Open Source Bridge

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.

Virtual hosting providers are particularly enticing for startups and new opensource projects, but they come with large and sometimes unexpected drawbacks. Learn what to expect and how to mitigate the worst performance issues you’ll face deploying your services in the cloud.

Most of us get involved with open source as a way to solve the problems we face on a day-to-day basis. But technology in general, and open source software in particular, also provides the key to solving the more catastrophic problems that people face around the world today.

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.

Read the Docs is a documentation hosting site for the community. It was built in 48 hours in the 2010 Django Dash. In January 2010 it had 100,000 page views, and increases daily. I will talk about all of the code to deploy and run a sizable Django site. We will go through the highlights and interesting parts of the code, as well as some of the lessons learned from the site being open source.

See! The Amazing Future of Human-Computer Interaction! Behold! The Awesome Power of Open-Source Libraries and Cheap Video-Game Accessories! Fake Beards!

Half the story of the building of Puppet Labs and half instruction on how to build your own company, Luke Kanies, the founder of Puppet and Puppet Labs, will tell how he built his company and product and how you can, too.

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.

Hear how a distributed team tackled a big project (a book about a large open source project) in our spare time. Along the way, we encountered tools, techniques, and working styles that may be useful to you in your own career—or at least serve as a humorous warning.

Many people view topics like Map/Reduce and queue systems as advanced concepts that require in-depth knowledge and time consuming software setup. Gearman is changing all that by making this barrier to entry as low as possible with an open source, distributed job queuing system.

Overview of Apache CouchDB, who is using it, and how you can too.

Many open source projects participate in college mentorship programs, but what about younger students? Should we be cultivating the next generation of contributors from an earlier age?

P2PU School of Webcraft: Web developer training that’s free, open and globally accessible.

Not sure what queuing system to use for your next project? How about the differences between broker vs direct queue services? What is a good fit for cloud vs your own data center? This session gathers information from open source queuing projects to help answer these questions and more. Queues are part of almost every scalable website and application, it’s time to find the best fit for yours.

Get an introduction to what these projects are, how they can help you with your personal data, and what kinds of exciting things are being built atop them.

As the Internet world moves slowly towards implementing DNSSEC, this session aims to start at the basics of DNSSEC and goes on to discuss implementation details as well as best practices, some of the most common mistakes that happen during and after deployments and finally what’s in store for the near future.

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

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.

Leave rigid tables behind, and work with your data as a graph, using standard web data schemas.

What OSS database to use is an important decision, but recently languishing in the shadow of the sexier “what framework should I use” talks – or underplayed as though the battle were only SQL v noSQL. If your understanding of data storage tops out at “Mongo is webscale” or “mysql + memcached = win” then this talk is for you.

What makes the culture of open source so hostile to women and how can we as individuals act to change it?

Envisioned as a cutting-edge computing platform that would encourage students to tinker with all the latest developments in the mobile space without fear of breaking their own gadgets, the initial version of the OSWALD project out of OSU failed in several key areas. In this talk, Tim will explore lessons learned from OSWALD and how they can help the open hardware and open education communities.

In order to keep a tree healthy, you have to prune its branches. This too is the case with an organization’s websites and projects. Let’s look at how Mozilla handles the end-of-life portion of a website’s life-cycle.

Django is a great web application framework that allows for rapid web app development out of the box. Since Mozilla picked up Django in 2009, they’ve started over a dozen Django-based projects. For these sites to scale to an international audience of millions of users, bells and whistles were needed that a stock Django instance does not offer.

Playdoh combines the experience of these projects into a template that contains various fixes and add-ons to make professional Django apps fast, featuring aggressive caching, instant localization support, and bullet-proof security.

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.

Hardware running Txtzyme will play well with the shell and other interactive environments. We’ll explain the Txtzyme language and show hardware integration examples using bash, perl, ruby, java and javascript.

Drupal has the ability to bundle contributed modules, configurations and settings, and custom code into a single package that can be easily installed and further configured by end users. The end result is an application-in-a-box focused on a specific set of requirements. Now that you or your business has invested hundreds or even thousands of hours creating your masterpiece, what do you do with it?

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.

How to use Debian live build to create a specific live GNU/Linux distribution. It will be illustrated by these 3 live distributions: Clonezilla live, DRBL live, and GParted live, special live GNU/Linux distributions for system imaging/cloning, diskless linux, and graphical partition editor, respectively.

“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.

Ward Cunningham & Paul Stoffregen will be there to try out 8-bit micro controllers with the Txtzyme hardware language.

Lightning talks and discussions on devops best practices, cloud infrastructures, and automation tools.

PDXPHP is Portland’s PHP user group. We meet every third tuesday.

The local Dorkbot PDX Hardware community as well as conference speakers Phil Tomson, Thomas Lockney and others will be there to try out FPGAs, and whatever other iron & blinkie lights their wonderfully fiendish minds care to tinker upon.

