Open Source Bridge

I'll be covering the technology that is now being used for the largest scale systems and how that technology is used, how it is connected, and how it keeps large volumes of data available for everything from genomic research, mass e-commerce processing or keeping medical data safe from loss.

Knuth advocated writing programs for people, not computers. How does crafting code with literate programming play with quick iterative development? Example heavy session using org-mode's Babel project and progrmming languages with succinct syntax, like Scala and Clojure.

Conventional wisdom says that writing high-performance code means working without the safety net of credible compile-time safety checks. Mozilla Research (a community of researchers, engineers, and volunteers) is trying to prove that conventional wisdom wrong by building Rust, a new systems programming language. Rust takes advantage of well-understood programming language technology to combine aggressive compile-time error checking with the high degree of direct control over the machine necessary to write efficient systems programs. By way of examples, I'll teach you how to use Rust to write fast and trustworthy code.

In just 1.5 hours, I will help you craft a computer game AI that will consistently beat you and your friends.

Meetup for students, mentors, and those interested in learning about Google Summer of Code.

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.

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.

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

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.

ETL. OLAP. BIDW. ELT. M/R. MPP. Windowing. Matviews. Data Marts. Column Stores. Are you at sea in a tidal surge of arcane terminology, trying to cope with big data problems?

So often we’re solely focused on the performance of our production systems. When disaster strikes, your team needs to know when error conditions begin, where they’re coming from, frequency, and an indication of the last time they occurred. Parsing logs isn’t fast enough, and email can’t keep up or preserve metadata.

Many people view topics like Map/Reduce and queue systems as advanced concepts that require in-depth knowledge and time consuming software setup. Gearman is changing all that by making this barrier to entry as low as possible with an open source, distributed job queuing system.

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

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

Are you tired of null pointer exceptions, unintended side effects, SQL injections, concurrency errors, mistaken equality tests, and other run-time errors that appear during testing or in the field? A compile-time tool named the Checker Framework has found hundreds of such errors. Oracle plans to include it in the Java 8 javac, but you can use it today to improve your code and avoid errors.

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.

Technical debt is something that most project teams or independent developers have to deal with - we take shortcuts to push out releases, deadlines need to be met, quick fixes slowly become the standard. In this talk, we will discuss what technical debt is, when it is acceptable and when it isn't, and strategies for effectively managing it, both on an independent and team level.

With node.js brining callbacks back into fashion and new languages like Go baking concurrency primitives directly into the language syntax, it can be difficult to keep straight what different concurrency approaches offer, what their shortcomings are, and what inspired them.

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

An opportunity to meet with other Google Summer of Code students, mentors, admins, and future participants. Learn how you can get involved, or share your personal experience with the program and give feedback on what works and how things could work better.

A general discussion of NoSQL databases, what they're good for and where they fit in the database world.

Meet up with local & not-so-local Pg users & developers.

Learn to hack Evently jQuery CouchApps -- p2p web applications that can be deployed anywhere there's a CouchDB.

Creating a redundant yet scalable virtualization environment is often difficult and expensive. Ganeti is an open source project which offers many solutions to simplify a clustered virtual machine environment while enabling you to use low cost hardware. This session will walk through Ganeti covering its basic design goals/features, installation architecture, and production implementation.

This session examines common application architectures in regards to threading and I/O handling. Various threading models are described and weighed, explaining the pros and cons of each. For I/O, topics such as the the c10k problem and buffering are discussed with solutions. A C++ framework is introduced as an example, but the concepts are applicable to other languages as well.

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.

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.

During this talk, we will survey real-world implementations of JIT-compiled embedded DSLs and their applications.

Multicore computers are here: is your programming language ready?

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.

Unlike most areas of enterprise IT, open source solutions in the storage industry have remained in the background. In 2010 this situation is going to change dramatically with new open source storage solutions, next-generation Linux file systems, and emerging cloud offerings making significant inroads.

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.

XHP is a PHP extension which augments the syntax of the language such that XML document fragments become valid PHP expressions. It fits somewhere between a templating language and a programmatic UI library. XHP allows you to use PHP as a stricter templating engine and offers a very straightforward way of implementing reusable, extensible components.