Open Source Bridge

Learn about the MinnowBoard, a new open source embedded hardware platform for hackers and makers.

Learn how to get started in open source. You can help your favorite open source project, even if you don't think you're "a good enough programmer". You just have to know where to start, and here you'll learn 29 different starting points where you can pitch in and make a difference in the software that you use every day.

Every programming language ever created has some horrible mistakes: your favorite is no exception. We'll talk about some fundamental principles of PL design and how they fail to play out in various real languages.

How do you transform your site or service into a platform others build on top of? How do you clear the path, lower the barriers, and make it easy for new developers to get started?

Get ready for a whirlwind tour of the current Clojure ecosystem of web app technologies. This talk will demonstrate how fast, responsive apps can be built on this up-and-coming functional language, which is based on Lisp and runs on the JVM.

Ever wonder what happens to your data between the write() call and the disk drive? Or feel the need to scrape your bits off the drive after an accident? If so, this talk is for you! Come learn the dark art of how filesystems work.

C2: A declarative visualization library written in Clojure for building interactive, data-driven interfaces on the web

Design has permeated our culture and our tools, but the software you're building doesn't have a graphical interface. That doesn't exempt you from thinking about user experience design! Learn how UX principles apply to even basic command line scripts.

Unicode isn’t new, but it still seems hard when your starting at the beginning and haven’t even been told the difference between a glyph, a codepoint, a character and a byte. Every year there are talks and tutorials at conferences about it, but if you haven’t grasped the basics, you can feel frustrated and lost much too quickly. This talk will cover the essentials of Unicode, locale and how they affect things like regular expressions, reading and writing files and sending data out to the world. Perl will be the programming language used to demonstrate these ideas, but much of the content should be accessible to all programmers.

Github has revolutionized social coding but where does social data stand in relation?

Sick of writing sign-in code? Not sure whether to support Twitter logins, Facebook logins, or both? Try IndieAuth! IndieAuth, built on top of OAuth, is a new way to sign in to websites online using your own domain name. This talk will show how OAuth and OpenID paved the way for IndieAuth, and will provide details about how to use this on your own websites.

Google will release a wearable heads up display this fall, and it may help to usher in a new era of augmented reality and wearable computing. What does this mean for us? How do we build for the next generation of machines? Who was here before us, and how can we learn from them?

Hiring remote workers is great for filling those holes on the team...but if you don't have the correct infrastructure in place you're just setting yourself--and your remote team members--up for a world of hurt. This session will detail how our engineering department went remote and thrived because of it.

Beer, cookies, psychopathy, happiness, regret—these are all things the world's greatest scientists have studied in detail. Learn how humans work, and how to get the most out of interacting with them.

Let's make an IRC bot together. A room of people will either come together, or break up into teams to create an IRC bot within the context of a session. What the bot will do, is up to the people in the room. The outcome is different every time, but it will surely teach us something about technology, and human nature.

Want to be agile? Why bother modeling your data with a static table, declaring classes, and setting up mapping from tables to objects and finally to HTML and back again? The linked data standard presents a more powerful data model, and lets you use your website itself as a database.

As the #2 most popular web server, NGINX has gained attention because of its performance, scalability and ability to manage concurrent requests. What are the basics that every developer needs to know about NGINX? Why would you choose Nginx over some other web server? What are typical deployment scenarios?

Code review is awesome. Do more of it.

How thinking about operations can help you make your code better, stronger, and faster.

Y'know those "Interactive Fiction" (IF) text-adventure thingies? Inform 7 is a language for writing IF in the style of English prose. It's also a neat idea for general modeling. Let's build a simple world together while learning some of what Inform 7 is about.

Many Linux desktop environments try to be easy to use for the average user, but that's not you. You're at your computer all day writing code; you don't want to mess around with *dragging windows* or (ugh) watching *animated transitions*. David Brewer will demonstrate how by using xmonad, a tiling window manager, you can free yourself from the tyranny of the mouse.

You use wireless technology every day. Do you want to know how it works?

How Pub/Sub helped my IRC bot stop living in the past and live in the moment. Also, special bonus features for polyglots!

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.

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.

A gathering for all those interested in open data, including government data, open data APIs, geodata, open social data, and more.

Come join us in talking about the state of testing in Open Source.

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.

The problem: My HVAC system is not balanced. Easy but boring solution: Hire a qualified contractor to fix it. More interesting solution: Use knowledge from dusty undergrad degree in electronics to cobble together some simple wireless temperature sensors using XBee modules and distribute them around the house. Then use Java programming knowledge to build up a monitoring system using open source software. Attempt to use readings from temperature sensors to figure out what's going on and fix it. This presentation will delve into the hardware and software aspects of the system, although with more emphasis on the software and the role that packages such as Apache Felix and Apache Mina play in the system.

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.

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

How does free software help defend free speech in repressive regimes? Danny O'Brien will draw from the records of the Committee to Protect Journalists to explore how open source can help those at the cutting edge of free expression.

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.

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.

LIGHTNING TALKS!

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.

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.

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.

Puppet is a powerful configuration management tool that makes life easier for people managing systems and applications. This tutorial gives you an in-depth and hands-on introduction to Puppet that is ideal for beginners to Puppet and configuration management.

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.

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

Leigh will be discussing hacker spaces, and the culture of DIY spaces for making things around the world.

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.

You've worked really hard on your software. It's stable and has lots of nice features and users love it. But your sysadmin hates it and complains about how hard it is to install, configure, and manage. What's up with that?

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.