Open Source Bridge

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.

It may seem obvious to some, but the socialist imagery that Mozilla uses isn't accidental. Nor is the grounding of Activity Streams in socialist theory. What do these things have to do with open source an its future? A lot, and I'll paint a picture to tell you how it should play out.

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.

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.

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.

Bug reports drive Open Source, but too often it's a hostile experience. As a user, how do you report a bug without being treated like you're dumping a sack of crap on the developer's doorstep? As a developer, how do you encourage users to report bugs? This is not a tutorial, but an examination of the social aspects of bug reporting.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

What kind of database do you need? Thanks to new database projects like CouchDB, TokyoCabinet, Solr and others, there are more non-relational database options available than ever for developers. Yet good information on how to choose what kind of database you need is still scarce. We'll cure that in this talk.

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.

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.

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.

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.