GitHub CodeConf 2016

CodeConf LA 2016

June 27 - June 29

CodeConf LA will converge June 27-29, 2016 in sunny Los Angeles for three days of unforgettable presentations and discussions.

This year’s event will focus on systems engineering projects, practices, and programs in the open source community. We'll explore topics ranging from systems programming practices to operating applications at scale over three days and more than 30 sessions, lightning talks, and workshops.

Josh Aas

Let's Encrypt

Josh Aas is a Co-Founder and Executive Director of Internet Security Research Group, the organization behind Let's Encrypt. He is also a Senior Technology Strategist with Mozilla Corporation. In the past Josh worked on Firefox and Gecko in the areas of networking, security, media, and platform support.

TBD
Michael Bernstein

Code Climate

Michael R. Bernstein lives in Takoma Park, MD and spends most of his time thinking about pottery, obscure LPs, food, and the intersection of philosophy and Computer Science.

The Perfect Programming Language

After years of searching, I have found the perfect programming language. It is capable of anything, and is all things to all people. Unfortunately, I'd have to recommend that you don't use it. In this talk, I'll share the language with you, describe its design and history, and explain why using it is a terrible idea.
Nadia Eghbal

Nadia explores how the software industry can better support open source infrastructure, highlighting current gaps in funding and knowledge. Her work is supported by the Ford Foundation. Nadia is a former founder and VC based in San Francisco.

TBD
Mitchell Hashimoto

Hashicorp

Mitchell Hashimoto is best known as the creator of Vagrant, Packer, Terraform and Consul. Mitchell is the founder of HashiCorp, a company that builds powerful and elegant DevOps tools. He is also an O’Reilly author. He is one of the top GitHub users by followers, activity, and contributions. “Automation obsessed,” Mitchell solves problems with as much computer automation as possible.

TBD
Kelsey Hightower

Google

Kelsey Hightower has worn every hat possible throughout his career in tech, and enjoys leadership roles focused on making things happen and shipping software. Kelsey is a strong open source advocate focused on building simple tools that make people smile. When he is not slinging Go code, you can catch him giving technical workshops covering everything from programming to system administration, and his favorite Linux distro (CoreOS).

TBD
Nick Doiron

The Asia Foundation

@mapmeld

Nick Doiron is a traveling software engineer and mapmaker with the Asia Foundation. In the past he was a web developer at the Museum of Modern Art (NYC) and a 2012 Code for America fellow.

Demolitions and Dalí: Web Dev and Data in a Graph Database
Neo4j is a NoSQL graph database based on links between records. This workshop uses Python code samples to walk through two real-world examples of linked data, including designing a graph database from scratch, for art and artists at the Museum of Modern Art, and analyzing demolition data by processing road network data from OpenStreetMap.
E. Dunham

Mozilla

@qedunham

E. Dunham is the DevOps engineer for Mozilla research, which in practice means shepherding servers for the Rust language and Servo browser engine web presence, continuous integration, and release infrastructure. An alum of the OSU Open Source Lab, E.’s hobbies include carpentry, gardening, and filing “please license your code” issues on GitHub.

Rust's Community Automation
Rust is a systems programming language that runs blazingly fast, prevents segfaults, and guarantees thread safety. Behind the scenes, Rust is also a community that nurtures new contributors, consistently enforces its code of conduct, and maintains a high-quality codebase. This talk will discuss the implementation details, as well as the social motivations and effects, of the customized infrastructure and workflow practices which allow the small core team to have such a significant impact.
Tyrone Grandison

US Department of Commerce

@tyrgr

Dr. Grandison is currently the Deputy Chief Data Officer at the US Department of Commerce. As a government technology leader, he believes that our focus should be on improving the lives of Americans and creating positive outcomes for all. Formerly, he was a White House Presidential Innovation Fellow (2014-15) working with the US Department of Labor and the US CENSUS Bureau on their data and API (application programming interface) initiatives. Dr. Grandison has over 20 years experience in software engineering, security and privacy.

Enabling Data-Driven Public-Private Collaborations
The U.S. Department of Commerce collects, processes and disseminates data on a range of issues that impact our nation. Having a host of data and ensuring that this data is open and accessible to all are two separate issues. This session will cover the Commerce Data Usability Project (CDUP) - a community-driven public-private partnership to help data scientists, programmers and other users to access open knowledge from our open data.
Elizabeth K. Joseph

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

@pleia2

Automation and Tools Engineer at HPE working on the OpenStack project Infrastructure.

