Personal schedule for Alex Martelli
Download or subscribe to Alex Martelli's schedule.
Josh Berkus (PostgreSQL Experts, Inc.)
Average rating:
(4.23, 30 ratings)
In 10 years of fixing other people's SQL databases, I've noticed that the less the original developer knew, the more complex the databases are ... and the more complex the problems. Here I offer a refreshing approach for simple SQL database design.
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wesley chun (Google)
Average rating:
(3.69, 13 ratings)
Python is an interpreted, cross-platform, object-oriented programming language that is popular for a wide range of applications, one of which is Internet programming. This tutorial introduces current Python programmers to three distinct areas of Internet programming, each in self-contained one-hour lectures with a demonstration of code following each lecture topic.
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Matthew Russell (Digital Reasoning Systems)
Average rating:
(2.93, 14 ratings)
Dojo is an industrial strength JavaScript toolkit that drastically simplifies the effort it takes to develop an application for the open web. This 3 hour tutorial provides an intense introduction to all of the "good parts" of the toolkit and includes a number of demonstrations built in real time (as opposed to primarily being a lecture) in the spirit of a "labs style" environment.
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Jacob Kaplan-Moss (Revolution Systems, LLC)
Average rating:
(3.50, 4 ratings)
There's plenty of material (documentation, blogs, books) out there that'll help you write a site using Django... but then what? You've still got to test, deploy, monitor, and tune the site; failure at deployment time means all your beautiful code is for naught. This tutorial examines how best to cope when the Real World intrudes on your carefully designed website.
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Alex Martelli (Google)
Average rating:
(3.79, 14 ratings)
Abstraction is a powerful servant, but a dangerous master. We code, design, think, debug ... on a tower of abstractions. Spolsky's Law tells us that "All abstractions leak". This talk explores why they leak, why that's often a problem, what to do about it; I also cover why sometimes abstractions SHOULD "leak", and how best to produce and consume abstraction layers.
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Steve Souders (Google)
Average rating:
(3.95, 19 ratings)
Steve Souders, author of High Performance Web Sites and creator of YSlow, discusses his new insights into faster web pages including how to load JavaScript asynchronously, optimizing CSS, and sharding resources across multiple domains.
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Brent McConnell (Novell)
Average rating:
(2.50, 2 ratings)
With collaboration and community tools like blogs, wikis, forums, tagging, and rating systems, the enterprise has become filled with collaboration tools to enable productivity. However, the lack of integration in all these platforms creates not only Data Silos but Collaboration Silos.
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Ben Collins-Sussman (Google, Inc.),
Brian Fitzpatrick (Google, Inc.)
Average rating:
(3.88, 16 ratings)
A pervasive elitism hovers in the background of collaborative software development: everyone secretly wants to be seen as a genius. In this talk, we discuss how to avoid this trap and gracefully exchange personal ego for personal growth and super-charged collaboration. We'll also examine how software tools affect social behaviors, and how to successfully manage the growth of new ideas.
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Danny O'Brien (Electronic Frontier Foundation)
Average rating:
(4.25, 8 ratings)
Why do we trust our most personal diary entries with only our closest friends -- and distant machines of a faceless social networking service? Why do you hand over to Amazon files and passwords that you wouldn't tell your own mother? EFF's Danny O'Brien explains why innovation still comes from the edge of our networks -- and how the next generation of free software will help.
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Sigurd Magnusson (SilverStripe)
Average rating:
(3.25, 16 ratings)
Web 2.0, Ajax, usability, and thoughtful graphic design are now commonplace, but open source web applications are lagging behind. Learn techniques that will make your project easier to use, more productive, less prone to user-frustration, and more successful.
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Matt Harrison (FusionIO)
Average rating:
(3.00, 11 ratings)
Sure you it's easy to throw a script over the fence for your users, but how do you deal with maintenance, testing, packaging and distributing your scripts? This talk will cover best practices for python scripting including any changes needed for version 3.
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Danese Cooper (Wikimedia Foundation and Open Source Initiative),
David Smith (REvolution Computing)
Average rating:
(4.00, 14 ratings)
Risk and chance play a huge part in our daily lives, yet the
human brain doesn't come pre-loaded with the right software to make
intuitive decisions about them. This talk is to
provide some illumination in the basic principles to help you
understand and quantify risk, and to introduce you to the open-source
language R, an essential tool for finding statistical solutions to
your own problems.
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Benjamin Mako Hill (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Average rating:
(4.00, 3 ratings)
This talk provides a humorous description of an argument in favor of free and open source software based on what I call "antifeatures:" functionality that technology developers charge users to not include. From DRM to crippled OSes to digital cameras, I will show off many of the most egregious antifeatures and describe how open source both makes them impossible and helps users work around them.
