Open Source Bridge

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

"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...

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

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?

How does free software help defend free speech in repressive regimes? Danny O'Brien will draw from the records of the Committee to Protect Journalists to explore how open source can help those at the cutting edge of free expression.

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.

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.

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

Two unsuspecting university project managers became super heroes when they stumbled upon the magic of open source CMS and sold their vision to bring web design in house, thus saving the university tens of thousands of dollars, better meeting their students' needs for online information, creating reliable revenue streams and enabling departments to more efficiently do their business.

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.

Interested in using PostgreSQL for you next project, or migrating to it? This tutorial will go over the basics of PostgreSQL administration and database application design.

The laws have changed and the open source community should take note.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"Do you watch television? Is your furnace loud? Do you have $2?" My 7-year-old's marketing suggestions aside, building custom gadgets to improve your life is remarkably simple, and I'll prove it by building something on stage that you can duplicate at home.

Leigh will be discussing hacker spaces, and the culture of DIY spaces for making things around the world.

PDXPUG will host the PostgreSQL BOF.

Do you know the basics of Git but wonder what all the hype is about? Do you want the ultimate control over your Git history? This tutorial will walk you through the basics of committing changes before diving into the more advanced and "dangerous" Git commands.

A panel on funding your business without VC, based on GitHub's experiences.

Selena loves Git and EmmaJane loves Bazaar. And like all good nerds they've spent a fair amount of time talkin' smack about the other's version control system (VCS). Come see what the fuss is all about!

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.

Welcome to the unconference day.

"All That Glitters is Not (Only) Code - Testing - Localization - Documentation - Release Engineering - User Interface Design / Usability - User support"

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

Lessons learned from a successful open source consulting company. This talk is geared towards the open source developer who is considering starting his/her own business, and the entrepreneur who wants to grow the business by leveraging open source development methodologies.

Earning a living from open source software? Yes, we can. Let's talk about what actually works (and what doesn't work) for building a service business based not just on open source software, but with an open source philosophy, drawing on real world experience.

Learn how to address the unique information security challenges that open source businesses face.

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.

Meditation is the ultimate open source tool. You can do it anywhere and it’s free. It requires only your brain and your body. It’s positive effects are numerous, including increased productivity, better problem-solving and a reduction in overall stress. Learn about long-term effects of mediation on the brain, some meditation techniques and how mediation can help you do your job better.

RubySpec is a project to write a complete, executable specification for the Ruby programming language. If organizing Ruby programmers is akin to herding cats, imagine what it's like to organize Ruby language implementers. We will talk about the history of RubySpec, how it works, challenges along the way, and the current status.

Featuring Mayor Sam Adams and Ward Cunningham

Featuring Amber Case, Cyborg Anthropologist, and Kurt von Finck of Monty Program AB.