Open Source Bridge 2014
2014-06-24..2014-06-27
Portland, United States
[Open Source Bridge 2011, Open Source Bridge 2013, Open Source Bridge 2014, Open Source Bridge 2015]
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Keynote: Frances Hocutt | Frances Hocutt | 37m |
Confusion about unexpected followership becomes a roadmap: founded a feminist hacker space called the Attic, started a feminist hacker space, ran fundraising… | ||
| Keynote: Lukas Blakk | Lukas Blakk | 28m |
Mozilla funds two pilot cohorts of 40 people total for a 6-week accelerator that pays participants a daily honorarium and provides transit, childcare, a laptop… | ||
| Keynote: Julie Pagano | Julie Pagano | 33m |
Claims that imposter syndrome makes capable engineers avoid speaking, open source contributions, pair programming and job applications, backed by interviews… | ||
| My Journey into Open Source Design | Mel Choyce | 31m |
Starts with a small conference volunteer logo and scales into committing CSS to core; uses p2s, IRC, Trac, SVN and GitHub to move from observation to patches… | ||
| Open source software could save libraries | Coral Sheldon Hess | 40m |
Argues that a practical open source search layer can make library sites usable by indexing local guides and database/journal lists and combining them with… | ||
| Learn you some Lisp for Great Good | Howard Abrams | 38m |
Over fifty years of language work stays active and experimental; examples include a weekend port of a Lisp to JavaScript and David Nolan reimplementing 1970s… | ||
| A Few Python Tips | Sumana Harihareswara | 40m |
Recommends writing new code in Python 3 when possible and using pip to install packages, demonstrates pip freeze and pip install, and advocates isolating… | ||
| How to make generics in C | Christopher Swenson | 42m |
A header-only C library generates type-specialized sorts by using token-pasting macros to create uniquely named functions from a user-provided type and… | ||
| Open Sourcing Mental Illness: Ending The Stigma | Edward Finkler | 49m |
Description of lived anxiety, adult ADD and depression with medication names (Lexapro, Strattera, buspirone, clonazepam) and CBT therapy, including self-harm… | ||
| Stop Crying in the Bathroom and Start Your Own Business | Kronda Adair | 46m |
Starts the business in January 2013 and builds a solo WordPress consulting practice serving solopreneurs, small nonprofits and social-justice projects, using… | ||
| OAuth, IndieAuth, and the Future of Authorization APIs | Aaron Parecki | 43m |
OAuth 2.0 plus a web identity layer that treats users and apps as URLs enables third‑party apps to post to personal sites using the standard authorization code… | ||
| The Outreach Program for Women | Liz Henry, Sumana Harihareswara | 42m |
Outreach Program for Women runs three-month paid internships for non-students and students alike, requires a mandatory try-before-you-buy task plus weekly… | ||
| REI's Expedition into Open Source | Rob McGuire-Dale | 37m |
Front-end team creates a covert rei-dev GitHub account, modularizes new code into standalone packages and submits upstream patches to Istanbul, npm and Maven… | ||
| When Many Eyes Fail You | Terri Oda | 44m |
Argues that open review helps sometimes but often fails: a webcrypto W3C candidate recommendation gets almost no attention then later hundreds of public… | ||
| The Promise of Collaborative Magic | Josh Lim | 50m |
Argues that Wikipedia’s original “wiki magic” — bold seed edits that others finish — is breaking: contributor count peaks around 50k then declines, policy text… | ||
| Towards more diversity-friendly social networks | Deborah Pierce, Jon Pincus | 43m |
Builds a small live test social network called tapestries that targets privacy and diversity, currently live with a small user group and still a work in… | ||
| Open Lighting Architecture | Matt Ranostay | 19m |
Explains DMX512 as 512 control slots over RS485 (250 kb/s, ~44 fps) and how network transports like Art‑Net/E1.31 map universes; shows an open source stack… | ||
| Get more contributors! Lessons from the Drupal Ladder | Rhys Fureigh | 37m |
Organizes local meetups around a step-by-step ladder of tasks (download, install, file/read/clarify issues, apply patches) using drupal.org issue queues, Git… | ||
| Don't Let Your Tests Flake Out | Jason R. Clark | 42m |
Explains two root causes of flakiness: leaked shared state (globals, constants, class vars, callbacks, even 50 lingering event subscriptions) and brittle… | ||
| Utilizing open source medical systems to reach the next 33 million | Judy Wawira | 48m |
