Open Source Bridge

I heard Will Shortz pose a mathematical puzzle on NPR on a Sunday Morning in January and I thought, "Hey, I can solve that with a genetic algorithm!" In OCaml. I'll show you how in this talk.

Learn about techniques, libraries and patterns useful for building REST APIs using Node.js

Get ready for a whirlwind tour of the current Clojure ecosystem of web app technologies. This talk will demonstrate how fast, responsive apps can be built on this up-and-coming functional language, which is based on Lisp and runs on the JVM.

Freedom 4: The freedom to use the program effectively, efficiently and satisfactory. For a software to truly be free, people need to be able to easily use it without help. A primer to usability testing in a distributed and independent development environment.

Design has permeated our culture and our tools, but the software you're building doesn't have a graphical interface. That doesn't exempt you from thinking about user experience design! Learn how UX principles apply to even basic command line scripts.

A pluggable type system extends a language's built-in type system to confer additional compile-time guarantees. We will explain the theory and practice of pluggable types.

Unicode isn’t new, but it still seems hard when your starting at the beginning and haven’t even been told the difference between a glyph, a codepoint, a character and a byte. Every year there are talks and tutorials at conferences about it, but if you haven’t grasped the basics, you can feel frustrated and lost much too quickly. This talk will cover the essentials of Unicode, locale and how they affect things like regular expressions, reading and writing files and sending data out to the world. Perl will be the programming language used to demonstrate these ideas, but much of the content should be accessible to all programmers.

Learn how to use Dreadnot, an open source deployment orchestration tool creating using Node.js and Twitter Bootstrap, to integrate with a variety of integration and infrastructure tools to enable rolling deployments with the click of a button.

This talk is for application developers who want to get started with Scala and MongoDB. We will discuss how Gilt Groupe's engineering team adopted Scala and MongoDB. We will demonstrate how you can connect to MongoDB within a Scala application.

Building your company's status board is more than just putting charts on a screen - numbers are just data, whether you write out the digits or plot a squiggly line. Learn to transform your data into information, and let that information instruct you.

This presentation will be of interest to system administrators and developers that want to provide isolated environments for production applications or test machines without the overhead of virtualization.

Machine learning and data mining methods underlie many exciting products and services, but their underlying workings remain opaque to many, even developers. I will provide a brief tutorial on some of the most important concepts and methods from machine learning and data mining, with motivating examples and illustrations from open source tools. Particular emphasis will be placed on learning methods and their appropriate use.

We all love sprinting with other experts, but how do you design an event effectively to reach out to and train newbies? It takes more work than you might think (publicity, prep, structure, and followup), but here's how.

Esoteric programming languages never really get the attention they deserve in the mainstream programming culture. We'll examine idioms from several exotic languages and explain how they can improve the quality of more common codebases.

How thinking about operations can help you make your code better, stronger, and faster.

What do you do when you have to parse weird message formats? You write parser! Or, in this case a regular expression. See how I make a moderately challenging problem easy for everyone.

The web was born of a series of deeply audacious hacks that created and transformed the browser into the most important, transparent, buggy and misunderstood software ever. A big part of the credit for this goes to the ability of any programmer to hack the browser itself using the technology of the web itself.

Many Linux desktop environments try to be easy to use for the average user, but that's not you. You're at your computer all day writing code; you don't want to mess around with *dragging windows* or (ugh) watching *animated transitions*. David Brewer will demonstrate how by using xmonad, a tiling window manager, you can free yourself from the tyranny of the mouse.

Make your life sweeter by replacing Google Maps with open-source alternatives.