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Juhan Sonin (Involution Studios)
Average rating:
(3.86, 7 ratings)
Sex and Design Axioms describes the minimal rule set for designing interfaces: the foundational concepts that are required knowledge for designers and engineers to create usable and elegant interfaces.
It is the analog for The Elements of Style by Strunk and White on user interface that encompasses layout, interaction, visual design, and prototyping tenets.
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Mike Olson (Cloudera)
Average rating:
(2.82, 17 ratings)
Hadoop is a powerful open source tool for analyzing large volumes of data. I'll provide an overview of Hadoop's architecture and describe some real-world use cases.
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Donald Smith (The Eclipse Foundation)
Average rating:
(4.20, 5 ratings)
Have you ever had a manager or legal department slow down your project why they try to figure out software licensing issues? This session will arm you with all the key information you need to join the conversation and recognize when your lawyer is trying to pull a fast one, versus when you’re facing a legitimate challenge.
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Bill Karwin (Karwin Software Solutions)
Average rating:
(4.33, 6 ratings)
SQL is from Mars, Objects are from Venus.
This talk is for software developers who know SQL but are stuck trying to implement common object-oriented structures in an SQL database. Mimicking polymorphism, extensibility, and hierarchical data in the relational database paradigm can be confusing and awkward, but they don't have to be.
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Akkana Peck (*)
Average rating:
(4.00, 9 ratings)
This talk will cover ways of configuring a Linux distribution to run
efficiently on slow CPU, low memory machines. You can get big
performance gains from areas such as:
* speeding up the boot process
* options for lightweight window managers
* performance tools that can help you find bottlenecks
* tuning your kernel
* Finding lightweight alternatives to big applications
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Michael Driscoll (Metamarkets)
Average rating:
(3.61, 18 ratings)
The age of Big Data demands open-source tools that move beyond storage towards analytics: tools to turn terabytes into insights. R is an open-source language for statistical computing and graphics, and an extensible, embeddable tool for the analysis of large data sets. In this session, I showcase R's power by building predictive models for Brazilian soybean harvests and baseball slugger salaries.
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Location: Exhibit Hall 3
Moderated by: James Turner
Average rating:
(4.00, 3 ratings)
Join us for a live web-casted roundtable discussion with some of the leading figures in open source languages such as Ruby, Perl, Python and PHP, hosted by O'Reilly Media. We'll debate and discuss the strengths and weaknesses, and what the sweet spots are in the application space for each language.
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Simon Wardley (Leading Edge Forum (CSC))
Average rating:
(4.37, 19 ratings)
In today's computing world, it can often feel like we are drowning in wave after wave of new trends such as mashups, service oriented architecture and cloud computing. This sea of concepts are simply the manifestation of an underlying change in IT. In this session we will explore what is happening and why open source is the dominant model for the future.
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Chris DiBona (Google, Inc.),
Leslie Hawthorn (Red Hat)
Average rating:
(3.67, 9 ratings)
In this talk, Chris DiBona will bring the audience up to date on recent Google activities in open source. We will specifically cover advances in Android’s open source deployment infrastructure, including the Gerrit and Repo tools, and the directions those tools are taking.
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Rich Wolski (University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB))
Average rating:
(4.00, 14 ratings)
We will present Eucalyptus -- Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for
Linking Your Programs to Useful Systems -- an open source software
infrastructure that implements IaaS-style cloud computing.
The goal of Eucalyptus is to allow sites with existing clusters and server
infrastructure to host an elastic computing service that
is interface-compatible with Amazon's AWS.
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Auke Kok (Intel)
Average rating:
(3.00, 3 ratings)
From the early 80s to the early 2000s computers and software got faster. But in the last 5 years the perception of performance hasn't really changed - or has even gotten worse! In this presentation we'll explain why it is hard to be fast, walk the audience step by step through one example where we addressed the issue and talk about ways to look at the problem more systematically.
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Dave Neary (Red Hat)
Average rating:
(3.00, 2 ratings)
Most companies who start working with free software projects have trouble. They run over common stumbling blocks. Questions go unanswered, patches go unreviewed. Why does it take so much time and evergy to be a good citizen? This presentation will outline the problems, and will give some metrics which you can use to evaluate a community's health before marrying them.
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David Ascher (Mozilla Messaging),
Dan Mosedale (Mozilla)
Average rating:
(3.67, 9 ratings)
Thunderbird 3 is nearing release -- in this developer-oriented talk, David Ascher and Dan Mosedale will talk about what Thunderbird 3 will mean to people who want to take an active role in managing their email lives.
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Richard Fontana (Red Hat, Inc.)
Average rating:
(4.33, 3 ratings)
FOSS can be seen as a new kind of legal system that facilitates
sharing rights in code. Viewed in this way, FOSS can benefit
from greater public knowledge of code origins and licensing
rules. My talk will focus on practical guidance for projects seeking
to improve legal certainty in the code they write and use. I
will conclude with some longer-term institutional proposals.
