Open Source Bridge 2015
2015-06-23..2015-06-26
Portland, United States
[Open Source Bridge 2011, Open Source Bridge 2013, Open Source Bridge 2014, Open Source Bridge 2015]
who it's for
community managers, open source contributors, web developers, software engineers, devops engineers, educators and trainers, hardware hackers
topics
functional programming monads; phonetic search algorithms; pprof performance profiling; Docker for education; HTTP advanced capabilities; web performance analysis with Julia; Python coroutine internals; troubleshooting distributed systems; universal web design; open source hardware tools; building web maps with OSS; email as protocol transport
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Monads Made Semi-Understandable | libby kent | 38m |
A concrete claim: monads are the pattern formed by two primitives, flatMap and apply (bind and return), plus the monad laws; Scala code shows how Option… | ||
| Project Fear | Adam Edgerton | 35m |
Defines “project fear” as imposter feelings plus loss of control, illustrated by a migration that integrates 15 APIs on a tight budget and a late QA crunch… | ||
| Cat-herd's Crook: Enforcing Standards in 10 Programming Languages | A. Jesse Jiryu Davis, Samantha Ritter | 42m |
MongoDB tries to make ten independent drivers behave the same and finds that plain-English specs and a Python reference implementation lead to divergent… | ||
| The Graceful Exit: Approaches for Changing One's Role in an Open Community | Kate Chapman | 28m |
Advice for exiting an open community with less chaos: claim a concrete handover (written notes, shared Google Docs, change document ownership), stage the… | ||
| Building mentoring into an os community that welcomes and values new contributors | Cathy Theys | 37m |
A concrete program embeds mentoring into issue queues, chat and events: scheduled IRC office hours, orientation and mentor docs, in-person Sprints with a live… | ||
| On-device, open source mobile vector rendering of OpenStreetMap | Justin Miller | 33m |
Mapbox announces an on‑device, GPU‑accelerated renderer that draws OpenStreetMap data as vector tiles on Android and iOS with a C++ core and platform bindings… | ||
| The Public Library As An (Almost) Open Source Institution | Alex Byrne | 42m |
Argues that public libraries already practice many open source habits but are blocked by proprietary systems and corporate pricing, cites concrete hurdles… | ||
| Economics of Volunteer Labor: Three stories from Debian | Asheesh Laroia | 44m |
Three concrete stories decide whether to watch: cdn.debian.net vs http.debian.net (cdn requires mirror operators to opt in via name‑based virtual hosts… | ||
| Building Diverse Social Networks | Lynn Cyrin, Jon Pincus | 44m |
Concrete claims and concrete tools: Dreamwidth works because Dreamwidth is open source and publishes a detailed diversity statement and enforceable guidelines… | ||
| How We Learned To Stop Worrying And Love (Or At Least Live With) GitHub | Jen Griffin, Athena Yao | 37m |
An organization loses its Bugzilla database and migrates issue tracking onto GitHub, building a webhook-backed service called ghi assist bot that listens for… | ||
| Hello, my name is __________. | Nick Patch | 34m |
Specific, actionable problems and fixes: MySQL silently truncates four‑byte characters so use utf8mb4 vs utf8; JavaScript treats non‑BMP characters as two code… | ||
| Probably | Bart Massey | 42m |
Explains why intuitions fail and gives concrete takeaways: Monty Hall = switching wins 2/3, sources of randomness from quantum to chaotic determinism, a… | ||
| What's in a name? Phonetic Algorithms for Search and Similarity | Mercedes Coyle | 24m |
Phonetic hashing actually finds misspelled names: soundex and Postgres built-in functions, NYSIIS and Metaphone variants, and an elastic search phonetic plugin… | ||
| Care and Feeding of a Healthy Job Hunt | VM Brasseur | 48m |
Actionable rules and precise tactics for a job hunt are here apply even if you dont meet all the listed requirements; treat postings as nice to haves not… | ||
| Trustworthy software in the real world | Jamey Sharp | 39m |
SMACCMPilot is a BSD licensed high‑assurance quadcopter autopilot that compiles 8k lines of autopilot code plus 10k lines of drivers into about 40k C and runs… | ||
| Failing With Grace | Sean O'Connor | 36m |
Distributed systems fail in predictable and weird ways: host crashes, degraded hardware, network partitions and consistency anomalies, and those failures scale… | ||
| Desigining for Renaming | Emma Humphries | 40m |
County court-ordered name change costs over $400 and can take six months, and dozens of sites still call a person by the old name. Examples: Square and… | ||
