Open Source Bridge

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!

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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