Open Source Bridge

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

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

Hang out and talk about functional languages.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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

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.

Come talk to other Portland software developers about how to engage with each other, the city of Portland, the Portland Development Commission.

A gathering for all those interested in open data, including government data, open data APIs, geodata, open social data, and more.

Join your fellow Rubyists to talk about fun things you're working on.

PSAS is a student aerospace engineering project at Portland State University. We're building ultra-low-cost, open hardware and open source rockets that feature perhaps the most sophisticated amateur rocket avionics systems out there today.

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.

Cloud computing, it's not all just hype! This presentation will highlight the benefits of an application centric view of infrastructure and operations and include a live demo building cloud infrastructure and providing services using Open Source tools. Starting with bare Linux images, Open Nebula will be automatically installed and configured on a cluster, while walking through the tools, architecture and resources you need to do the same thing.

A look at the tools and practices used at Facebook to support the #2 site in the world.

Agile processes can be very successful for both clients and developers, but the rapid pace and the lack of detailed long-term plans can make it difficult to design and build high quality user experiences. We'll talk about good ways to do that.

Wikis are easy as pie to install, edit, and even to develop. The real challenge they present is in bringing together the right people in the right way to make things happen. There are ways to tackle that challenge that can give your open source community a fighting chance.

The problem: My HVAC system is not balanced. Easy but boring solution: Hire a qualified contractor to fix it. More interesting solution: Use knowledge from dusty undergrad degree in electronics to cobble together some simple wireless temperature sensors using XBee modules and distribute them around the house. Then use Java programming knowledge to build up a monitoring system using open source software. Attempt to use readings from temperature sensors to figure out what's going on and fix it. This presentation will delve into the hardware and software aspects of the system, although with more emphasis on the software and the role that packages such as Apache Felix and Apache Mina play in the system.

Cassandra is an open source, highly scalable distributed database that brings together Dynamo's fully distributed design and Bigtable's ColumnFamily-based data model. In this talk we'll discuss the strategies Cassandra employs to provide an eventually consistent data model.

This presentation will show how to connect to REST-based web services from an Android application. We'll discuss HTTP programming as well as XML and JSON libraries. This presentation will include a live demo of an Android application.

Interested in setting up your own test automation infrastructure? This is what you need to know.

"This compression algorithm is of course very inefficient, at least when applied to a small collection of documents. But if you were to apply it to a larger collection, say, all the music ever recorded and all movies ever made, some gains may be realized...

Learn to hack Evently jQuery CouchApps -- p2p web applications that can be deployed anywhere there's a CouchDB.

Creating a redundant yet scalable virtualization environment is often difficult and expensive. Ganeti is an open source project which offers many solutions to simplify a clustered virtual machine environment while enabling you to use low cost hardware. This session will walk through Ganeti covering its basic design goals/features, installation architecture, and production implementation.

The Drizzle Project is a fork of the MySQL 6.0 server. One of the many goals of Drizzle is to enable a large plugin ecosystem by improving, simplifying, and modernizing the application programming interfaces between the kernel and the modules providing services for Drizzle. This tutorial serves to showcase the new APIs for Drizzle's replication through a series of in-depth examples.

Current state of Drizzle.

Print is dead. Well, not dead yet. But it'll be stone dead in a moment.

This session examines common application architectures in regards to threading and I/O handling. Various threading models are described and weighed, explaining the pros and cons of each. For I/O, topics such as the the c10k problem and buffering are discussed with solutions. A C++ framework is introduced as an example, but the concepts are applicable to other languages as well.

Should you start a foundation? Should you start a nonprofit? What's the role of non-profits in the Open Source community today? How can you be a good citizen in the Open Source arena with a foundation to support?

30 Hour Day was the first web-based live streaming telethon of its kind, designed to raise money for local charities in Portland and beyond. In this presentation, I'll share my "eureka moment" when I realized that 30 Hour Day could be the lightening rod for smaller charities in local communities around the world to use our content to raise money and awareness. We'll also have a preview of the next 30 Hour Day (July 2nd & 3rd at Pioneer Courthouse Square) and how you can get involved!