| Learning and Knowing with Federated Wiki | Ward Cunningham | 32m |
Federated Wiki claims that sharing happens entirely in the browser and that each participant runs a small Node.js site so pages fork and write back to the… | ||
| The Quantified Self in the Smart City: Geo-Visualizing the Open Data of YOU | Arlene Ducao | 26m |
Claims that personal tracking scales to cities as Quantified Self 2.0 with concrete pipelines: NASA Echo Reverb and NYC Open Data ingestion, Arduino and… | ||
| "R" You Ready for Some Football? Hacking Fantasy Sports with Open Source Software | Ed Borasky | 41m |
Claims a concrete pipeline: R and openWAR for projections, a Docker image packaging scrapers and tools, and an optimizer using mixed integer linear programming… | ||
| What is LocalWiki, and why is it so much fun? Let's edit it! | Britta Gustafson | 29m |
LocalWiki runs small city wikis for deep local detail and few rules, backed by open source code, Kickstarter and Knight Foundation grants, a visual editor… | ||
| Community Public Offerings: A New Way to Engage Markets (and Investors) in Oregon | Simon Love, Kristin Wolff | 36m |
Oregon legalizes the Community Public Offering in January 2015 allowing unaccredited residents to invest locally with clear limits: $250,000 cap per company… | ||
| A Profile of Performance Profiling With pprof | Lauren Voswinkel | 38m |
Uses pprof with gperftools and language wrappers (perftools.rb, stackprof, Go builtin) to turn samples into actionable hotspots. Shows ld_preload linking on… | ||
| Good Enough Voter Verification & Other Identity Architecture Schemes... | Ele Mooney | 01h 38m |
Argues a pragmatic identity stack: use PayPal verification crossed with the Washington state voter database to get roughly an 80% voter match, hold the matched… | ||
| How the Internet Works | Noah Kantrowitz | 42m |
A typed request becomes a DNS UDP query on port 53, wrapped in UDP then IP then an Ethernet frame, resolved by ARP, NATed at the home router, and routed across… | ||
| Teaching and managing for technologists | Lennon Day-Reynolds | 51m |
Personal story of switching from coder to manager with concrete takeaways: helped Reed College students learn to code; started managing a 5 person team that… | ||
| Leveraging Docker to Enable Learning | Kirsten Hunter | 25m |
Docker cuts workshop setup from hour and a half → 10 minutes by shipping a prebuilt filesystem via hub.docker.com using a Dockerfile + automated build. The… | ||
| Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Pelican: A Comparison of Static Site Generators | Lucy Wyman | 24m |
Jekyll ships as the GitHub Pages engine so it works with GitHub Pages and gives fast, well-documented deployment and many community plugins, but it keeps… | ||
| HTTP Can Do That?! | Sumana Harihareswara | 43m |
Shows concrete exploits and experiments: malformed requests that plant spam in 404 logs, an API that accepts POST but not GET, and a toy server written in… | ||
| Introduction to data munging with pandas and IPython Notebook | Melissa Lewis | 35m |
Shows concrete steps: use IPython/Jupyter Notebook and pd.read_csv dtype for zip to import, inspect and export; create new columns, use apply, round values… | ||
| From the Inside Out: How Self-Talk Affects Your Community | Kat Toomajian | 39m |
Claim: discouraging negative self‑talk measurably raises confidence morale and contributions. Evidence: a project with ~50 active volunteers, ~two‑thirds women… | ||
| Developer and the DOM - A history of manipulation and abstraction | Zachary Michael, Gregory Noack | 29m |
Traces the DOM from Netscape and the browser wars to ECMAScript 6 (June 2015) and modern frameworks, showing actual code and concrete tradeoffs: a jQuery… | ||
| Using Julia & D3 to analyse web performance data | Philip Tellis | 47m |
Uses Julia and D3 to parse Boomerang web timing data, serialize rowwise JSON from DataFrames, and render per-browser histograms in iframes. A prototype with… | ||
| Build a Web Map with Open Source Tools | Lyzi Diamond | 43m |
A working web map that finds the nearest Capital Bikeshare stations, shows walking directions to the station and a bike route between stations, and updates… | ||
| Hosting Events that the Whole Community Loves | Meg Hartley | 39m |
Clear operational playbook: how to run 29 public camps a year under $150 a ticket, scale community-run meetups to 75 cities 130 meetings/year, and schedule… | ||
| Testing the Multiverse | Jason R. Clark | 38m |
A concrete workflow emerges: a small gem straw is built around Bales to collect a productivity metric, tests run against multiple gemfiles via the… | ||
