Open Source Bridge

In this talk I'll explore stategies for getting testing going inside your project, drawing upon experiences of making legacy code more testable.

From the early PC to today's laptop we have a million times the memory, a million times the disk storage, and similar increases in processing capabilities. What problems/opportunities does another million fold increase in raw computing bring?

At the Apache Software Foundation, we believe in being open. But we also recognize that "open" isn't enough to draw people in and get them involved. This talk will draw on the lessons learned in the incubation and mentoring projects at Apache to help you understand what's needed to tap the huge pool of potential contributors who already care about your work!

When you're in production, with real users and revenue on the line, you can't let a regression bug slip in and ruin your and your users' day. So you have to test. Everything. When you combine dozens of tests in several browser configurations, it takes forever. This session will provide an overview of the open source Selenium project and best practices for keeping up with your tests.

Since its launch in 2009, Forge.mil, the Department of Defense’s groundbreaking collaborative software development platform, has quickly garnered over 8000 members and over 400 projects. Its utilization of open-source principles has improved the ability of the military to rapidly deliver dependable software. Its efficient use of scarce resources provides a model of collaborative cooperation that can benefit all communities in and out of the government.

Diaspora started out on MongoDB, but after nine months of full-time development we switched to MySQL. Why? How? And what now?

Want to learn how to *successfully* reach out to new contributors? Learn from other projects' successes

GNOME 3 was released in April 2011. A presentation on the thought process in innovating a different user experience on the desktop.

You're one-third of the way through Google Summer of Code. What's working, what's not, and what to do?

Much of the difficulty for open source developers who try to work on civic or government apps is getting past the RFP process and convincing analysts and procurement officers that their projects have long term value and support. We hope to supply details on how to find and respond to the RFP process as well hints on how to work outside the process.

Mozilla's Webdev team is small, but helps out with over 100+ web properties. We're experimenting organizationally to scale ourselves. Learn about the new Webdev Steward role.

Sqlite provided a very cool offline storage system for web applications, but there is a new standards-based DB in town, IndexedDb. See how web applications can keep their user's data 100% private. Gawk at how sophisticated web applications can use offline local storage. Recoil in horror at the boring name... IndexedDb

The OpenStack project was launched last summer during OSCON by Rackspace, NASA, and a number of other cloud technology leaders in an effort to build a fully-open cloud computing platform. It is a collection of scalable, secure, standards-based projects consisting of compute, storage, images, and more. This session will introduce the projects, the principles behind it, and how to get started.

Many value-creating strategies, products, and processes rely on information systems. Yet enabling access to these vital information resources through the procurement, implementation, and use of proprietary software is often complicated and costly. Proponents of open source software (OSS) claim that robust and yet affordable solutions are available because software engineers and programs around the world are able to contribute to source code that is open for anyone to modify and maintain overtime. This production model has shifted the notion of software as the intellectual property of a vendor, to a resource for all. However, questions remain about the viability of OSS for businesses and non-profits. For example, organizations seeking software-based solutions require the security of knowing that the software will not compromise their larger information infrastructure and hurt their business. Some software vendors now provide stable versions of open source software, which they call “vendor driven open source” that combine the strengths of open source with the security of having a direct contract with a company to provide technical/user support and software documentation. Through an exploratory field study of OSS use within city and state government, the researcher seeks insight into its viability for work operations.

How to go from unmanaged to managed with Puppet, with devops practices and existing tools where possible and with open source hackery and spackle everywhere else.

An animated musical mini-movie in which our heroine uses open-source software to overthrow the stranglehold of the evil head of IT, and finds true love in the process.

Project management for open source communities is often taxing and difficult. Many community initiatives struggle because of the difficult environment of volunteerism and a lack of dedicated PM resources. This session will be a set of two case studies from PMs within the Drupal community.

How do you go about building an open source project in a community known for waiting on the Mothership to bless them with new code?

Ever wanted to get a bit more out of Memcached? Wondering how to set it up for redundancy or load check your server? This talk will go over all of the latest features to libmemcached including new SSL and configuration data.

Master Foss said: “A man who mistakes secrets for knowledge is like a man who, seeking light, hugs a candle so closely that he smothers it and burns his hand.” This talk will cover koans for small, open source business enlightenment.

Last year the cloud computing industry was changed dramatically with the introduction of OpenStack. The project is two releases deep - with one on the way – and it is currently the fastest growing cloud project in terms of code contributions and participating developers.

You're working on a great project, but how do you know if you're on track compared to your goals? Your bosses (your customers, your user community) are asking for status every day and you don't know what tell them - or nothing you tell them seems to satisfy. Knowing what to count and how to communicate it can help you and your team track progress, identify problems, and communicate to those around you.

Join us for a case study on using open source tools to build a platform for enterprise web applications with symfony. The focus of this session will be on how Yahoo! has built web applications that scale with open source tools.

Ship or fix? This choice presents itself to open source projects every day, and the consequences can be considerable. Learn how to control this "technical debt" in open source projects.

Have you ever just wanted to unsubscribe from one of those tedious threads on your favorite mailing-list? List administrators wouldn't it be nice to allow end-users to unsubscribe from conversations rather then just silently leaving the list? Now you can using Dyanmic Sublists for GNU Mailman.

We aim to inform you about the archive formats you use every day. We will include an in-depth look at the tar, ar, cpio, gzip, bzip2, and deb formats, as well as the internals of the Git object store. Armed with this information, we will show you a practical application: removing the redundancy between files in version control and distributions of source and binaries.

Since free software "is a matter of liberty, not price", developers and distributions are allowed to ask users to pay for free software (though most users can easily choose not to). Musicians like Radiohead have experimented with asking, but not requiring, users to pay for music (by choosing their own price, which could be $0). What would happen if we did this for free software?

RDMS showed us the one true way to organize data, yet the NoSQL movement shows us how it fails. The faithful are confused and concerned. The heretics rally boldly in the streets with torches and pitchforks, yelling something about "doesn't scale," while the defenders of orthodoxy scream about the features and safeties these strange new gods lack, and do the apostates even realize it? As the philosophical storm brews, DB admins and developers must make fateful decisions that will affect the rest of the code's life. Here they will glean the first glimpses of the knowledge they will need to make informed choices and be spared the wrath of the database gods.

Let's discuss the development of a beginning Ruby programming curriculum for the general public.

Usability testing can be fast, cheap and effective. Learn simple, unintimidating ways to do usability testing to identify things that are going horribly wrong.