Open Source Bridge

Magic Windows, Football Field Style Bicycle Race Clocks, Talking Coffee Cups, Space Invaders Style Video Games, and A War On Christmas Lights.

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.

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.

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.

Methods of communication are constantly evolving, and traditional phone systems can not keep up. Open source phone systems allow for infinite possibilities for customizing the way we interact with each other. This session will walk through setting up your own Asterisk IP PBX from bare-metal to making calls.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Hardware running Txtzyme will play well with the shell and other interactive environments. We'll explain the Txtzyme language and show hardware integration examples using bash, perl, ruby, java and javascript.

Faced with bit rot, expired proprietary software, and imminent collapse, we spent 2 weeks re-inventing a tsunami casualty simulator using open-source technologies. Come hear about the pitfalls, the elation, and how switching to an open stack changes the economics of city planning.

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.

The bar to contribution in Open Source web development projects can be lowered through the use of devops tools and virtual machine technologies.

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.

From the Browser to node.js all the way to the database you can use and share your JavaScript!

"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.

It took me two years to get a master's in tech management. I save you $40K and give you the short version.

The last year has shown the Internet and computers to be a major force for freedom and self-determination around the world. The presenter discusses his work as a hacktivist. Working with Anonymous and Telecomix, he has helped organized protests in support of WikiLeaks, provided communications support to Egypt and the Middle East, and generally fought the good fight.

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

Join Michael Richardson, a cofounder of Urban Airship, as he elaborates on the decisions around creating a startup outside of Silicon Valley, how to keep your head above water, and how to find and manage a team during explosive growth.

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

Learn to use simple natural language processing and graph analysis tools in Python and R to explore the structure of the dataverse. From Reddit to the USPTO to Google Books, come try some data hacks!

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.

Why be locked into a cloud vendor? Shouldn't Cloud be Open Cloud and powered by Open Source software? Open Stack is a collection of open source technologies to deliver a cloud operating system. Learn about Open Stack and how to use it to deliver your own Open Source powered clouds.

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).