Personal schedule for Ricardo Signes

HTML5 and CSS3 are the new buzz words. Recruiters will soon be asking for 5 to 10 years of HTML5 experience. While we can't give that to you, we can help you stay ahead of the game! In this workshop you will learn what CSS3 and HTML5 features are implementable and how to implement them. Read more.

Moose continues to emerge as the new standard for writing OO libraries in Perl. It provides a powerful, consistent API for building classes with a minimum of code. It can be customized with reusable components, making it easier to refactor your code as you go. This tutorial will explain what Moose is, how its parts work together, and how to start using Moose today to get more done with less. Read more.

Growing exponentially over the last decade, Unicode text now comprises over 95% of the documents retrieved over the web, while in other collections, it is often 100% Unicode. This tutorial shows Perl programmers how to manage Unicode data. Read more.

Quick and effective jump start for using Apache Solr, the Lucene-based search server. Solr powers the search and discovery systems of sites such as Zappos, Smithsonian's collections, The Motley Fool, Orbitz, and many many others. This three hour session will give you the basics to immediately begin using Solr on your own data. Read more.

Not sure whether you want to run out and upgrade to Perl 5.14? Have your eyes glazed over trying to read the list of changes from previous versions? This talk walks through the most useful changes for day-to-day use, with practical examples of how to get the most out of Perl 5.14. Read more.

Ever wish you could live in a cabin in the woods? Geeks, with their high income, superior problem solving skills, and ability to work remotely, are often in a better position to realize such Thoreauvian dreams. Based on my own experiences of going from the cubicles of Silicon Valley to the backwoods of Northern California, the talk will cover the ins, outs, hows and whys of life in the woods. Read more.

Plack and PSGI have opened a new landscape of developing Perl web frameworks and servers. Now that most web frameworks have adopted PSGI support, this talk will focus on the other side of the ecosystem: how to deploy Plack based web applications. Read more.

Ever have a code release go horribly wrong? Have a routine system upgrade turn into 12 hours of downtime? Had to field angry phone calls from engineers, customers and your boss? Sometimes things go horribly wrong. This talk will teach you how to plan for the worst, minimize risk and recover gracefully from failure. Read more.

Think Zork is dead? Wrong! Come see what 30 years of evolution has done to the fascinating intersection of creative writing and programming. Witness the amazing open source tools that have made it possible: virtual machines, domain-specific programming languages, and IDEs. Learn about the intense indie community that develops these works, and how you can get involved as either a player or writer. Read more.

In "topics we're looking for", the call for papers has the phrase "open, open, open". And the word "open" appears eleven times. The word "source" appears thrice. This talk is about "source, source, source." It is the intelligibility, the accessibility, the understandability of the *source* code and data which creates community and collaboration. Presenting source patterns and anti-patterns. Read more.

Plaid is a new programming language with native support for typestate and permissions. Typestate captures the changing states an object can be in, allowing the object's interface, representation, and behavior to change. A gradual (optional) type system tracks the typestate of objects, using permissions like "unique" to reason in the presence of aliasing. The PL's power is demonstrated by examples. Read more.

Gamification is a critical trend, affecting industries from finance to fashion and beyond. But how does gamification affect open source, software development and community? How can we leverage the techniques of engagement to build better software and connect with end users. And, how do we make our lives more fun in the process? Read more.

You can now easily place a trivially sized computing device anywhere a power plug is present. This fast paced session will provide a complete, hands-on review of the currently available Plug format devices, their capabilities, advantages and pitfalls. We will demonstrate development and debugging on the most recent Sheevaplug-class device as a hands-on introduction to embedded Linux environments. 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.

Languages with first class functions are different. Callbacks and `each' are just the start - the fun really begins when you start learning from the Lisp guys and writing code that writes code that writes code. Think differently about your Javascript and do more with less code Read more.

"I'm sorry I coined the term 'objects' for this topic ... the big idea is "messaging"' - Alan Kay Stop thinking about objects and start thinking about the messages you're sending and how they can be handled and you will have simpler methods. In this talk we cover a couple of key patterns and see how they open the door to simpler, clearer, more extensible code. Read more.

The current buzz in K-12 education is about 21st Century skills and self-directed learning. But this vision is at odds with the passive consumer attitude of many of our current students. Open Source can be the transformative key by enabling engaged cooperation on a global scale on projects of substance. Come learn about Makerbot 3D printers, humanitarian FOSS projects and the new Open IT Lab. Read more.

This presentation relates my experience teaching Python as a tool for creative writing---or, more specifically, as a tool for creatively reading, transforming, and generating poetic text. Code examples link Python with contemporary practices in creative writing (cut-ups, flarf, generative poetics). Discussion will include hints, tips, and obstacles in using Python in a pedagogical environment. Read more.

How does Unicode support across major platforms, including Java, Perl, Python, Ruby, and more, stack up? Who's doing the best job, and who's failing miserably? Is anyone doing a good job? Does anyone actually implement to standard, and to what extent? I'll compare the major platforms to separate the losers from the not-so-losers. Read more.

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. Read more.

Git makes so much more sense when you understand how it really works. It only has two tricks, and they're really simple, but explanations go on about Directed Acyclic Graphs and Octopus Merges and a bunch of CS jargon nobody understands. Feh. You can illustrate and understand git using just children's toys! Read more.