| Software Archeology and The Code Of Doom | Kerri Miller | 51m |
Argues that treating legacy systems like excavation yields actionable fixes and shows concrete tools and results: static metrics with flog and Flay, churn vs… | ||
| The Open Source Writing Stack | Thursday Bram | 24m |
Practical tool recommendations and workflow details decide whether to watch: real claims about what actually gets used and why, not abstract rhetoric. Notes… | ||
| Internet of Things Militia: Paramilitary Training for your IoT devices | Terri Oda | 28m |
A practical catalogue of specific misuses: repurpose a refrigerator as an always-on processing node to aggregate sensors and jam or override neighbor Wi‑Fi… | ||
| From the Unicorn’s Mouth: Stories of Managing Multiple Diverse Identities in Tech | Megan Baker, Thalida Noel, Lisa Sy | 46m |
Panel reports concrete practices and failures around intersectionality: OkCupid adds non-binary support (up to five genders and five orientations); an office… | ||
| Open Source Tools of the Hardware Hacking Trade | Joe Grand | 49m |
A practical catalog of open source hardware tools and what they actually achieve: oscilloscope used to spot millivolt differences between a smart card and a… | ||
| How to Really Get Git | Susan Tan | 28m |
Covers concrete workflows: configuring git with aliases, colorized status and tab completion, and making PS1 show branch; four confusing undo tools explained… | ||
| Cassandra at the Keyboard: Whistleblowing at all scales | Heidi Waterhouse | 33m |
Concrete thresholds matter: an internal docs mismatch about Docker leads to stalled features, being asked to plagiarize the AMA creates legal liability… | ||
| How to Teach Git | Georgia Reh | 42m |
Concrete checklist for beginners: start with the problem git solves and teach the local workflow with status add commit cycles, always use -m so editors don't… | ||
| When Your Codebase Is Nearly Old Enough To Vote | Denise Paolucci | 40m |
Dreamwidth Studios maintains a fifteen year old web app with quarter million lines of legacy Perl, custom BML templates from 1996, and UTF‑8 handling… | ||
| Bringing Security to Your Open Source Project | Terri Oda | 37m |
Small projects get concrete steps: publish a security@ email and thank reporters instead of legal threats, run automated checks (CVE checker, static analysis… | ||
| Making the web fun again | Kyle Drake, Victoria Wang | 42m |
Neocities revives GeoCities: open sources the front end, launches a rails-backed host that file whitelisting stops from becoming a malware dump, and grows fast… | ||
| kenny_g.rb: Making Ruby Write Smooth Jazz | Tim Krajcar | 20m |
Uses Ruby with the micro_midi gem to send MIDI note numbers and velocities, records short prerecorded phrase snippets in a custom notejs format (JSON), and… | ||
| How Do Python Coroutines Work? | A. Jesse Jiryu Davis | 35m |
A minimal async framework is implemented from scratch using nonblocking sockets and Python 3’s selectors, then refactored into coroutines built from… | ||
| Community Moderation: you can't always halt a flamewar with one raised eyebrow... | Azure Jane Lunatic | 44m |
Concrete tactics and limits: use moderated posting for repeat rule-breakers, create an off-topic side list to divert cat and beer threads, require ops in IRC… | ||
| Building and maintaining a healthy community | Priyanka Nag | 38m |
Explains how a large open project scales by splitting into task forces, setting clear scopes and dependencies, and using multiple channels (IRC, phone apps… | ||
| So how do you reach every person on the planet: Internationalization at Twitter | Alolita Sharma | 40m |
Twitter claims language scale by combining tooling, open libraries and NLP rather than manual translation alone. translate.twitter.com exists for community… | ||
| Making Docker Actually Work | Simon McFarlane | 21m |
Containers are useful but immature: expect to redo work when a standard (OCI) lands and avoid using containers for big sites unless switching quickly is… | ||
| A Developer's-Eye View of API Client Libraries | Frances Hocutt | 38m |
A concrete checklist for usable API client libraries: claim that good libraries stop developers banging their heads by handling HTTP, auth, parsing and… | ||
| Email as Distributed Protocol Transport: How Meeting Invites Work | Christine Spang | 35m |
Meeting invites are plain email messages carrying an iCalendar payload (often duplicated as an application/ics attachment and a text/calendar MIME part) and a… | ||
| Bridging the Digital Divide with SMS Bots | Briar Schreiber | 38m |