Argues that reaching the “next 33 million” Kenyans requires pragmatic deployments not promises, using openMRS (deployed in 42 countries and running 160,000 HIV… | ||
| Patents are for babies: what every engineer should know about IP law | Belinda Runkle | 50m |
Explains copyright, trademark, patent and trade secret tradeoffs with concrete examples: the Amazon one-click patent (assigned to the company), 20-year patent… | ||
| Life-Hacking and Personal Time Management for the Rest of Us | Heidi Waterhouse | 42m |
Applies agile software practices to messy home life and shows concrete methods that work: Kanban-style boards with a two-task Kanban limit, Trello for a Trello… | ||
| Crash Course in Tech Management | VM Brasseur | 50m |
Argues that management is a craft with three concrete duties: get things done, manage people, and make informed technical/business decisions. Recommends… | ||
| Build your own exobrain | Paul Fenwick | 46m |
A personal automation framework called exobrain runs on a laptop or cloud, written in Perl, using ZeroMQ messaging and Ubic process management, exposing agent… | ||
| Code review for Open Source | Alex Gaynor | 33m |
Argues that code review raises the bus factor, improves readability and culture, and should be mandatory before merge; recommends concrete tools… | ||
| Working Effectively with People in Government on Open Source Projects | Jason Denizac | 46m |
A practical playbook for partnering with government: advocates apply Code for America methods in Chattanooga to draft an open data policy, use short release… | ||
| Battling Browser Bugs for "Fun" and (Non-)Profit | Roan Kattouw | 44m |
Browsers mostly work until pushing edges reveals specific failures: Chrome treats box-shadow as interactive, fonts sometimes render from freed memory… | ||
| Confessions of a DBA: worst and best things I've done in production | Emily Slocombe | 44m |
Runs 3,000 customer databases in Amazon and shows concrete fixes: converts a heavy write table with ALTER TABLE ... ENGINE=BLACKHOLE to stop replication lag… | ||
| Surviving Support: 10 Tips for Saving Your Users and Yourself | Julie Cameron | 31m |
Open-source jQuery quiz called slick quiz becomes a WordPress plugin and generates support across GitHub issues, WordPress.org threads, Stack Overflow and… | ||
| Making language selection smarter in Wikipedia | Sucheta Ghoshal | 24m |
Builds a compact language selector on top of the Universal Language Selector using browser language, up to five cookie‑stored previous choices, GeoIP plus CLDR… | ||
| An exploration in technology, art, and making mistakes | Catriona Buhayar, Bill Madill | 46m |
A set of painted benches with embedded lighting runs a programmed sunrise-to-sunset sequence using BlinkM MaxM LEDs driven by an Arduino Uno; scripts load onto… | ||
| Rocket Science On Github | Nathan Bergey | 47m |
A university rocket project with about 50 to 100 contributors moves its code and docs onto GitHub, consolidating 45 repositories and using read the docs and… | ||
| Performance strategies for delivering web fonts at Wikipedia scale | Alolita Sharma | 47m |
Wikipedia serves roughly half a billion monthly users and actively supports 115 web fonts across ~287 languages while pushing 82 font files and using default… | ||
| The joy of volunteering with open technology and culture | Netha Hussain | 53m |
Describes hands-on volunteer programs that use Wikipedia, Wikinews, Mozilla localization, IRC and Google Groups plus spreadsheets and cheat sheets to recruit… | ||
| Extreme Software Portability as an Art Form | Andrew Nacin | 41m |
WordPress explains how extreme portability means sacrificing modern conveniences to support the long tail: PHP compatibility across versions, 25 bundled… | ||
| NerdCred++; How to Customize your Bash Prompt | Pamela Ocampo, Rachel Walker | 42m |
Shows how to turn the default shell line into an information-dense prompt by setting the PS1 variable, writing it into ~/.bashrc and applying it with source so… | ||
| Power Tuning Linux: A Case Study | Alexandra Yates | 34m |
Measurements use a Yokogawa WT310 power meter and a photometer plus PowerTOP for tuning on a Sony Vaio Core i5 SSD laptop with 20 minute runs. Default settings… | ||
| UX Design in Action: Redesigning the Mailman UI | Karen Tang | 39m |
Mailman archives get rebuilt into HyperKitty: a Django/Python frontend that uses a REST API to add search and activity graphs, per-list stats, thread up/down… | ||
| History of Concurrency | Michael Schurter | 42m |
