Personal schedule for Richard Fontana

Doing more with less? How about learning one language and doing everything with it: client-side browser scripting, server-side programming with node.js, shell scripting, cross-OS desktop applications, browser extensions, photoshop scripting and even native phone apps. Come learn how to leverage "the world's most misunderstood language". Read more.

8 years ago, I moved from my tuned Linux desktop to OS X. This closed-source platform has attracted many developers with its BSD underpinnings and excellent user interface. Can a developer pampered by sleek design ever go back? I'm going to show you how to break the closed-source habit and run a true open-source environment without sacrificing usability. Read more.

The Go programming language was designed to make programming productive and efficient. Go is a concurrent language that compiles quickly to machine code yet has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. This talk is an introduction to Go that focuses on how the design of the language helps it achieves those goals. Read more.

This talk is about the evolution of Python. We will discuss Python 2 and Python 3: what the compatibility issues are, what the main differences are, and also talk about migration, Python 2.6 & 2.7, and other transition tools. Read more.

Come learn about the Perl community's plans for our 2012 release: Perl 5.16. We'll look at how we're refactoring the core language, the Perl distribution and the Perl development community. Read more.

The OpenStack project was launched last summer during OSCON by Rackspace, NASA, and a number of other cloud technology leaders in an effort to build a fully-open cloud computing platform. It is a collection of scalable, secure, standards-based projects consisting of compute, storage, images, and more. This session will introduce the projects, the principles behind it, and how to get started. Read more.

Formal contributor agreements give rise to a number of social, economic and ethical problems, threatening to undermine many of the advantages of open source development, without offering any real legal benefits. Projects and their sponsoring organizations should implement explicit but informal contribution policies that are grounded in free software tradition and that encourage community-building. Read more.

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. Read more.