Open Source Bridge

Android 3.1 and beyond

Code N Splode is a local user group that supports the participation of women in the Portland tech community. We'd like to go out for drinks with you while you're at OS Bridge!

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.

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.

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.

Virtual hosting providers are particularly enticing for startups and new opensource projects, but they come with large and sometimes unexpected drawbacks. Learn what to expect and how to mitigate the worst performance issues you’ll face deploying your services in the cloud.

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.

Data Science promises to transform ubiquitous and cheap data into insights with the potential for great social, scientific and personal value. I will provide a lightning tour of high level theory, concepts, and tools to extract knowledge and value from data.

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.

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.

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.

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!

Imagine an open source project was an actual place: a place where people volunteer to make something better; contribute their time, knowledge and resources; a place to share ideas or just to get work done. Hacker Dojo is for hackers and thinkers and this session will describe how the open source ethos can successfully be applied to a physical space.

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.

This session will provide examples of major government uses of open source technology, and provide some examples and case-studies of how government is contributing to open source and the web.

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.

Many geeks are uncomfortable interacting IRL with clients or audiences but you don't have to be. There are some simple physical tricks to keeping an audience (of 1 or 1k) engaged and not undermining your skills and yourself.

Are you taking the underlying infrastructure that allows you to do the cool stuff you do online for granted? Do you think that ubiquitous, affordable, high speed broadband will just happen? Merger mania in the telecommunications arena means we prosumers will have less and less of a choice in our connectivity options. What role can communities play in ensuring broadband communications infrastructure and connectivity strategies promote openness, and improve accessibility and responsiveness of government to citizens.

BIND is the nameserver which runs 80% of DNS world wide... It is maintained by a non profit managed open source company and driven by an international user and developer community. What does product management, using scrum, on an open source project, with developers on three continents, look like?

"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.

In this puppet show, a wise lion coaches an eager but inexperienced mouse through the process of normalization and (equally important) denormalization.

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.

P2PU School of Webcraft: Web developer training that’s free, open and globally accessible.

Everything you learned about database modeling is wrong. At least for document databases like CouchDB and MongoDB. Learn about these differences, the trade-offs, the use cases, and put it all in practice in a discussion about a real-life document database problem. Unlearn SQL habits and relax.

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.

What makes the culture of open source so hostile to women and how can we as individuals act to change it?

Parrot is an ambitious and long-lived project that aims to be a VM for interoperable dynamic language implementation. We'll take a look at what Parrot's developers have been doing of late, what kind of awesome goodies we've plundered from the OSS world and where we want to go in the next year.

In a language that strongly enforces a formatting style on the programmer, keeping it "pythonic" is only the tip of what makes python a wonderful, but confusing language. See what all the fuss is about in this introduction to the styles and nuances of the Python programming language and the tools you should be using when writing it.

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.

MongoDB is a popular new document-based non-relational database. Like all new technologies learning its strengths and weaknesses while trying to support a quickly growing dataset is trying.

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.

Practical cartographic geekery for accidental and padawan mapmakers: a crash course in Mapping 101 where we'll talk about the anatomy of maps and what you need to know when creating them. Topics include cartographic standards, projections, visualization, and the fine art of finding, deciphering, and using geodata and metadata. Included will be examples of the good, the bad, and the ugly, as well as resources for further exploration.

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

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.

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.

This presentation will show how to connect to REST-based web services from an Android application. We'll discuss HTTP programming as well as XML and JSON libraries. This presentation will include a live demo of an Android application.

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

Current state of Drizzle.

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

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

Thomas Jefferson envisioned a nation of self-sufficient citizen farmers; programmers like Alan Kay and Bill Atkinson tried to help us code as easily as we might hang a poster on the wall. What happened to the HyperCard ideal? Have we settled for consumption over creation? I will explore the question through a case study, surveying the state of citizen programming in 2010 — from CouchApps to Shoes to plain-jane HTML5+JS to HyperCard 2.4 — and try to convince all comers that realizing the dream of the citizen coder is vital to continuing the ideals of open source.

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

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.

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.

This yoga session is of benefit to anyone who sits and works on computers a lot. Breathing exercises and physical postures that can be done anytime to help maintain a healthy body and clear mind will be taught. Suggestions will be included for how to modify stretches to protect injuries and provide gentle opening.

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.

Facebook are full of juicy information about your friends and strangers alike! Learn how to use some simple open source tools and techniques to learn more about them.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A follow-on to last year's highly popular presentation, Hal Pomeranz returns with another super-size helping of command-line madness!

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.

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.

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.

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.