Open Source Bridge

You've found a critical error in a widely-used FOSS system, you write a great fix, you submit it... and it is bounced, and you think the reason is lame. What to do? We'll guide you through the political minefield that is submitting your first patch to a FOSS project.

Why do you have to relearn yet another API every time you want to really use someone's data source on the Web? It's time we moved beyond just consuming feeds -- we need full-function data access APIs! That's what the Open Data Protocol (OData) and the Google Data Protocol (GData) aim to do. Learn about these efforts, how they are used, and why you should adopt them for your next web API.

Talks about how to develop PHP applications that can be deployed on many different platforms with ease.

You've been through the tutorials on Django, and now you want to deploy a real site in it - and you're lost. Let's fix that.

Want to build that kick ass geo-site? Use Django!

One of your clients has asked you to have a look at their web application and to make it faster. Where do you start? Without looking at (or changing) the source code of the application, what can you do to make it better?

JavaScript has long been considered a toy language, but new project focusing on server-side JavaScript the language could be the best choice for new development.

Inspekt is a filtering and validation library for PHP. With a focus on ease of use, Inspekt makes writing secure PHP applications faster and easier. This talk covers the Inspekt library and the "input cage" concept, best practices when utilizing the library, and how to integrate Inspekt with existing applications and popular frameworks.

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?

The Complex Ethics of Piracy This talk aims to replace the "piracy is good" vs "piracy is theft" debate with a more nuanced understanding. It will investigate when piracy is selfish; when it is civil disobedience; whether it is ever constructive for cultural industries, or whether it is ever, as copyright holders argue, "theft". I will conclude that each of these things is sometimes true about piracy, and that simple views are inadequate for understanding the ethical dimension of copyright infringement. Both pirates and copyright industries need to develop more subtle understandings of the morality of file sharing.

How can a business that publishes twelve magazines, organizes two conferences and trains 2,000 developers a year in three different formats be managed in its entirety by a team of five people across two different countries? Why, through the magic of open-source software, clever hackery and a passion for great 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.

Large-scale web projects use sophisticated staged deployment systems, but the prospect of setting these up can be daunting. Using virtualization and automated configuration puts the benefits within easy reach even for small projects. David Brewer explains how Second Story uses Linux, VMware Server, and AutomateIt to grease the wheels of development on their museum-sector projects.