Lightning talks and discussions on devops best practices, cloud infrastructures, and automation tools. [continuation of earlier BoF]

The local Dorkbot PDX Hardware community as well as conference speakers Phil Tomson, Thomas Lockney and others will be there to try out FPGAs, and whatever other iron & blinkie lights their wonderfully fiendish minds care to tinker upon.

Hackthon for Linq To RDF and dotNetRDF. Troy Howard and Eric Sterling will be there trying to resurrect Linq To RDF, help out dotNetRDF and just generally geek out on SPARQL, OWL, RDF, the Semantic Web, and how to work with this stuff in the .NET framework. Bring your questions, opinions, insight, and hacking skills!

Data Science promises to transform ubiquitous and cheap data into insights with the potential for great social, scientific and personal value. I will provide a lightning tour of high level theory, concepts, and tools to extract knowledge and value from data.

Developing more effective habits isn’t just for the good guys. We’ll discuss seven methodologies that make trolls more effective—-and tell you what you can do about it.

Come join me as I dispel some of the clouds of pollution which obscure the name of marketing, show how it can help your projects, reveal how—whether you realize it or not—you already use marketing every day and how that’s a very good thing indeed.

Ever wondered what would happen if you could rethink a decade worth of design changes? Drizzle is a redesign of the MySQL server targeted at web development and optimized for Cloud applications.

MongoDB is a popular new document-based non-relational database. Like all new technologies learning its strengths and weaknesses while trying to support a quickly growing dataset is trying.

Faced with bit rot, expired proprietary software, and imminent collapse, we spent 2 weeks re-inventing a tsunami casualty simulator using open-source technologies. Come hear about the pitfalls, the elation, and how switching to an open stack changes the economics of city planning.

Ganeti is a cluster virtualization management software tool built on top of existing virtualization technologies such as Xen or KVM and other Open Source software. This hands-on tutorial will give an overview of Ganeti, how to install it, how to get started deploying VMs, & administrative guide to Ganeti. The tutorial will also cover installing & using Ganeti Web Manager as a web front-end.

Everything you learned about database modeling is wrong. At least for document databases like CouchDB and MongoDB. Learn about these differences, the trade-offs, the use cases, and put it all in practice in a discussion about a real-life document database problem. Unlearn SQL habits and relax.

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.

In a world where Javascript is everywhere; your browser, server, database, mobile device — you want and need code reuse to speed up development. In order to do this, you need to know that code works in all the environments you care about.

Jellyfish is a node project focused on provisioning different environments and making it easy for you to execute your JS and get the results.

Learn from open source community leaders who work on projects big and small.

Practical cartographic geekery for accidental and padawan mapmakers: a crash course in Mapping 101 where we’ll talk about the anatomy of maps and what you need to know when creating them. Topics include cartographic standards, projections, visualization, and the fine art of finding, deciphering, and using geodata and metadata. Included will be examples of the good, the bad, and the ugly, as well as resources for further exploration.

So often we’re solely focused on the performance of our production systems. When disaster strikes, your team needs to know when error conditions begin, where they’re coming from, frequency, and an indication of the last time they occurred. Parsing logs isn’t fast enough, and email can’t keep up or preserve metadata.

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

Lots of attention has been given to GPUs for speeding up certain types of computations. While GPUs are very well suited for vector operations, there are other things they are not so well suited for. FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) are not used as widely yet, but they offer a much more flexible computing fabric than GPUs. You can implement a GPU in an FPGA, for example, or you could implement your own custom processor optimized for very specialized tasks. The barrier to entry can be high for FPGAs: how does a person with a software development background get started using them? And what about HDLs (Hardware Description Langauges) used to program FPGAs? What’s the difference between simulation and synthesis? What kinds of tools are freely available? These are some of the questions that will be addressed in this session.

If you’ve ever written any code to authenticate wtih Twitter, you may have been confused by all the signature methods and base strings. You’ll be happy to know that OAuth 2 has vastly simplified the process, but at what cost?

When kids get hands on experience with the source code of a program, they get excited!

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

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.

In a language that strongly enforces a formatting style on the programmer, keeping it “pythonic” is only the tip of what makes python a wonderful, but confusing language. See what all the fuss is about in this introduction to the styles and nuances of the Python programming language and the tools you should be using when writing it.

Magic Windows, Football Field Style Bicycle Race Clocks, Talking Coffee Cups, Space Invaders Style Video Games, and A War On Christmas Lights.

Learn to use simple natural language processing and graph analysis tools in Python and R to explore the structure of the dataverse. From Reddit to the USPTO to Google Books, come try some data hacks!

ePUB is the open e-book standard. Building on previous open standards, the ePUB format allows for flexible and flowing documentation, perfect for viewing on a variety of devices where the forced page sizing of other formats fails. We’ll crack open some ePUB files and take a look at the innards and then we’ll check out some tools to make ePUB generation less painful.

