many of the ways to innovate without the need for a significant budget by using open source software to try new things under the radar and on a shoestring budget.

You click on a link and you can’t get to your favorite web site. Now what? Is the web site down? Is it your connection? Is it something in between? How can you figure out what’s wrong if you don’t know how it works? We’ll show you everything that happens after you click a link so next time the web site is down you’ll know what to do to fix it.

If you have ever wanted to know what you can do to make a difference in our electoral process, then this talk is for you.

Come and learn some useful command-line short cuts and shell idioms that will make you vastly more productive in a Linux or Unix shell. Time permitting, we’ll even play “stump the expert”, so bring your thorniest shell problems.

Bring your laptop with Python installed and follow along as we go through examples from a 21st century high school mathematics curriculum, such as we’re currently prototyping and implementing in niche markets.

Configuration management tools are finally coming into their own. Powerful, automated infrastructure management is now available in a wide variety of open source tools. Tools written in different languages, using varying operational methodologies and embracing differing philosophies. Come meet some of the creators and maintainers of these cutting edge tools like cfengine, Puppet, AutomateIT, Chef, and bcfg2 and quiz them in the why and hows of their tools and the philosophies behind them.

A look at efficient PHP development through proper architecture and profiling tools.

Can you perform simple arithmetic? Do you know how to program well enough to open and read files? Then you can write a Bayesian classifier, one of the machine learning techniques for predicting categories, most famous for its use in spam filters. Let’s demystify this impressively-named but ultimately simple process.

Build real-time interactive applications using the Lift Web Framework

Paper prototyping is the fastest, cheapest way to test your user interface designs. To prove it, in 45 minutes we’ll walk through several rounds of prototyping and testing a small application.

Survey of current database technologies beyond the traditional ACID RDBMS

Learn to turn line noise into clean and structured, albeit unreadable, sed programs.

Learning how Open source communities work is an important skill in today’s job market, but many college students fail to join projects. Come learn how the School of EECS at Oregon State University is working to motivate students, and help them overcome the barriers of joining open source projects through Beaversource.

Most farmers don’t use Open Source Software. Why not? Are there cultural issues? Are needed applications missing? Could Open Source Software be packaged better for farmers? Are there marketing and advocacy issues?

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

Learn about several computer vision techniques and how to put them together to form an entry-level object classifier.

A panel on funding your business without VC, based on GitHub’s experiences.

As a long-time user of open source software, I’ve often considered myself an advocate but not necessarily a participant. Over the last year and a half, my own search for technical inspiration has led me full-circle to the realization that I’m an active member of a vibrant community of technical women.

Ruby has established itself as a first-tier language for developing web applications. Now it’s time to think about everything else.

Use Google App Engine to harness a lifetime of shell history from any computer with tagging, searching and annotations.

An examination and discussion of the various enterprise-class OSS tools available for course management, online collaboration, and administration for educational institutions.

Selena loves Git and EmmaJane loves Bazaar. And like all good nerds they’ve spent a fair amount of time talkin’ smack about the other’s version control system (VCS). Come see what the fuss is all about!

This talk will discuss different web testing strategies, tools, and getting you up and writing windmill tests.

In 2002 people wanted to build a database to track creative works; we
built that database and it’s called the Web.

Documentation for open source projects is every bit as important as the code itself. But how can you create a single source of docs that can be used in a variety of ways and translated into other languages? This presentation will show you how.

Solar powered server and communication arrays in Earth orbit .

Manufacturing, costs, environmental benefits, security, maintenance, and survivability will be discussed.

Meditation is the ultimate open source tool. You can do it anywhere and it’s free. It requires only your brain and your body. It’s positive effects are numerous, including increased productivity, better problem-solving and a reduction in overall stress. Learn about long-term effects of mediation on the brain, some meditation techniques and how mediation can help you do your job better.

DRINK.

A number of open source tools exist that make profiling Linux servers easier. These tools include traditional Unix utilities like “sar” and “iostat”, but they also include some tools that go deep into the processors and I/O subsystems.

PDXPUG will host the PostgreSQL BOF.

PDXCritique is an open forum where anyone who makes things can get constructive criticism on their work from their peers.

WordPress blogging platform users unite for their monthly meeting!

Hang out and talk about functional languages.

Welcome to the unconference day.