Argues that core concurrency ideas come from the 1960s–70s (mutexes and semaphores in 1965, CSP in 1978) and shows concrete implementations: an 1980s… | ||
| Modern Home Automation | Benjamin Kero | 44m |
History of X10 (16 devices, single-bit powerline signaling, ~70–80% failure and ~0.75s per command) leads to modern choices: Z‑Wave USB stick paired with… | ||
| Introduction to Sphinx & Read the Docs | Eric Holscher | 45m |
Covers how reStructuredText plus Sphinx generate semantic docs from plain text, with directives, cross-references and code‑block testing; shows an autodoc… | ||
| Lightning Talk Workshop | Michelle Rowley | 01h 21m |
Hands-on workshop that leads participants from brainstorming to a scripted five minute presentation then partnered practice with timing, feedback and a clear… | ||
| SQL Utility Belt | Michael Alan Brewer | 47m |
PostgreSQL-focused toolbox of concrete techniques for building large reporting queries for NSF STEM enrollment exports: use INSERT ... SELECT for bulk inserts… | ||
| The 20,000km view: How GPS works | Jamey Sharp | 47m |
Explains that GPS measures time-of-flight from satellites at 20,000 km altitude moving ~14,000 km/h, requires relativity corrections, and recovers signals that… | ||
| Generational Relay: Passing the Open Source Torch | Eric Steele | 44m |
Plone documents a concrete recovery plan: 87 releases since 2001, a measured shift from single-founder control to a multigenerational model, and explicit… | ||
| xmonad: the window manager that (practically) reads your mind | David Brewer | 45m |
A demonstration of xmonad shows a tiling window manager implemented in Haskell that removes title bars, uses a master pane with resizable tall layout, and… | ||
| Make your wireless router route or anything else the way you want it to | Russell Senior | 46m |
Shows how to build and flash OpenWrt from the Makefile repo: clone, run feeds update -a, run menuconfig and then make -j32 to build cross toolchain and ~4,000… | ||
| How I Learned Haskell by Writing Tiny Games | Moss Collum | 45m |
Builds a series of tiny roguelike games in Haskell, often shipping one-game-per-day while traveling, to learn practical Haskell techniques. Uses GHC with… | ||
| Futel: the future of the past of telephony | Karl Anderson | 41m |
Portland project puts real pay phones back on the street as Portland's smallest phone company offering free domestic calls, voicemail, an on-call operator… | ||
| Network Science for Fun and Profit | John Taylor | 01h 38m |
Describes using R + igraph and other tools (NetworkX, Gephi, Neo4j, GraphChi/GraphLab) to fit real networks to models—random, small‑world, scale‑free—and to… | ||
| IPv6 for Programmers | Ian Burrell | 26m |
IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses with a default /64 subnet so hosts auto-derive interface IDs from MACs (and often use privacy extensions to randomize them)… | ||
| OpenStreetWhat? Mapping The World With Open Data | Rafa Gutierrez, Justin Miller | 01h 41m |
Live demo shows creating and saving OSM edits (a building polygon traced over ID editor and committed as a change set which appears live within minutes)… | ||
| Advanced Javascript Basics for Web Developers | Lauren Voswinkel | 51m |
Starts by demonstrating value versus reference semantics with numbers versus arrays and shows hoisting by declaring a local var after use so the function logs… | ||
| DIY User Research for Open Source Projects | Erin Richey | 49m |
Two-person open source startup publishes user-research templates on GitHub, runs a quick survey with 50 survey responses that reveals bloggers rely on Facebook… | ||
| The Keys to Working Remotely | Carson Shold | 44m |
Argues that remote work is ordinary work: 90% personal remote time, ~10% of Shopify staff remote, and tools like Basecamp, GitHub, Google Hangouts, Envision… | ||
| Keeping your culture afloat through a tidal wave of in | Azure Jane Lunatic, Kat Toomajian | 48m |
A community forks LiveJournal into DreamWidth in 2009 and manages a codebase of quarter of a million lines of code with persistent technical debt, staffed by… | ||
| How I went from stage fright to stage presence and want to help others do t | Julie Pagano | 46m |
A volunteer-run support group uses Google Groups and Google Hangouts to coach new speakers through brainstorming, CFP selection, proposal editing and… | ||
| Extension Development with Mediawiki | Richa Jain | 39m |
Shows how to build a working MediaWiki extension that adds inline annotations stored in a new DB table and reachable via custom REST-style endpoints: it uses… | ||
