Open Source Bridge

Your brain is really good at surviving in neolithic Africa, but not because of our powers of higher levels of thought; they're much too slow. Humans are so successful as a species because we're champions at automating things, including our own thoughts and behaviours. What's fascinating is that we're profoundly unaware of just how much our own lives run on automatic, and just how much our own behaviour is influenced by external factors. Join internationally acclaimed speaker Paul Fenwick as we examine the fascinating world of the human mind.

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.

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.

Many open source projects participate in college mentorship programs, but what about younger students? Should we be cultivating the next generation of contributors from an earlier age?

Leave rigid tables behind, and work with your data as a graph, using standard web data schemas.

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.

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.

Overview of Apache CouchDB, who is using it, and how you can too.

Have you ever wanted to automatically turn on your lights when you get home, or turn them back off when you leave? What about controlling your lights by SMS or IRC? This presentation will teach you how to automate your life with location-based hacks and SMS.

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.

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.

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.

Not sure what queuing system to use for your next project? How about the differences between broker vs direct queue services? What is a good fit for cloud vs your own data center? This session gathers information from open source queuing projects to help answer these questions and more. Queues are part of almost every scalable website and application, it's time to find the best fit for yours.

Read the Docs is a documentation hosting site for the community. It was built in 48 hours in the 2010 Django Dash. In January 2010 it had 100,000 page views, and increases daily. I will talk about all of the code to deploy and run a sizable Django site. We will go through the highlights and interesting parts of the code, as well as some of the lessons learned from the site being open source.

When kids get hands on experience with the source code of a program, they get excited!

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

Disruptively low-cost real-time transit displays

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

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.

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.

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.

Touchscreen is a platform for creating interactive kiosk and dashboard displays. It powers presentations for visitors to the Open Source Lab's data center and the network operations center. Come learn how touchscreen works and how to use it for your own display screens.

Interested in setting up your own test automation infrastructure? This is what you need to know.

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.

As a "software person," I found the hard technologies of building with steel and wood made for a very different creative and hacking process. At the same time, I discovered many parallels to software development, embedded hardware, and even open-source philosophies.

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

Dropbox, the leader in online storage and synchronization, is good, but not good enough. Find out how you can hack together your own equivalent that's more flexible, secure and convenient.

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

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.

I've been looking for an affordable, flexible, easy to learn robotics platform for years that I could use to teach kids the basics of programming/electronics/robotics. Last Fall, I finally found it.

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

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.

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.

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.

Ever wanted to create your own printed circuit board? There are open source tools for that. This session will take you step-by-step through the process of creating a printed circuit board using the gEDA suite of electronic design automation tools. Beginners are welcome, no previous hardware experience required.

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.

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.

What motivates us as developers? How do we define success? Throughout the development of Spaz, we've learned a lot about what works, what doesn't, and what really matters. Come to hear the story, and participate in the discussion of how we define success in open source.

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.

Since 2001, Perl 5 has undergone a renaissance. Modern Perl programs are powerful, maintainable, and understandable. Come learn how to take advantage of perl circa 2010.

Many people see project management as the art of trying to please everyone and pleasing no one, while trying not to go too far over deadline and too far over budget. It doesn't have to be that way. Good project management can be so predictable and reliable that it's almost boring. Here's what works in real projects.