Building an Open Source Cloud
Over the past several years companies around the world have starting using OpenStack and working with partners to provide internal cloud solutions. However, these solutions leverage proprietary components, from platforms developed in house to manage resources to working with vendors who come in with their own solutions. It doesn't necessarily have to be this way. Over the past year I've worked on two major projects that leveraged the official, open source Puppet modules for OpenStack to produce fully open source OpenStack clouds use for training and in production. The tooling is relatively easy to learn and in both cases the teams developing the clouds it were distributed. I'll be diving into the basics of both these projects, challenges the teams working on them faced and overcame, and how we've been able to work with the OpenStack project directly to improve the deployment story for all users.
Anton McConville

IBM Canada

@antonmc

Anton McConville is a digital designer and developer with a passion for mobile apps made with iOS or HTML. With backgrounds in UX and engineering, Anton works hard to make apps that are well coded, thoughtfully designed, and that try to push on boundaries. He currently works as developer advocate in IBM's Cloud unit.

Natural language analysis of Bowie's personas
From 'Space Oddity' to 'Blackstar', Bowie inspired us with his diverse personas. What can natural language processing reveal about those iconic characters? That's the mission of 'Ziggy' a little Python app that builds a database of lyrics, and digs into the style and tone of writing within them. This session explores the findings, and shows how it works. We'll consider real world use cases, and future iterations.
Mike McQuaid

GitHub

@MikeMcQuaid

Mike McQuaid is a software engineer at GitHub. He maintains the Homebrew OS X package manager and has contributed to a wide array of open-source projects.

Managing a healthy open-source community
Managing an open-source community is easy when your project is small but grows harder the larger your project becomes. Learn from a Homebrew maintainer for 6 years and GitHub employee, about how to grow your project’s community, the important groupings of users to consider and how to keep them all happy.
Emily Xie

Recurse Center

@emilyxxie

Emily Xie is on programming sabbatical at the Recurse Center, where she is pursuing algorithmic art and data visualization. Previously, she was a software engineer on the Devtools team at Wayfair, where she worked on various Git-related projects. Emily currently lives in NYC, and enjoys photography, cooking, yoga, and video games.

Dissecting Gits Guts
How does Git work? We’ll use Git’s plumbing commands to dissect the underlying structures that constitute Git and discuss how it is essentially structured as a Merkle DAG.
Tracy Osborn

DreamFactory

@limedaring

Tracy Osborn is a designer, developer, and entrepreneur living in the California Bay Area. She’s a part of the developer relations team at DreamFactory, the author of Hello Web App, and creator of WeddingLovely. She's also an avid outdoorswoman and would love to go on a hike with you.

Design for Non-Designers
Designing, when you are a programmer, can be super intimidating. This talk will highlight the best ways to improve your design and UX skills so you can create an interfaces that are usable and at least semi-attractive without hiring a designer — guaranteed no designer-y jargon.
Herman Radtke

Nordstromrack.com | HauteLook

@hermanradtke

Herman is a sociologist turned full stack engineer turned VP of Engineering at Nordstromrack.com | HauteLook in Los Angeles. He writes PHP during the day at work and is a Rustacean at night. He spent a past life writing a lot of C and used that knowledge to help maintain the pecl/memcache and pecl/gearman extensions. He is also very passionate about creating and consuming hypermedia APIs. Outside of technology, he enjoys homebrewing, hiking, camping and reading.

Rust: Systems Programming for Web Developers
The modern web stack is made up of a dozen different systems, but too few people know how to create and support them. I believe this is because systems programming has historically had too many barriers to entry, such as memory safety and the trading of expressiveness for performance. Let us explore some of the ways Rust breaks down these barriers and can make systems programming feel much more approachable to web developers.
Anjuan Simmons

Assemble Systems

@anjuan

Anjuan Simmons is a technologist with a successful track record of delivering technology solutions from the user interface to the database. He is currently a software project manager and Certified Scrum Master at a leading construction software manufacturer. He has spoken as South by Southwest Interactive multiple times as well as local and regional technology conferences around the United States.