| Scikit and the K-Nearest Neighbor Algorithm | Portia Burton | 33m |
Scikit learn K‑Nearest Neighbors applied to the classic iris dataset with 150 samples and two features uses an IPython notebook to build a classifier, plot… | ||
| When Firefox Faceplants - what the fox says and who is listening | K Lars Lohn | 42m |
sakuro is Mozilla’s home‑grown crash pipeline: Breakpad in the client posts JSON and up to four binary blobs to six Python collectors in Phoenix, which use a… | ||
| Building leadership in the journalism code community | Erika Owens | 44m |
OpenNews documents concrete steps for growing newsroom coding: DocumentCloud spawned Backbone and Underscore, Django began in a newsroom, and dozens of funded… | ||
| Introduction to Scala | Todd Lisonbee | 46m |
Scala runs on the JVM and interoperates with Java while adding concise features: case classes generate equals/hashCode/toString/copy automatically… | ||
| Net Art Praxis: Making Internet-Based Visual Art using Open Source | Mark Hintz | 44m |
Defines net art as web-native work tied to the browser and shows concrete projects: a frame-by-frame animation served by sequential URLs, Flash-based… | ||
| How to Run 100 User Tests in Two Days | Daniel Sauble | 37m |
A UX team runs concentrated user research at its conference booth, achieving 50 tests the first year and 95 tests in 2013 by using a 700-person Puppet Test… | ||
| Intro to the IndieWeb: How Far Can We Go? | Amber Case | 46m |
Argues that personal domains stop data loss illustrated by AOL Hometown vs Phosphor, and credits 2003/Google Reader as turning points; demonstrates working… | ||
| Beyond Leaning In: How to Negotiate to Get What You Want | Katie Lane | 47m |
Advocates shifting from fixed demands to motivations — ask for interests not positions — using concrete examples (French Bulldog vs qualities) and money framed… | ||
| Random | Bart Massey | 01h 30m |
Covers why common shuffles and simple PRNGs fail and what to use instead: demonstrates the correct Fisher–Yates in-place shuffle, shows how linear congruential… | ||
| Finding problems quickly in a quickly evolving opensource project | Timothy Chen | 45m |
A zero‑day automated system monitors 400 git trees hourly, pulls new commits, compiles across configs and architectures in VMs/qemu/KVM, runs ~5,000 tests/day… | ||
| Data, Privacy, & Trust in Open Source: 10 Lessons from Wikipedia | Steven Walling | 42m |
Wikimedia Foundation recasts privacy around concrete practices: builds an event logging JSON schema published on the Wiki so every tracked field is explicit… | ||
| Making Your Privacy Software Usable | Jen Davidson, Sean McGregor | 28m |
Evaluates Mailvelope, Tor Browser and CryptoCat with concrete fixes: finds Mailvelope docs buried offsite so users hit a dead end after install; spots Tor… | ||
| Extending Gems - Patterns and Anti-Patterns of Pluggable Gems | Jason R. Clark | 42m |
Library authors encounter concrete failure modes and fixes: New Relic RPM is broken by internal monkey‑patches and by single shared instrumenters that get… | ||
| Trust, Community, and Automatic Updates | Andrew Nacin | 47m |
WordPress implements automatic updates for only patch releases, using a staged API rollout, package checksums, copy-and-verify file replacement, VCS detection… | ||
| Deconstructing Open Source Contributions | Shauna Gordon-McKeon | 45m |
Explains concrete methods used at Open Source Comes to Campus—27 on-campus events (nine this year) and an 800-project aggregator—to turn contributing barriers… | ||
| Unicorns Are People, Too: Re-Thinking Soft and Hard Skills | Liz Abinante | 25m |
Argues that labeling skills "soft" or "hard" misleads hiring and rewards, proposes concrete replacements (examples: interpersonal vs quantifiable… | ||
| Hacking In-Group Bias for Fun and Profit | Kat Toomajian | 49m |
An open source community built from LiveJournal code (≈250k LOC) runs with ~50–60 volunteers, ~2/3 women and ~65% who never coded before, and uses concrete… | ||
| Distributed Agile Development | Arthur Richards | 42m |
Mobile web engineering team embraces distribution since 2012, adopts Scrum rituals, drops a Wiki for project tools, and moves from Mingle to Trello and Google… | ||
| Modernizing a Stagnant Toolbox | Aaron Jorbin | 34m |
A WordPress build and repo overhaul modernizes tooling without breaking existing SVN workflows by introducing a develop source repo plus synced core.svn and… | ||
| Mushroom Data Demystified | Lauren Hudgins | 43m |
