Tools and Techniques

The class examines (from a geek perspective) seven basic principles of good presentation, covering preparation, content selection, delivery techniques, and handling questions...or the lack thereof. It also explores a dozen simple and practical techniques for making your slides not suck. Read more.

Inkscape is a cross platform, GPL, graphics editor. Its native file format, Scalable Vector Graphic (SVG) is a W3C open standard. This tutorial guides participants through a series of tasks designed to introduce Inkscape's interface and tools, and build foundation skills for creating and modifying vector graphics. Read more.

Matthew McCullough, trainer for GitHub.com, and Tim Berglund, co-presenter of the O'Reilly Git Master Class, will guide you through the fundamentals of Git in three hours of lecture, discussion, and hands-on exercises. Read more.

We'll talk about the roles of A/B testing and similar techniques in web applications, examine an open-source A/B framework for PHP, and present general design ideas that can be applied to building similar systems using other technology stacks. Read more.

Request Tracker (RT) is an enterprise-grade ticketing system designed to help your organization track what needs to get done and what still needs doing. From basic customer service to advanced back-office workflows, RT is flexible enough to keep your processes smooth and effective. This tutorial will cover deployment and day to day use of RT as well as basic customization. Read more.

We've all heard about HTML5 & CSS3, but do we know how to effectively apply all of the new properties and features to our websites? In this tutorial, practical application is the name of the game. We'll cut through the theory and show you how to design and build functional websites using the newest HTML5 tags and CSS3 properties. Read more.

StatusNet (http://status.net/) best known as the Open Source microblogging platform, has a powerful plugin system for building new social networking applications. In this tutorial, the core developers of StatusNet show how to build server-side plugins, API clients, and custom themes to make your own social network tools. Read more.

A look at the state of data storage, management & analysis, from SQL to NOSQL, “NewSQL” and beyond. I will explain why the core premises of data management have changed; tell some of the tales of success and failure I have collected on the topic; share some counterintuitive rules-of-thumb about the sometimes mind-blowing, sometimes nerve-wrecking reality of life with an alternative datastore. 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.

First done at OSCON 2010, we though this session was extremely useful in helping developers work better with Google technology and answer questions they might be baffled about. So, for 40 minutes, we'll be happy to answer nearly any question an engineer might have. Many Googlers covering everything from Android to search will be in attendance and ready to answer your questions. Read more.

SVG as a vector graphics format has been around for many years, but its usefulness has recently blossomed. Web support extending to being native in all major browsers, inclusion in HTML5, iOS device and now Android support are just the beginning of where SVG can be applied. This talk will give an overview of SVG and then present many of the different areas where one might use it today. Read more.

Open source projects have long skimped on presentation & packaging (basically, they are the equivalent of "she has a great personality!"). Let's change that. Open source can be the hot girl too. Learn how developers can create opportunities for designers to contribute to projects. Great design is the best way to draw an audience to your project & build contributor confidence. Read more.

Today's hybrid cars give you the best of both worlds, and hybrid web apps can do the same. We'll walk through how NPR's Project Argo quickly built a blogging platform by combining the strengths of WordPress and Django. Along the way, we'll cover the benefits and drawbacks of this approach, considerations and details of our implementation, and best practices for any hybrid web application. Read more.

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. Read more.

A web API needs documentation, unit tests, functional tests and possibly a WADL. Usually one or more is out of date or just doesn't exist. The Unico DSL can generate all these for you from a natural-language document written by project manager-types. Build a quick API in this session and BELIEVE. Read more.

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. Read more.

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. Read more.

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. Read more.

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. Read more.

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. Read more.

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. Read more.

With the news that IPv4 address allocation is in its final stages, IPv6 is getting a great amount of attention and questions are being asked about whether software works with IPv6. Why should you as an open source developer care? What do you need to think about in your applications? How can you make sure your apps work with IPv6? 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.

Discover a variety of creative techniques for dramatically improving page load speed which focus on low-hanging fruit rather than micro-optimization, and what impact they had when applied to the world's fifth largest website, Wikipedia. Trevor and Roan will explore optimization beyond server load, minification and gzip, and offer up new open source libraries to help others do the same. Read more.