Preparing for Open Source Bridge

As the date for Open Source Bridge gets closer I’m feeling some butterflies about offering a session on yoga at a conference for developers. I am excited to work on a series that is short compared the the usual classes I teach.

I’m very interested on getting to focus on caring for those joints that get so much stress spending long hours at a computer or at the end of a long day at a conference. I am looking forward to showing people some easy things they can do when they’ve got a few minutes. Simple yoga that can be done anywhere, anytime, with only the kind of “equipment” you’d find in a conference room.

Yoga is easy, accessible, and a valuable tool for everyone. It doesn’t require fancy props or special packaging. It may have a few complicated terms and techniques here and there, but there’s a large community of people working to help others learn and share knowledge. In a lot of ways I think yoga has some interesting similarities Open Source! I hope people feel free to ask me about my theories after my session on Wednesday!

While at the conference I’m really looking forward to the ‘Teaching System Administration” session since I do a lot of coaching, including sysadmin level topics. As a person without a DBA I’m also very interested in the “5 Things to Know About MySQL If You Don’t Have a DBA” session! I look forward to seeing the “Re-factor Your Brain” session goes, I think it is very complimentary to my session.

I really value and am very grateful to the Portland tech community for encouraging me to submit this decidedly different session.

(Image courtesy edugreen. Used under Creative Commons.)

Here’s why you should attend my Open Source Bridge talk, “Unit Test Your Database!”:

• To see test-driven development in action
• To watch me ship well-tested code with a serious bug
• To witness on-stage beer consumption
• To laugh at testing misconceptions
• To get religion for testing databases
• Hallelujah!

There are other great talks at OSB to check out. Personally, I want to see:

• “Introduction to Parrot.” This sucker is stable and ready to rock your code!
• “Project Management Should be Boring!” Because I hate project management.
• “Building a SQL Database That Works.” We app developers need to better understand how RDBMSs really work.
• “Advanced Git tutorial: Not your average VCS.” Because for such a simple system, there is *so* much to learn!
• “Open Source Microblogging with Laconica.” Because I don’t really get it.

Such great stuff!

(Image courtesy Jeff Kubina. Used under Creative Commons.)

For me, Open Source software is very much about leverage. Open Source tools allow their creators to share their own productivity enhancements with the entire community, thereby making everybody more efficient.

That’s powerful.

The Linux command-line is simply another one of these tools, but I’m finding that a lot of folks these days don’t get as much leverage from the shell as they could, and that’s really too bad. So I created my “Command-Line Kung Fu” talk as a compact way for me to download a few tricks and idioms that will make anybody vastly more effective and efficient in Linux.

Let me show you what I mean with a couple of examples:

• What does this bit of shell fu do?

for f in *; do mv -- "$f" "${f// /_}"; done

• Which of these is faster? Why? And how can you tell?

find /usr/include -type f -exec grep -l sockaddr_in {} \;
find /usr/include -type f | xargs grep -l sockaddr_in
grep -rl sockaddr_in /usr/include

Curious about the answers? Come to my talk! Have a thorny problem that you just can’t figure out the right set of commands for, or have a solution that you’re not happy with? I’ll even take requests!

Assuming you’re sufficiently geeked out by my talk, you’ll probably want to follow it up with Philip Tellis’ “Programming Patterns in sed” talk, which will be happening right after my talk. And after that you can get down with Josh Cronemeyer’s talk on “Your Shell History in the Cloud”.

Yep, it’s a whole afternoon of shell fu for you!

(Image “Squirrel Fu” courtesy Greg Westfall. Used under Creative Commons.)

We know good things happen when users control their data and have access to the application source code. The web gave us an incredible simple model for application development, but the downside was code locked up on servers, with users feeling out-of-control of their data.

Maybe we trust Flickr, but if my network connection drops unexpectedly when I’m in the middle of showing baby photos to Grandma, the fact that Flickr holds my data remotely can’t be denied.

Standalone CouchDB applications give users control over their data in a way that we’ve never seen on the web or the desktop before. CouchDB serves Ajax applications directly to the browser, and can manage vast
databases using map reduce views.

The combination of simple web applications with powerful queries is exciting on its own, but what really sets CouchDB apart from the past is it’s peer based replication. Using replication your data can be anywhere: your laptop, the cloud, your phone. Grandma will be happy about CouchDB’s transparent offline mode, but the bigger win is that users have their data and the applications together on their own machines, giving them the opportunity to view and modify the source code.

I sincerely believe that an ecosystem of CouchDB web apps will do more to further the open source cause than anything else we’ve seen in the web era. In my OSBridge talk I’ll give an introduction to CouchDB, explain the way it makes data portability and open source the default, and show a few example applications to inspire you to build your own.