Personal schedule for Thom Williams

The future of design is everywhere a user touches our product or service—digital or physical. Web and other digital practitioners must move beyond the screen to designing a holistic customer experience that is seamless across channels and devices. In this interactive workshop, Samantha will provide specific tools for designing for a full experience lifecycle across all channels and touchpoints. Read more.

In the Matrix, the hero Neo learns Kung Fu in 30 seconds. But in the real world, it takes a three hour OSCON tutorial to master such a skill! In this tutorial, you'll learn what makes Erlang so powerful and how to use it to build your own scalable, fault tolerant distributed systems. At the end, you you'll wake up, turn to your friends and say, "I know Erlang". Read more.

Organizations and individuals seriously involved in Android development should consider testing as a pillar in their strategy. In this session we will analyze the components available in the Android platform to support unit testing, Test Driven Development, performance tests, test automation, code coverage analysis and Continuous Integration. Read more.

So you've shipped an API. But what if you had to ship over 100 APIs? Come hear the lessons Google learned, and the unique challenges we faced, as we scaled our system for developing and serving APIs from a handful to over 100. Read more.

Netflix has created one of the most beloved and, at times, controversial consumer products of the last decade. Two veteran executives of the company, leaders of product design and product engineering,will give a detailed, behind-the-scenes look at how the experiment-oriented culture of Netflix drives product decisions. Read more.

What do data analytics and negotiation theory have in common? In this talk, community management adviser David Eaves will outline how these two disciplines form the core of a new Science of Community Management: an approach to measure and manage contributors to make participation less frustration and more productive. Read more.

Medical devices can no longer be seen as standalone components because of the significant clinical data they collect. Creating connected devices is a major requirement for most manufacturers and this talk with show how to use modern, open source and open software architecture techniques to build connected devices. Read more.

Whether you're consumer or provider, getting the API right is a puzzle. This session gives the best practices for making this relationship easier all round, with clear PHP-based examples and a few war stories to go with them. Read more.

If open APIs and open data are the new open source, then what makes a good API into a great API? This session is a deep-dive on helping you build better APIs. And designing an open API is a lot harder than it looks: protocols, data formats, optimizations, security, abstractions, and more. This session draws on our experience at ProgrammableWeb where we've looked at over 5,000 different open APIs. Read more.

Open standards and open architecture support developing countries to build systems in a more thoughtful and pragmatic way. Through this approach, and using these tools, we can follow an example of how Rwanda has begun to design and develop a national health information system, and how this will allow other countries to do the same, more quickly and more effectively then ever before Read more.

We've assembled the first comprehensive history of open source in the US government -- all the major events, publications, policy, and code releases we could collect. And it's mashable. From that data, we learn how the government adopts open source, how policies affects adoption, and how governments have most effectively encouraged their own open source use. Read more.

Web developers dream of continuous deployment: new code in production without a hitch. In this talk I'll cover the full story from building deployable code through working out a build and release process through continuous integration, automation, and continuous deployment. We'll also look at deployment velocity and why CD might not be for you. Read more.

We will look into when it make sense to reduce technical debt, and when it does not. Read more.

Message Queues are a hot topic, but not all are created equal. After reviewing most of the popular choices, I will review my findings and offer suggestions for which to use when, and pros and cons of each. On the list are RabbitMQ, Kafka, Apache Qpid, Kestrel, ZeroMQ and more as time permits. Read more.

Web services are everywhere! I'll give you the context you need to use REST web services, and - more importantly - give you the tools you need to debug what's happening while you do. Attendees will be taught how to understand, sniff and debug HTTP traffic to debug web service calls. They will be given a brief overview of REST web services and an overview of how OAuth authentication works. Read more.

Within 10 years 90% of people will use a smartphone, tablet, or other non-traditional device as their primary computing interface. But what about the other 10%: the professionals who need devices with both power *and* usability? In this session we will explore the the future of desktop apps as they compete with mobile and web based applications and look at new tools & toolkits to build them. Read more.

If you've ever written any code to authenticate wtih Twitter, you may have been confused by all the signature methods and base strings. You'll be happy to know that OAuth 2 has vastly simplified the process, but at what cost? Read more.

Grow, Grow, Grow! People are the life-blood of Open Source Communities. Mozilla has always recognised this in regards to their own success, and are now undertaking a project to expand the community even further with the Mozilla Reps program. This talk will discuss the successes and challenges we have had, and our plans for continued momentum. Read more.