Creating functional requirements as a part of the planning process is like creating a treasure map. You want to get compensated for the value your cool built-with-open-source-thing is providing to your clients. Your clients want it to work better than what they originally had in mind. If you do the work upfront, you'll know when you've hit the X marks the spot.

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.

From creating remote-sensing CubeSats to analyzing aerogel: how the public is hacking into open source space exploration.

API design, parallelism, automated testing, parallel automated testing, deployment, build tools, meta programming, GUI design and construction, hardware interfaces, network protocols, databases, change tracking, file formats, and why simple software becomes an epic journey.

HipHop transforms PHP source code into highly optimised C++ and then compiles it using g++. It allows developers to continue writing complex logical directly with PHP but leverages the speed benefits of using C++. Currently, HipHop powers the majority of Facebook servers, making this more than just a theoretical exercise. This session will cover how HipHop works, how to setup HipHop and the small changes that may be required to applications to allow it to work with both PHP and HipHop.

As a "software person," I found the hard technologies of building with steel and wood made for a very different creative and hacking process. At the same time, I discovered many parallels to software development, embedded hardware, and even open-source philosophies.

Writing quality software is a worthwhile challenge. Learn how to harness the magic of testing to create better software. This presentation will provide you with an overview of the different kinds of tests, show code using different testing tools, and help you decide when and how to apply these to your projects

Learn how to manage your infrastructure as source code - from provisioning to application deployment and everything in between.

MongoDB is an open source, high-performance, schema-free, document-oriented database that is rapidly gaining in popularity among web developers. In this talk we'll introduce MongoDB and the features that make it great choice for your web applications.

During this talk, we will survey real-world implementations of JIT-compiled embedded DSLs and their applications.

What is possible when you can consume servers on various hosting providers with nothing more than a python script? This talk will discuss libcloud, an Apache Incubator project dedicated to building standard interfaces into the cloud.

LIGHTNING TALKS!

You've launched your new web site and it's starting to get some attention. You've tuned your database and optimized your HTTP daemon, but what if it's not enough to keep up with all the hits you're getting? We'd like to introduce you to your two new best friends: Varnish and Pressflow.

I've been looking for an affordable, flexible, easy to learn robotics platform for years that I could use to teach kids the basics of programming/electronics/robotics. Last Fall, I finally found it.

Multicore computers are here: is your programming language ready?

Node.js is one of the most exciting things to happen to server-side development in the last few years. Here you'll find out why Node.js is a perfect fit for your next project and a better fit than existing languages for modern web development.

Augmented Reality and Geolocation have been hot topics this year, but there has often been a confusion between aesthetics vs. practicality, and fantasy vs. reality. This presentation will highlight the advantages and disadvantages of visual and non-visual augmented reality. We'll tell stories from our experiences building location-aware social networks with custom proximity notification.

Curious about OAuth? Ever wondered why OAuth has steadily gained popularity among major API providers such as Google and Twitter? Ever wondered how OAuth helps streamline consuming data from other providers? Learn more about OAuth the specification and how to implement OAuth with PHP5. The session will cover the basics of OAuth, and follow up with an OAuth implementation using php.net/oauth.

Open Source software has been instrumental in the development of every revolutionary communications technology on the Internet. The Open social Web is no different.

Unlike most areas of enterprise IT, open source solutions in the storage industry have remained in the background. In 2010 this situation is going to change dramatically with new open source storage solutions, next-generation Linux file systems, and emerging cloud offerings making significant inroads.

User groups are a vital part of the open source community. Learn more about how to start a group, keep it going, and make an existing group better from a panel of experienced user group organizers.

Facebook are full of juicy information about your friends and strangers alike! Learn how to use some simple open source tools and techniques to learn more about them.

JavaScript is a unique and powerful language. Its ubiquity in the browser and its elegant concurrency model make JavaScript an ideal tool in a number of situations. Learn about the best ways to use and to understand this language from a full-time JavaScript professional.

Puppet is a powerful configuration management tool that makes life easier for people managing systems and applications. This tutorial gives you an in-depth and hands-on introduction to Puppet that is ideal for beginners to Puppet and configuration management.

