Hacks

Time now to take another look at all of the cool content that’s being proposed for Open Source Bridge.

Today’s topic? A perennial favorite: Hacks.

What does Hacks entail exactly?

Tinkering, experimenting and bending the rules to make hardware and software do what we want.
Hacks are clever. They break the rules. They force the available material into doing what you need or want. Some hacks are illegal, and some just make you proud and embarrassed that it worked. Sometimes a hack is the only way. Show the world how you make your hardware and software obey your every whim.

Let’s take a look at what’s sitting in the Hacks hopper:

• Brian Ford‘s “RubySpec: What does my Ruby do?” which offers “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.”
• Webb Sprague‘s “‘TITL’: Tcl Is a Templating Language” a talk about “A simple, batteries included platform for developing internet applications based on the world’s most Zen scripting language.”
• Markus Roberts‘ “Spindle, Mutilate and Metaprogram: How far _can_ you push it before there be dragons?” which will be a discussion about the edge. “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.”

Have a topic you’re interested in discussing? Submit a proposal. Or keep track of all of the proposals by subscribing to the proposal feed.

And of course, none of these presentations will be as interesting without your involvement. So make sure to register to attend Open Source Bridge in June.

Photo courtesy drumm. Used under Creative Commons.

When we had our very first planning meeting for the conference, we made a big list of everything we wanted to cover (with colorful commentary—sorry, we were pretty excited).

Our initial conference content outline

In the course of the discussion, we realized that if every topic we were excited about had its own track, we would have way too many of them to manage. Also, it would go against one of our core principles: we want to bring people together, not shuffle them off into separate rooms. So we decided to take a different tack, and group the content around how we approach it, not what the underlying technology is.

That’s how we ended up splitting the most technology-heavy topics into three tracks: Cooking, Chemistry, and Hacks. I think they make the most sense if viewed as a group. We learn what to do via cooking, following recipes until we’re able to improvise our own. We learn why it works by studying the chemistry, which lets us see what’s happening at lower levels. Finally, we rewrite the rules by hacking. This isn’t a linear progression; we may jump from one approach to another frequently in the course of our work.

The other two tracks round out the picture. Business is about how we earn a living. Culture is all of the other things we do around our work, like organizing user groups, managing projects, and applying the open source ethos to other areas of our lives.

We arranged these five tracks to cover the full scope of our open source existence. Within them, there’s plenty of room to talk about individual languages and tools, even at the advanced level, but sharing with people from a range of backgrounds. We can all learn much from each other.

Hopefully, this provides a better frame of reference for our tracks. (And now you’ve got even more reason to submit your own proposal.)