Sessions at OSCON 2011 on Friday 29th July in Oregon Convention Center

Opening remarks by the OSCON program chairs, Sarah Novotny and Edd Dumbill.

Code for America is a new type of public service for geeks to leverage their engineering skills to bring open source practices to communities across America. We'll talk about the growing geek corps and the challenges of leveraging each other's work in building our digital communities.

Keynote by Brian Fitzpatrick, Engineering Manager, Google, Inc.

Keynote by Karen Sandler, Executive Director, GNOME Foundation.

People hate change, and Java.net, a java-centric open source forge and community, needed a lot of change. Not just a facelift, but a whole new infrastructure with new development tools and a modern content management system. With 5600 projects and 600,000 registered members, and a handful of engineers dedicated to the task, how do you move a community this big without destroying it?

Web API documentation is a necessity for the success of a platform. Developers need docs to learn how to utilize your resources. Providing poor documentation is often considered worse than no documentation at all (which is inexcusable).

Why do so many companies fail at providing great docs? What are the trends in the API universe when it comes to web API docs?

Neil will discuss the trend of interactive API documentation, and how it helps platform providers maintain docs more easily, keep docs examples fresh and up to date, and provide an interactive learning environment that is clean and concise.

Is your application distributed ? How have you chosen to deal with the implications of this distribution? In this session we will introduce and explore zookeeper. Originally developed at Yahoo and used by hbase, zookeeper is a wonderful tool. Zookeeper is straightforward and provides an interface allowing for easy configuration and use.

Learn how Netflix builds its third-generation device user interfaces with web technologies. Between device performance limitations, new technologies like CORS and CSS3 transitions, techniques for managing directional input, and developing both subtle and wildly different UI variants for A/B tests, developing Webkit-based UI for TV devices like the PlayStation 3 is a whole new world.

Open source serves as a superb platform for collaborative R&D and the practice of Open Science. In this panel three members of the research community discuss ways to fund, support, and grow research programs based on open source practices.

A relatively recent addition to Linux, CGroups provide a mechanism to control resource allocation in a manner that has long existed on Unix environments. Most recently released Linux distributions now include CGroups in their standard package repositories, but few system administrators are aware of the features they provide.

As any open source project that leverages the power of the CPAN or other dependency rich sources knows, streamlining installation for your users is critical. Shipwright allows you to build and distribute relocatable vessels that can ship everything above libc and allow a user a truly dependency-free installation.

Do you like to tinker? Would you like to see how MySQL? If you’d like to get your hands dirty (or watch others work their developer magic), stop by this session and learn how to take a simple desktop system running MySQL into a fully functional time based backup system that you can connect to any server and get up to the minute recovery capability.

I've run the Open Source Lab for the last five years at some of the largest and most influential educational technology shows, including ISTE and CUE. Over the years I've gained some understanding of why and how Open Source Software is adopted (or not) by schools.

As the market for browsers on the desktop and mobile platforms becomes increasingly fragmented, remembering what works where and what doesn't becomes increasingly hard. Browserscope is an open source, community-driven project for profiling web browsers. The goals are to foster innovation by tracking and sharing browser functionality and performance. Learn how you can use this cloud resource.

This talk surveys the FLOSS copyleft compliance problems that were and are encountered, and how they have changed historically. Much progress has been made since the 1990s, but widespread adoption of GPL'd and LGPL'd software in embedded systems has led to more violations than ever before. This talk explains how our community meets these challenges to improve worldwide copyleft compliance.

A review of three open data projects, from a developer's perspective: assembling a map of poetry posts, crowd-sourcing photos of Heritage Trees, and showcasing Portland's extensive collection of Public Art. Includes practical tips, such as using CouchDB to manage datastores that continue to evolve based on citizen input. Ideal for anyone hoping to get their community engaged in open data projects.

With systems such as Grid Engine, Condor and others, it is relatively easy these days for organizations to create robust distributed compute farms. See how the Grid::Request Perl module can make the authoring, submission and control of large distributed jobs easy and in a scheduler agnostic manner.