A live-built SMS bot demonstrates reach and tradeoffs: it uses Twilio, Nexmo or an Android SMS Sync gateway tied to a Flask/Heroku backend and Google Voice… | ||
| Five years, 1000 students: The story of Open Source Comes to Campus | Asheesh Laroia | 44m |
OpenHatch runs Open Source Comes to Campus and claims 1000 students in five years, scaling to about 25 events and 500 students in 2015. Curriculum changes… | ||
| Catalyzing Diversity: Practical Advice for Navigating Minority STEM Communities... | Shauna Gordon-McKeon, Alberto Roca | 45m |
Claims concrete outreach tactics: using hashtags and recurring Twitter chats like #BLACKandSTEM and Latinos in Tech (LATISM), pitching panels and booths at… | ||
| What stuttering taught me about marketing - not your typical soft skills talk | Sharon Steed | 16m |
Stuttering forces specific choices: choosing writing, freelancing, then deliberately practicing public speaking as an experiment that either works or doesn't… | ||
| How to Read a Stack Trace | Moss Collum | 38m |
Explains how to locate the real fault: the innermost frame usually shows where it breaks, but languages differ — Python shows outermost first while Ruby and… | ||
| Venturing into the Spooky Science of Ruby | Zoe Kay | 33m |
Explains concrete internals: how method lookup walks class → included modules → object/kernel/basic_object, how const_set/const_get and class_new create… | ||
| Bringing non-technical people to the Free/Libre/Open world and why it matters | Aaron Wolf | 34m |
Argues that non-programmers must join development to make software that actually serves everyday people, citing music tools musescore and audacity, a messy… | ||
| User Research For Non-Researchers | Jane Davis | 38m |
Claims that usable research needs only a tight question and real people and shows how to do it: sharpen the question to two lines or fewer, run gorilla… | ||
| Fear Driven Development | Ryan Kennedy | 37m |
Argues that fear blocks change and shows concrete remedies: automated tests as exposure therapy, a Yammer-built database on Berkeley DB where failovers and a… | ||
| Write It Down: Process Documentation from the Ground Up | Kat Toomajian | 35m |
Process documentation lets different people reliably recreate work by recording exact steps, reasons and exceptions; examples show a whiteboard flowcharts… | ||
| A Matter of Time | John Feminella | 38m |
Every so often a minute lasts 61-second minute and that breaks naive code; libraries and examples show concrete failures: Python small-int caching (only -5 to… | ||
| Calculating Guilt: Using open-source software in forensic DNA testing | Sarah Chenoweth | 41m |
Claims that probabilistic genotyping turns messy mixtures into quantitative evidence and that open source tools make that transparent. Uses Lab Retriever… | ||
| You Got Your Idris in My C++! A First Look at Denotational Design | Ian Dees | 39m |
Argues that designing meanings in Idris and then translating to C++11 yields tighter, simpler APIs and verifiable invariants. Shows concrete tooling (Idris… | ||
| Stronger Than Fear: Mental Health in the Developer Community | Edward Finkler | 38m |
Developer community faces concrete numbers: 1 in 5 adults have a mental disorder and WHO data ranks mental disorders as the largest disease burden in North… | ||
| Free Your Money: Open Source Crowdfunding Tips & Tools | Skyler Corbett | 29m |
Examples of what actually works: a photography project hits $22,000 goal exceeded after a ~$15,000 target and relentless promotion; a mod developer runs… | ||
| Using Asterisk to Stop Robocallers | Michael Pigg | 36m |
Uses Asterisk with a BeagleBone Black and a Grandstream HT503 ATA, provisioned by Vagrant and Ansible, to answer after two rings, grab caller ID over the FXO… | ||
| Reinventing black boxes | Daniel Johnson | 42m |
Reconstructs actual hacks and outcomes: reverse engineering BitKeeper by connecting with telnet and discovering a BitKeeper telnet clone revealed full history… | ||
| Opening Up The Current Open Source Blueprint | Stephanie Morillo | 23m |
Makes three concrete claims and shows simple fixes: a cited stat of less than 2% women contributors and an anecdotal count of fifteen people of color with four… | ||
| Put Up or Shut Up: An Open Letter to Tech Companies Seeking Diverse Teams | Kronda Adair | 38m |
Claim: 50% of women quit tech within 10 years. Evidence: an anonymous survey reports widespread unpaid diversity labor, no HR recourse, pay gaps and hostile… | ||
| "A huge green fierce snake bars the way!"; or, Building a Text Adventure Game in Python | Katie Silverio | 28m |
A working Python text-adventure engine that separates state into rooms things players and turns commands into command-as-modular-helpers is described, with a… | ||