Is your Wordpress site too slow? What's this HipHop PHP thing? How do I write really fast PHP apps? Drop by to get the answers to these questions.

Open source software projects can succeed or fail based on their documentation. Thanks to Sphinx, open source developers now have a "documentation framework" that provides convenient indexing and automatic syntax highlighting, integrates your documentation with your code, and can automatically generate a beautiful manual as a PDF document.

This talk focuses on adapting and augmenting interfaces to memcache in order to overcome some of its limitations and to better utilize available resources. Then we'll talk about combining those interfaces in a simple, snap-together fashion.

USB 3.0 promises a 10x speedup and better power management than USB 2.0. But how do these devices actually work? Is there open source support for them? Come learn about these fast new devices that are finally hitting the market.

You have so much you want to teach, how do you structure it so that your training course is both interesting and challenging? How much theory can you squeeze into an hour before your attendees have forgotten where you started? How do you structure your course to account for classes which move slower or faster than average? This talk will cover all of these answers and more.

Social software is kind of a big deal right now. In the open-source spirit of transparency and dissection, let's talk about what makes social technology creepy, what makes it fun, and how to hack things to maximize your desired outcome.

Location and mapping are making a huge impact on the web and mobile. Open Source is right there. Learn the elements of the geo stack, from mapping APIs to geo databases.

A follow-on to last year's highly popular presentation, Hal Pomeranz returns with another super-size helping of command-line madness!

The symfony framework is a full-stack web framework for PHP. It's great for building websites, but you might be surprised where else it comes in handy. David Brewer shows how Second Story uses symfony to build custom content management and delivery systems powering interactive installations ranging from collections of Disney memorabilia to maps plotting every monument at Gettysburg.

Co-conspirators Jamey Sharp and Josh Triplett get up to a lot of miscellaneous hacking mischief together. Much of this hacking occurs while staring at the same screen, and tag-teaming the keyboard. Sometimes this happens with the two of them in different places. We'll demo our favorite tools and invite audience contributions to the discussion.

Markus: Nautilus? I thought you said noodle house! Matt: Wait, wait, I think I see her head!! Markus: Are you sure? Matt: Maybe It's Not Her Head...

You've worked really hard on your software. It's stable and has lots of nice features and users love it. But your sysadmin hates it and complains about how hard it is to install, configure, and manage. What's up with that?

The United States has a treasure trove of nautical charts in digital form, including plots of shipwrecks, navigation buoys, coastal and river depths, and other fine booty. OpenStreetMap is an open source, open format collaborative project for building a free map of the world. Join this session to find out more of the marine secrets of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), OpenSeaMap's plans to extend OSM to the high seas, and splicing the two (and your mainbrace) together. We'll use the Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (GDAL), OGR, Python, and the OSM API.

Open Source is great fun, even in the area of professional services. But sometimes, you want to be able to pay the bills with your awesomeness too. One of the areas of difficulty is setting boundaries with clients, even though you really just want to write amazing stuff.

Using your computer on a public network is like having a conversation on a city bus: people you don't know can hear everything you say. They'll probably be polite and ignore you, but you still might not want to shout out your credit card number. Yet this is what your computer does. All the time. And you don't know it.

OpenConferenceWare is the application running this site. The software is themeable, customizable and open sourced: anyone can use it to run their own conference site. OpenConferenceWare's developers would like to talk with users about making the software better, organizers about using it for other events, and with those interested in joining the development team.

PDXCritique is an open forum where anyone who makes things can get constructive criticism on their work from their peers.

PDXPUG will host the PostgreSQL BOF.

Ask the main Puppet developers about the state of the software, its roadmap, or anything else you're interested in.

Learn about several computer vision techniques and how to put them together to form an entry-level object classifier.

The strength of your community is the best predictor of your project's long-term viability. What happens when your community is gradually infiltrated by assholes, who infect everyone else with their constant negativity and personal attacks? This talk will teach you about the dramatic impact assholes are having on your organization today and will show you how you can begin to repair it.

