Open Source Bridge

Since January of this year, a group of independent programmers, community-based organizations, public officials, and software executives and entrepreneurs have been working as part of the PDX11 initiative to identify solutions to make it easier for local software professionals to establish mentoring relationships. This presentation will outline a novel approach to developing a software application to support the local tech community and will invite feedback from attendees to help shape the process moving forward.

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.

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

An introduction to the cryptocurrency system called Bitcoin. The cryptography, the economics of currency bootstrapping, and the traction its getting today.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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

Anyone can show how to save the world. We tell how to receive unsolicited love letters while doing it.

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.

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

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.

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?

Join Michael Richardson, a cofounder of Urban Airship, as he elaborates on the decisions around creating a startup outside of Silicon Valley, how to keep your head above water, and how to find and manage a team during explosive growth.

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

Why be locked into a cloud vendor? Shouldn't Cloud be Open Cloud and powered by Open Source software? Open Stack is a collection of open source technologies to deliver a cloud operating system. Learn about Open Stack and how to use it to deliver your own Open Source powered clouds.

What's going on in the mind of the user as they use your system? Did they choose it, or was it chosen for them? Do they like it or hate it? How can you tell? This talk discusses the types of users that exist, and their motivations.

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.

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.

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 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 about the current state of embedded Linux distributions and advantages of the OpenEmbedded framework for developing Linux-based products.

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

The most common way of using SSL/TLS encryption relies on a public-key infrastructure that puts near-absolute trust in a large number of entities around the world, any one of which could accidentally or deliberately empower anyone to impersonate any site or service and spy on all of our communications. We've seen that these certificate authorities can make mistakes. We need new mechanisms to meaningfully double-check that they're doing the right thing.

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.

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

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

Hearing your data - exploratory data analysis by way of algorithmic composition

Best practices for employers, employees and open source projects to coexist without legal conflicts.

Multicore computers are here: is your programming language ready?

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.

Serialist (http://serialist.net/) provides a way to find, track and read serialized content (e.g., web comics). It's implemented entirely in Haskell and demonstrates functional web application development, crawling, scraping and distributed architecture. Serialist uses interesting graph algorithms to add and step through content lazily.

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.

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.

What you need to know before you even think about raising venture or angel capital, presented by a Silicon Valley founder who raised $9m from top tier firms.

Even at pro-FLOSS businesses, logistical obstacles and incentive problems get in the way of giving back. I'll show you how to fix that.

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...

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.