Lending Privilege
Diversity and inclusion have become hot topics in technology, but you may not know how to you can make a difference. However, this talk will help you understand that, no matter your background, you have privilege and can lend it to marginalized groups in tech.
Cedric Williams

PayPal

@AskCedricW

Cedric Williams is a technologist, advocate, and coach. He aspires to nurture products, businesses, and societies that make a difference in people’s lives. He is currently an InnerSource Advocate with PayPal and fostering the InnerSourceCommons.org community.

Transitioning to InnerSource

InnerSource applies the lessons learned from large-scale distributed open source projects to proprietary engineering. Benefits include increased delivery velocity, smoother collaboration between groups, higher-quality development, and documentation that appears without having to resort to threats of removing the soda machine.

Cedric Williams examines the factors that keep software teams from collaborating effectively, explores the model of development used for Apache Software Foundation projects, and talks about ways to bridge the two approaches. You’ll learn practical guidelines and business justifications for building InnerSource practices in your organization, as well as some antipatterns to watch out for.

Experience level: Experience with developing software in larger and/or older organizations, experience with culture change challenges, and willingness to consider change.
Sonya Mann

@sonyaellenmann

Sonya is a writer and thinker who asks a lot of questions and proposes a lot of answers. Iterating toward a greater understanding of how the world works.

Behavior Design: Teaching Your Users' Security

When you're shipping a product or service -- or a resource that doesn't fit into either category -- you can do a lot of technical work that protects your users behind the scenes. But it's just as important to communicate security and privacy principles to your users, empowering them to take control of their own exposure. Many open-source tools end up being used by people who are less tech-savvy than the creators, and the more accessible you make your security and privacy features, the better.
Florent Vilmart

AmpMe

@flovilmart

Dad, full-stack, engineer, open source contributor.

From closed to open, a tale about Parse

Shaking the world of many mobile developers and startups, Facebook announced Parse was shutting down in 2017. Alongside that announce, parse-server was released on github. We'll discuss in that session the impact it had on the community of developers as well as the bright future open source givers to the popular backend.
John Feminella

Pivotal

@jxxf

John Feminella is an avid technologist, occasional public speaker, and curiosity advocate. At Pivotal he works on helping enterprises transform the way they write, operate, and deploy software. He's also the cofounder of a tiny analytics monitoring and reporting startup named UpHex. John lives in Charlottesville, VA and likes meta-jokes, milkshakes, and referring to himself in the third person in speaker bios

Distributed Consensus with Raft

Getting people to agree to things is sometimes hard. But implementing consensus with computers is harder. And distributed consensus with computers is really hard. How do we do it?

In this talk, we’ll explore one idea of how distributed consensus can work, which the authors call Raft, with several popular open-source implementations. Along the way, we’ll learn about why consensus is challenging, how Raft works in practice, and see a real live example of a system that depends on Raft.
Stephanie Snopek

npm, Inc

@StephSnopek

Stephanie Snopek is a professional problem solver with extensive experience working in advisory and supportive roles in the field of Education. She transitioned into tech in 2015 because of the career opportunities this industry offers, and she's passionate about creating space for other people coming from non-technical backgrounds.

the <3 of npm

npm, Inc., is a small company with a big heart and an even bigger community of users. We support the JavaScript community by running a free open source registry of modules built by developers like you. Along the way, our users need help debugging errors, understanding documentation, and resolving conflict with their peers. In this talk, we'll explore the strategies we use at npm, Inc., to support the global, diverse, passionate & growing community of Node.js developers and npm users.
David Molina

Operation Code

@davidcmolina

When ex-Army Captain Dave Molina couldn't use his education benefits, the New GI Bill, to pay for code school he taught himself to code and in 2014 launched Operation Code. When he's not coordinating and cultivating military veterans in the Operation Code Slack channel, or learning vim, he's busy co-raising three young daughters with his better half in Portland, Oregon.

What happens when military veterans learn to code

Learning to code is complicated. Between Googling your way and figuring it out on your own, military veterans now have a resource at the ready. Is it an open source project? Is it a community of military veterans learning to code? Is it a community of software developers that want to give back? A coding nonprofit? It's all of the above.
Kerri Miller

GitHub

@kerrizor

Crescent Wrenches, Socket Sets, and Other Tools For Debugging

Additional Speakers coming soon.