This discussion will creatively explore the fundamental technologies being used by hosting providers, and bridge these concepts with open source development and application deployment. Developers attending this discussion will be provided with examples of where failure can occur, and what questions to ask their provider to ensure optimal uptime for their applications.

The open-source Titanium platform allows developers to use their existing knowledge of rich web application technologies – JavaScript, Python, Ruby, HTML and CSS – to build desktop applications. In this presentation we'll go from start to finish building a desktop application using Titanium.

A rapid introduction to Hadoop architecture, MapReduce patterns, and best practices with Cascading.

Configuration management tools are finally coming into their own. Powerful, automated infrastructure management is now available in a wide variety of open source tools. Tools written in different languages, using varying operational methodologies and embracing differing philosophies. Come meet some of the creators and maintainers of these cutting edge tools like cfengine, Puppet, AutomateIT, Chef, and bcfg2 and quiz them in the why and hows of their tools and the philosophies behind them.

Rethinking MySQL for the modern web.

Code sprints are events where developers quickly complete coding tasks in a collaborative environment. A panel of skilled developers will share their experiences for organizing effective code sprints so you can better participate and organize your own. The panel members have organized and participated in over a hundred sprints (ranging from Django to JRuby) and used sprints as the primary way to develop community-oriented projects (e.g., Calagator). While most of the discussion will be about volunteer-run open source code sprints, many of the ideas will be readily applicable to improving development at your workplace. The panel will offer practical, actionable advice that you can use and answer your questions.

Building novel and robust applications with Firefox

Welcome to the unconference day.

Idealist.org's mission is to help change the world by providing proactive people, communities, and organizations with a forum to connect and communicate.

Ruby has established itself as a first-tier language for developing web applications. Now it's time to think about everything else.

Navigating the Darkside of the Open Source Development Community. A decidedly sarcastic and hopefully humorous look at the dark under-belly of the Open Source Development Culture.

Microblogging lets people share short status messages with their social network. Public Web sites like Twitter, Jaiku and Plurk are wildly popular with consumers, but Open Source programs allow a distributed social graph and implementation inside the enterprise firewall. Evan Prodromou, founder of Identi.ca, will describe the Open Source microblogging tool Laconica and its uses in the workplace and on the Public Web.

As a freelancer, you must be your own IT department. You are responsible for website hosting, backups, version control, project/time-tracking and invoicing. Finding inexpensive and maintainable solutions for these needs can be quite daunting. In this session, I will present an overview open-source solutions for these needs.

Paper prototyping is the fastest, cheapest way to test your user interface designs. To prove it, in 45 minutes we'll walk through several rounds of prototyping and testing a small application.

Learn to turn line noise into clean and structured, albeit unreadable, sed programs.

Rumors of its senescence -- at least lack of stylishness -- to the contrary, Tcl/Tk is still one of the best scripting environments around. I will show you why.

Scala is a functional/object-oriented hybrid language that runs on the JVM or the CLR. Scala is fully compatible with Java and brings many powerful features to the JVM, features such as: the ability to easily create DSL's due to Scala's ability to define methods for most operators, easily target multi-core hardware as Scala's types are immutable by default, access to the Actor based concurrency model, and expressive and concise code due to Scala's type inference and expressive syntax. All this without much of the boilerplate and cruft code that is so common in Java.

Solar powered server and communication arrays in Earth orbit . Manufacturing, costs, environmental benefits, security, maintenance, and survivability will be discussed.

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.

How the Linux kernel development model works.

Large-scale web projects use sophisticated staged deployment systems, but the prospect of setting these up can be daunting. Using virtualization and automated configuration puts the benefits within easy reach even for small projects. David Brewer explains how Second Story uses Linux, VMware Server, and AutomateIt to grease the wheels of development on their museum-sector projects.

Everyone has a different reason to love virtualization: security, configuration isolation... the list goes on. But containerization offers many of the same goodies as virtualization, alongside an efficiency and performance advantage. Just what you need, more options. There's no wrong answer. Andy de la Lucha and Irving Popovetsky help you ask the right questions about what's right for your environment.