How to use the new NO-SQL MariaDB features from SQL.

Tests are great – except when they aren’t. Learn how to avoid writing tests that are more trouble than they’re worth.

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.

Why be locked into a cloud vendor?

Shouldn’t Cloud be Open Cloud and powered by Open Source software?

Open Stack is a collection of open source technologies to deliver a cloud operating system. Learn about Open Stack and how to use it to deliver your own Open Source powered clouds.

Do you know what people are really doing in your open source project? Having good community data and metrics for your open source project is a great way to understand what works and what needs improvement over time, and metrics can also be a nice way to highlight contributions from key project members. This session will focus on tips and techniques for collecting and analyzing metrics from tools commonly used by open source projects. It’s like people watching, but with data.

Forum-based interactive learning is an important open tech community activity. We will look at a storytelling-based example from the past.

Web frameworks have done a good job of organizing the server side code in our web applications. But that doesn’t help with Javascript. RequireJS helps you solve this problem.

How many times have you received an email or phone call from a potential client who describes their project in a few sentences and expects a formal proposal the next day? This session will address this seemingly impossible task by going over the method we have created at OpenSourcery to estimate web projects. This method has helped us work with clients to prioritize functionality, set realistic schedules, and has improved our ability to close sales.

If you can’t reproduce your work reliably then you can’t maintain it. You may get by for a while with ad-hoc build/release/deployment processes, but sooner or later they’ll bite you. We’ll present a new practical approach to assembling both software products and installed systems, drawing inspiration from sources including the functional programming community, commercial software projects, large IT deployments, and Linux distributions like Debian.

Slides available at http://apters.com/osbridge2011.pdf

Are you taking the underlying infrastructure that allows you to do the cool stuff you do online for granted? Do you think that ubiquitous, affordable, high speed broadband will just happen? Merger mania in the telecommunications arena means we prosumers will have less and less of a choice in our connectivity options. What role can communities play in ensuring broadband communications infrastructure and connectivity strategies promote openness, and improve accessibility and responsiveness of government to citizens.

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.

Importing, managing, correcting, reprojecting and mashing up geodata with PostGIS and OGR

Folks from the local Portland Open Source GIS user group will be gathering, along with our GIS conference speakers, for their monthly meeting and to compare & play with various Open Source GIS technologies. Perhaps a competition shall ensue? We shall see…

Android 3.1 and beyond

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

Portland JavaScript Admirers is a local user group intended to help people learn about JavaScript

Lightning talks and discussions about Ruby-related libraries, projects, implementations and more.

Introduction to IRC for new users, entertainment for veterans. Learn basics, safety, security. Hang out interesting places, we’ll visit Freenode, Telecomix, Anonymous, Wikileaks.

Build applications for the desktop and mobile devices using HTML and Javascript.

Since January of this year, a group of independent programmers, community-based organizations, public officials, and software executives and entrepreneurs have been working as part of the PDX11 initiative to identify solutions to make it easier for local software professionals to establish mentoring relationships. This presentation will outline a novel approach to developing a software application to support the local tech community and will invite feedback from attendees to help shape the process moving forward.

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

What’s going on in the mind of the user as they use your system? Did they choose it, or was it chosen for them? Do they like it or hate it? How can you tell? This talk discusses the types of users that exist, and their motivations.

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

Methods of communication are constantly evolving, and traditional phone systems can not keep up. Open source phone systems allow for infinite possibilities for customizing the way we interact with each other. This session will walk through setting up your own Asterisk IP PBX from bare-metal to making calls.

As you can see we get a “403 Forbidden” in response to our “POST /integer/5/increment”…can anyone tell me why? It worked when we did “PUT /variable/x/let/integer/5” followed by “POST /variable/x/increment”, so why can’t we do it directly?

The CoApp project is bringing real open-source style package management to Windows; this session demonstrates the basics of creating and consuming CoApp packages.

So your project needs a book? Do you write it yourself, or do you approach a publisher? This talk walks you through everything that factors into this decision providing real world examples of projects and companies offering open source books.

Open source folks are naturally lazy. Anything mundane task they can automate, they will. So what does an open source developer do when faced with planning, planting, and tediously watering a garden? Automate!

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.

You are an employee of COMPANY. COMPANY is investigating open sourcing PROJECT. You will explore some of the most obscure and frustrating territory as you lead this effort. Hardened leads have run screaming from the terrors of this undertaking!

With node.js brining callbacks back into fashion and new languages like Go baking concurrency primitives directly into the language syntax, it can be difficult to keep straight what different concurrency approaches offer, what their shortcomings are, and what inspired them.

lua is an extension language that is used in everything from mail filters to World of Warcraft. Learn how you can script C libraries with lua and alien.