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Stormy Peters (GNOME Foundation)
Average rating:
(3.50, 2 ratings)
While consumers and the open source community don't interact often, users are important to projects because users test software, spread the word, motivate developers, lend credibility, contribute financially and participate in users groups. Come learn why users are important to an open source project and how they can be more involved.
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Michael Schwern (eval Empire)
Average rating:
(3.69, 13 ratings)
Geeks have a special relationship with The Truth. Nothing is more important than correcting a falsehood, no matter how small, and nothing is more odious than not telling The Truth. Unfortunately the meaning is often mangled and the end result is the opposite, a lie. This leads to misunderstanding, mangled interfaces and the myth of the stupid user.
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David Fetter (PgExperts)
Average rating:
(2.64, 11 ratings)
PostgreSQL 8.4 is the first Open Source database management system to handle trees and lists using SQL:2008-compliant Common Table Expressions and Windowing functions. You'll learn how these work, see intriguing examples, and walk out ready to use them to your advantage.
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Jacinta Richardson (Perl Training Australia)
Average rating:
(4.00, 2 ratings)
The president of your committee is doing most of the work and none of the management. The secretary hasn't written the minutes for any of the meetings for the last 6 months (you wrote the last 4 agendas). The treasurer can't access the bank account, and you haven't heard from your publicity officer since you started planning the big event. Welcome to the fun of volunteer communities!
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David Wheeler (PostgreSQL Experts, Inc.)
Average rating:
(4.29, 14 ratings)
You unit test your application API. You unit test your presentation layer. You write integration and acceptance tests. But your database is tested only as a side-effect to testing everything else. That's a pretty important part of the stack to just leave to the assumption it works as expected!
Come to this talk to learn about the tools that enable integrated unit tests for your database.
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Bradford Stephens (Drawn to Scale)
Average rating:
(3.14, 7 ratings)
The end of "scale-up" computing is near. The coming wave of web-scale
data is too big to justify exponentially increasing hardware costs for
decreasing returns. Apache's "Cloud Stack" (Hadoop, Lucene, HBase,
etc) is enabling Visible Technologies to move from a non-scalable
MS-exclusive platform to a large cluster processing millions of pieces
of content a day.Here's what we learned.
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Elaine Wherry (Meebo)
Average rating:
(4.00, 8 ratings)
Baroque harpsichordists excelled at taking simple melodies and creating elaborate, beautiful pieces of music. But in their desire to push the boundaries of experimentation, these keyboard virtuosi eventually ornamented the music beyond the limits of good taste, making the composer’s original melody unrecognizable. Something similar happens in web design.
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Karen Sandler (GNOME Foundation),
Simon Phipps (Open Source Initiative),
Gervase Markham (Mozilla Foundation),
Larry Augustin (SugarCRM),
Chris Messina (Google)
Average rating:
(4.00, 3 ratings)
Trademark law is designed to prevent confusion in the market place but understanding how it can benefit the FOSS community can often be confusing. This panel will discuss whether it is useful to register a trademark and, if so, how to permit its use by others. Various policies and enforcement strategies will be evaluated from corporate and non-profit perspectives, often in strong disagreement.
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Bruce Lawson (Opera Software ASA)
Average rating:
(4.42, 12 ratings)
A pragmatic look at HTML 5 by experimenting with converting a real site to HTML 5 - how does it work? Where it useful and where is it annoying? How is support in current browsers?
Read more.
Douglas Crockford (Yahoo! Inc.)
Average rating:
(3.88, 8 ratings)
How JSON overcame intolerance, inurement, and death threats to become the preferred data interchange format.
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Damian Conway (Thoughtstream)
Average rating:
(4.47, 19 ratings)
The usual smorgasbord of new and improbably useful modules beamed straight into your mind from the secret island hideaway of Perl's own Dr Evil.
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Paul Scott (DSTV Online)
Average rating:
(4.00, 1 rating)
XMPP is a cheap, low bandwidth alternative to the web in bandwidth poor countries. This talk will show how we have used XMPP networks to address social problems like gansterism, drug abuse and HIV AIDS.
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Jonathan Ellis (DataStax)
Average rating:
(3.85, 13 ratings)
Replication. Partitioning. Relational databases. Bigtable. Dynamo.
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to scaling your database, and the CAP theorem proved that there never will be. This talk will explain the advantages and limits of the approaches to scaling traditional relational databases, as well as the tradeoffs made by the designers of newer systems like Google's Bigtable.
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Bryan O'Sullivan (Serpentine Green Design)
Average rating:
(4.50, 2 ratings)
The Haskell language makes it possible to write elegant code while achieving top-notch performance. We'll introduce you to the features that make fast code possible, focusing on one of the newest and most exciting techniques for number crunching and text processing: stream fusion.
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