Fungi taxonomy is shockingly incomplete: around 280 new fungal species per year, we likely know less than 5% of fungi, and at current rates cataloging could… | ||
| Airplanes : Sailboats :: Mobile : Desktop | Amye Scavarda Perrin | 40m |
Claim: mobile design is a new technology layer that lets teams build rigid‑wing sailboats—America’s Cup–style interfaces engineered with computational fluid… | ||
| Compiling Pythons with Custom Grammar for the sake of a joke | Amy Hanlon | 34m |
Rewrites CPython’s grammar to replace the literal import token with AO, edits the grammar file and runs make, then runs a project-wide find-and-replace to… | ||
| Write an Excellent Programming Blog | A. Jesse Jiryu Davis | 43m |
Argues that writing is a tool for thinking and problem solving, showing that drafting an explanation lets someone diagnose a Python concurrency bug in about… | ||
| Internet Archive: More than the Wayback Machine | VM Brasseur, Alexis Rossi | 49m |
Nonprofit library with about $12M/year budget, roughly 50 petabytes of spinning disk (duplicated) and 32 scanning centers that scan ~1,000 books/day, the… | ||
| The Case for Junior Developers | Shawna Scott | 35m |
Argument: hiring juniors costs less long term and forces fixes that seniors ignore. Data points: median junior salary $57,500 versus senior around $117k–$140k… | ||
| Data Wrangling: Getting Started Working with Data for Visualizations | Rachel Shadoan | 47m |
Argues that any data can be visualized if it is consistently modeled and cleaned, shows that a single view realistically encodes four dimensions per view… | ||
| Building Community Mesh Networks | Marc Juul, Mitar Milutinovic, Jenny Ryan, Russell Senior | 48m |
Community meshes here report concrete results: a Slovenia network with about 300–360 nodes, Portland clusters of roughly 100 nodes serving ~50,000 users/year… | ||
| Slytherin 101: How To Win Friends and Influence People | Denise Paolucci | 52m |
Argues that Slytherin-style goals—power as having decisions respected, influence as having unspoken wishes honored, and optimization as minimum-effort… | ||
| Scottish Folk Dance: If you can follow code, you can dance! | Darrick Wong | 43m |
Claim: Scottish country dances are built like code from reusable figures — setting, right‑hand crosses, progressions that move first couple to second place —… | ||
| Badging and Beyond: Rubrics and Building a Culture of Recognition as Com | Larissa Shapiro | 45m |
Argues that badges track and verify specific skills but do not replace personal recognition, and shows concrete tooling and results: Open Badges and a badge… | ||
| Unicode Beyond Just Characters: Localization with the CLDR | Nick Patch | 44m |
Explains how the CLDR is used to localize real products: a production number-formatting CPAN module CLDR number formats currencies and percentages using local… | ||
| Forking Pop Culture and Remixing Code: Where Open Movements Intersect | Nancy McLaughlin | 47m |
Builds and runs Archive of Our Own in Ruby as a volunteer project that starts in 2007, goes public 2008–09, and now hosts 1,000,000+ works with millions of… | ||
| A short examination on the intersection of security and usability | Morgan Miller | 43m |
Claims that strong cryptography exists but people cannot use it get backed by concrete studies: PGP study: ~30 people in 1999 fail to encrypt, recent Lori… | ||
| Freedom, security and the cloud | Matthew Garrett | 43m |
Cloud hosting boosts utilization and lowers cost but adds layers of software and attack surface: hypervisors, QEMU, orchestration and management. Claims… | ||
| Nest + Pellet Stove + Yurt | K Lars Lohn | 35m |
Nest thermostat outputs are mapped to a pellet stove high/medium/low switch by an adapter that reads three white wires and implements the truth table with a… | ||
| Making your mobile web app accessible | Eitan Isaacson | 40m |
Firefox OS apps use only HTML/CSS/JS and platform web APIs to access sensors, so accessibility must be baked into the DOM and events. Use native controls when… | ||
| Open Source is Not Enough: The Importance of Algorithm Transparency | Rachel Shadoan | 46m |
Argues that open source code alone fails because users still cannot inspect what an algorithm actually uses or why it produced a result; demands that systems… | ||
| Building a Translucent Mobile Crypto Currency with Couchbase Lite JSON | J Chris Anderson | 49m |
Proposes a translucent mobile cryptocurrency called Document Coin that abandons a global blockchain in favor of a web of trust style model: coins are JSON… | ||
| nothing matches | ||