Open Source Bridge

I'll be taking a deep dive into cloud architectures and how to build applications, generally at the PaaS level mixed with a little IaaS, to get people rolling with high velocity, high quality, and without the need to worry about the little things.

This session will cover the major advances of platform as a service technology, what's available in the OSS space to enable faster, easier, higher quality software development cycles in the cloud. The session will complete with a demo of PAAS technology in use, deploying a highly scalable, distributed & dispersed web application.

What do bananas have to do with censorship? What do polyamorous people have in common with fax machines? How can you help your ideas have cyber-sex? In this far-reaching seminar, join Social Justice Technologist and free software developer maymay as he explains the 101's of how to make keeping your content up easy and taking it down hard. More important than merely a crash-course on tools, learn the fundamentals of how to build anti-censorship techniques directly into your publishing process using nothing more technologically complex than copy-and-paste. Whether you're a non-technical individual or a savvy multi-national organization, you'll discover how you can put data portability, distributed publishing, and censorship circumvention tactics to use right away in order to stay one step ahead of those who would call you "obscene."

The principles of abstraction are drilled into us repeatedly, and we work hard to abstract the layers of our applications. Abstraction between layers is excellent, but what about abstraction within layers, especially the data layer? Many developers still build database-centric applications, and then struggle the day they need an additional or new data source. Learn the reasons why this is a poor design choice, and the best ways to avoid it.

Top 5 browser hacks of all time! The very first hack, in fact the biggest browser hack ever was in February 1998 when Jamie Zawinski uploaded the Mozilla source under the MPL. The second biggest hack was the release of Firefox ( then Phoenix ), and the third was the development of khtml ( later, 'webkit' ). These are the foundational open source web rendering engines, and the existence of several open source web rendering engines is critical for the future of the open web. Hack #4 had more sinister beginnings: the first browser to support 'extensions' was IE5, and the main use of the extension api was to add toolbars. But if MS hadn't introduced this feature, perhaps there would be no Firefox extensions, no Chrome or Safari extensions. No Firebug, youtube downloaders, etc. Hack #5 is the only one in the top 5 that is an extension: Firebug. You may curse it now, but Firebug so dramatically improved life for web developers.

The concept of the API, we all know it, we all use it, but do we really understand it? This talk seeks to deconstruct the API and discuss it's usefulness for everything from your web app, to your coffee, to your marriage

Just-released open-source software that implements VoteFair ranking is now available to help us reach higher levels of voting fairness. You do voting when you click on Google results, and you use voting results when you view the star rating of an Amazon product. Now learn how voting really works, how it is usually miscalculated -- intentionally in the case of elections -- and how it can be done to fully extract the wisdom in a group. Learn the math behind the puppet strings that connect politicians to the biggest campaign contributors. (Partial spoiler: The biggest unfairness is hidden in primary elections.) Also learn the math that eventually will cut those puppet strings. Along the way you will learn that there are different kinds of popularity.

A look at the technical and legal issues surrounding home construction of firearms, focusing on semi-automatic AK-47 style rifles.

This talk will show how to keep control of your PHP projects with continuous integration and deep source code analysis.

We all know about the Android Open Source project and that in theory anyone can make an android device with their very own customised AOSP ROM. But, what is it like to work on something using AOSP. How deep is that rabbit hole anyway?

Learn about Kotlin — a modern programming language targeting JVM (and JavaScript). Kotlin not only interoperates transparently with Java and re-uses all the existing Java libraries, but even allows you to make those libraries _better_. This session demonstrates how existing Java libraries may be enhanced in Kotlin.

Tools and methods for popping the top on mobile apps. Covers decompiling, device DNS hijacking, man in the middle as well as techniques for obfuscating your application to prevent such actions.

Y'know those "Interactive Fiction" (IF) text-adventure thingies? Inform 7 is a language for writing IF in the style of English prose. It's also a neat idea for general modeling. Let's build a simple world together while learning some of what Inform 7 is about.

The M4 macro preprocessor is a tool that inspires fear in the hearts of many open tech developers. This is kind of pathetic. I'll show you how to quickly, easily and fearlessly build useful prototype tools in M4.

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.

Sitting with your arms and attention forward shortens and tightens your pectorals, and doing nothing with your upper back unbalances the muscles that keep the bones in your shoulders and arms aligned. This makes your shoulders easier to to injure during your frisbee golf game. So let's do something to engage your upper back. This will also give you a sense of how your back and shoulders might feel when your upper body posture is aligned...

Are you ready to take your Open Source project to the next level? Maybe it's time for a startup.