Review worst practices for releasing software: how to destroy scope in a single meeting; "death sprints" (more agile than death marches); how to avoid testing; how to make your software impossible to configure; and finally, when pushing out a webapp release, how to make your ops team hate you. This tongue in cheek session will review things learned painfully and late at night.

Whether you’re just rolling out a new project, or you’re maintaining ten years and three major versions of legacy code, good documentation is vital for your users. They won't bother downloading your software if they can’t work out what it does, and if all you have is the bare-bones documentation to help them to get up and running, you’ll end up spending more time than you want to on support.

Tropo is a cloud communications platform for voice, SMS, and IM. In addition to the hosted service, we have opened the source of the core platform. In this session, we’ll talk about the lessons learned from running a cloud service and a parallel open source project. We did a lot wrong, and we got many things right. We’ll discuss what we’ve learned about product management, release management, marketing, and third party licensing.

• Source Control – How we sync our internal source code with our external open source repository
• Release management – How testing, releases, and change notifications differ between hosting and open source. Releases to one lag behind the other, so how do you manage that?
• Marketing – How do your open source offerings affect the cloud offerings? Should you market them both through the same web site?
• Licensing – If your cloud product contains services, features, or technologies that are licensed from third parties, how does your open source release cope?

Nowadays many modern web applications are solely relying on JavaScript to render their frontend and only provide an API endpoint at their backend, resulting in a much more fluent and desktop-application-like user experience. But if you want to create mashups, load data from many different places or include external widgets into your site, you are quickly running into boundaries because of browser and security restrictions. In this presentation I will talk about techniques, some older, some brand new, and show you examples which will help you to:

make API calls to external domains.
authenticate these calls through OAuth without compromising your secrets.
load external content and JavaScript widgets safely.
send JavaScript messages between frames on different domains.
get real-time notifications from your backend.
and use the browser to store the some of the user’s data.

Most online education has failed to work, for the simple reason that it was designed by engineers instead of educators. The O'Reilly School of Technology has been growing for three years and has deployed multiple certificate series in technology fields. Come and hear from its founder (and a content author who will be familiar to OSCON audiences) the principles that make OST so successful.

A portable app is a program that you can carry around with you on a portable device (USB drive, cloud drive, mobile phone, etc) and use on any Windows or Linux PC you plug it into. This session will cover why making your software portable makes sense and how to do it using open source tools.

With the prevalence of multi-core systems and virtualization, several assumptions made during the design & optimization of PHP & APC are no longer valid. This talk covers the basic under-the-hood changes that have gone into making PHP perform better on multiple cores & virtualized environments.

Developers deploy production code more than 20 times per day at Etsy. Small rapid changes allow us to move fast, detect failure, and respond quickly. This works for a number of cultural and technical reasons. Learn about the tool we built, Deployinator, to automate this processand how we accomplish this effectively.

The move to pervasive computing is increasing the speed of production and lowering the bars to entry. The Arts & Crafts movement of was a reaction to the commoditization and division of labour. Perhaps it is time to look again at the idea that craftsmen should take pleasure in their work produce things which please their customers.

jemalloc is primarily known as a high performance memory allocator, but Facebook has evolved it to also provide numerous tools for tracking application behavior and detecting memory errors. Jason Evans will demonstrate how to use jemalloc for diagnosing memory errors in large-footprint and/or long-running applications, whether during application development or after deployment.

This talk explores the similarities and differences between Volunteers and Contributors and the various ways to keep "motivational paychecks" from bouncing. Developers can always point to their code as "proof" of contribution, but what can we give our non-developer volunteers as their "proof" of contribution.

The Google Android platform has sky rocketed in popularity over the last few years, boasting uncounted devices and a vibrant development community. We aim to pull back the curtain on the behind the scenes infrastructure that supports this world wide development effort from Gerrit code review to the servers that push the source code.

Building a strong community is hard. People are diverse and have different interests. So how to gather them and make things happen in a sustainable and constant way? For the past years, Rio's community kept growing strong. Dozens of different initiatives started to emerge resulting on a "community overflow" spread all over the country. We've learned from it, and now we can share our recipe.