Sessions at CodeConf 2011 on Sunday 10th April

Managing an open source project is more than managing code. Managing the contributors and community is a big part of it, too. GitHub's collaboration tools make this easy, but also bring certain challenges to project managers used to other code management systems.

Much has been said about the process of software creation. Let's talk about the when, why, and how of abandoning a software project responsibly.

The gaming community assumed they'd never see FarmVille on the iPhone because there was no Flash runtime, but then we made it happen. Come hear about how it was done: from using the game engine Cocos2D, to the SWF asset converter we built, to how we hooked into the existing game servers, to how we managed a giant amount of textures.

Startups often start out with only a vague idea of what they're building, and the path to launch is full of twists, turns, and abandoned explorations, and at least one git reset --hard HEAD^^^. I'll talk about how we dealt with this on the road from Burbn's initial prototype to Instagram's launch, and which decisions we made early on helped us iterate quickly—and which didn't.

Code is a written artifact, but should it be treated like writing? Discuss code in the context of open source, high-level languages, and literate programming.

For years, we have been suffering with the myth that if we just tried harder, our CSS would stay clean. Each time we start a new project, we valiantly follow best practices and commit ourselves to writing beautiful code. Then, a few months into the project, we're once again faced with a mess. Maybe it was the contractor who committed crappy code? The project manager who would never give us time to refactor? The truth is that our best practices are killing us. In this talk, we will debunk the best-practice-myths that are making a mess out of our sites.