Join Michael Richardson, a cofounder of Urban Airship, as he elaborates on the decisions around creating a startup outside of Silicon Valley, how to keep your head above water, and how to find and manage a team during explosive growth.

Almost every web application relies on cookies to authenticate each request after the user logs in. Cookies are vulnerable to cross-site request forgery and session hijacking. It is time to explore better, more secure alternatives that are now possible thanks to practical in-browser cryptography.

Have you ever wanted to automatically turn on your lights when you get home, or turn them back off when you leave? What about controlling your lights by SMS or IRC? This presentation will teach you how to automate your life with location-based hacks and SMS.

New contributors are often intimidated the first time they appear in public to share a tarball, submit a patch, or open an IRC client. What if they could practice within “training levels” for open source contribution? This talk introduces the OpenHatch training missions, an open-source, interactive, entertaining way to learn the tools and culture of our community.

Technical debt is something that most project teams or independent developers have to deal with – we take shortcuts to push out releases, deadlines need to be met, quick fixes slowly become the standard. In this talk, we will discuss what technical debt is, when it is acceptable and when it isn’t, and strategies for effectively managing it, both on an independent and team level.

A deployment pipeline combines several development best practices, fully automated and taken to their logical extreme. The result is almost magical: changesets go in one end, and fully-tested software packages come out the other. We’ll take a tour of the components of a deployment pipeline, with concrete examples showing how to use Hudson, Rake, and Puppet to deploy PHP projects.

ETL. OLAP. BIDW. ELT. M/R. MPP. Windowing. Matviews. Data Marts. Column Stores. Are you at sea in a tidal surge of arcane terminology, trying to cope with big data problems?

From the Browser to node.js all the way to the database you can use and share your JavaScript!

This session will provide examples of major government uses of open source technology, and provide some examples and case-studies of how government is contributing to open source and the web.

An introduction to the cryptocurrency system called Bitcoin. The cryptography, the economics of currency bootstrapping, and the traction its getting today.

See the leading open source GIS desktop systems solve real world problems.

The traits of an ‘open’ dataset — factors like accuracy, geographic scope and copyright entanglements — shape the development process in profound ways. I’ll share what I’ve learned building projects around heritage trees, public art and poetry posts in Portland, and extrapolate a blueprint for evaluating and planning open data projects.

The bar to contribution in Open Source web development projects can be lowered through the use of devops tools and virtual machine technologies.

More and more FOSS projects are benefiting from a formal design process. This is an opportunity to see accessibility as a design requirement and integrate into earlier stages of the project’s cycle as opposed to the afterthought it often is. In this talk we will see what a design process that integrates universal design looks like, and open the floor to discussion about inclusivity in design.

BIND is the nameserver which runs 80% of DNS world wide… It
is maintained by a non profit managed open source company and driven
by an international user and developer community. What does product
management, using scrum, on an open source project, with developers on
three continents, look like?

Disruptively low-cost real-time transit displays

In this puppet show, a wise lion coaches an eager but inexperienced mouse through the process of normalization and (equally important) denormalization.

You’ll learn about the techniques needed to transform classes at runtime, adding new behaviors and addressing cross-cutting concerns. The presentation will discuss a new framework for this specific purpose, but also draw examples from the Apache Tapestry web framework, which itself is rich in meta-programming constructs.

Optimize your productivity by keeping your body healthy. Learn how to prevent ‘laptop back’ and RSI; extend your workday by taking care of your body.

Hackthon for Apache Lucene.Net. Two of the committers for this project, Troy Howard and Chris Currens will be there hacking on some new features for Lucene.Net and will be available to answer any questions you might have or help you with your project that relates to Lucene/Lucene.Net.

Code N Splode is a local user group that supports the participation of women in the Portland tech community. We’d like to go out for drinks with you while you’re at OS Bridge!

Ask (and maybe answer) questions about ISC’s projects, BIND, DHCP, and whatever else. Open Source internet infrastructure and protocol geeks unite! Share the feature you want to see, ask questions, make suggestions….

Hang out and talk about functional languages.

Chris Smith will be by to show how he uses Javascript, CouchDB and transit service web services APIs to show transit arrivals across several agencies. Scott Garman will also be working on a multi-architecture Linux distro for these devices based on the Yocto Project.

CASSIS is universal JavaScript (JS) that works on the client and the server for scalable application logic. Developed as an immediate to near-term solution until typical web hosting companies make it easy to run JS on the server (e.g. Node.js), CASSIS is a fast functional open source JS-subset and framework you can use today to implement application logic once and have it run both dynamically in browsers with JS, and on the server for when JS is not supported (search engines), is disabled (security), or slow (mobile).

The GIS folk will gather again, this time led by Aaron Parecki & Amber Case of GeoLoqi, to test out & hack upon their GeoLoqi location framework.