| Aesthetics and the Evolution of Code | Coraline Ada Ehmke | 26m |
A 2014 survey rates six languages across API CLI documentation UI and readability and produces an aesthetic index with Python first Ruby second JavaScript… | ||
| For Love and For Money | Audrey Eschright | 33m |
Build story is specific: a local app caligator grows from biweekly code sprints but uses subversion vs git so merges create hidden cleanup work that burns out… | ||
| Your Job is Political: Tech Money in Politics | Kelsey Gilmore-Innis | 43m |
Tech wealth buys ballot measures, board seats and contracts; Tim Draper pours about $5M into six Californians, venture investors bankroll Prop 39 and Reed… | ||
| Troubleshooting In Distributed Systems | Megan Baker | 29m |
Recommendation: design services to fail well and emit expressive logs with stack traces and structured fields; centralize shipping with Logstash forwarder into… | ||
| Funding for Open Source Projects: Is a Universal Basic Income the Solution? | Luc Perkins | 41m |
Argues that universal basic income (UBI) shifts motivation from survival to purposive work, citing behavioral research where pay fails for creative… | ||
| Hacking Minecraft! | Jonan Scheffler | 42m |
Shows concrete how-to and what breaks: uses Spigot and Canary plus Minecraft Forge and Sponge workarounds, demonstrates a pyramid of TNT that sometimes crashes… | ||
| Dog Food is for Dogs: Escape the Crate of Your Perspective with User Research | Amelia Abreu, Rachel Shadoan | 25m |
Argues that dogfooding alone fails to find real users and shows concrete methods: field work with 10 participants in Portland and Nashville, semi structured… | ||
| A Pair Programming Workshop | Moss Collum, Laura Dean | 22m |
Hands-on workshop runs three constrained pairing exercises that turn theory into code: pairing ping pong (TDD back-and-forth), farsighted Navigator (driver… | ||
| How To Be A Great Developer | Edward Finkler | 39m |
Claim: tech skills are really overrated and soft skills matter more for productivity and team health. Lists five concrete practices: five principles: empathy… | ||
| How you tell the story matters: telling better stories and making better technologies | Amelia Abreu | 27m |
Claim: narratives shape what gets built, who gets credited, and how users behave — origin stories omit designers like Susan Kare, Fairchild’s Navajo factory… | ||
| Micropub: The Emerging API Standard for IndieWeb Apps | Aaron Parecki | 31m |
Micropub is an API standard for creating posts on your own domain from third‑party apps, using the microformats2 vocabulary and IndieAuth (OAuth2 with URLs)… | ||
| Universal Web Design: How to create an awesome experience for *every* user | David Newton | 41m |
Universal design on the web means concrete practices not platitudes: render HTML server‑side so content loads without JS, use semantic markup and headings, and… | ||
| Through the Warp Zone: Hacking Super Mario Brothers | Shawna Scott, Emily St. | 48m |
An emulator reconstructs the NES by running its 6502 instructions so a dumped 40 kilobyte ROM becomes editable; using Hex Fiend to search and change bytes (for… | ||
| Build a Web Map with Open Source Tools | Lyzi Diamond | 01h 34m |
Builds a working interactive web map end to end using Mapbox.js (Leaflet), Mapbox Studio styles and vector tiles, GeoJSON overlays, client side spatial… | ||
| Why Making a Programming Language is Awesome | Michael R Fairhurst | 32m |
Builds a working language called Wake that compiles to JavaScript and emphasizes type-safe with optional variable names and testability; implements generics… | ||
| Tricking Out the Terminal: An Introduction | Lydia Katsamberis | 44m |
Shows concrete commands and configs: editing ~/.bashrc to set PS1 with emoji (snowman), running mkdir/touch/pwd/ls, and saving the prompt so new shells show… | ||
| Why Relationships Matter in Community Building... | Josh Lim | 19m |
Wikimedia Philippines secures 80,000 dollars to run the Philippine cultural heritage mapping project, funds three wiki expeditions and trains 20–30… | ||
| Humanising Math and Physics on Computer Science | Hanneli Tavante | 41m |
Claims that embedding calculus into CS yields better engagement with code and that stories and films spark learning: a Brazilian test teach numerical methods… | ||
| Removing Barriers: Ascend Project Post Mortem | Kronda Adair, Lukas Blakk | 45m |
Six weeks of paid immersion funded by Mozilla, with laptops, food and stipends, yields concrete outcomes: 20 enrolled, 18 complete, about 15 fix at least one… | ||
| nothing matches | ||