Open Source Bridge

Nicole will talk to us about Tech Reform

Prototype early and test often! Learn how to brainstorm an idea, create a simple paper prototype, and conduct some guerilla user tests.

Based on The Responsible Communication Style Guide, this workshop is an introduction to the concepts in the style guide. It also covers how a style guide can be an effective part of the workflow when creating and promoting technology projects (including open source).

Technical interviews can be intimidating, but it’s easier if you have confidence in yourself and your ability to answer complicated questions. The hardest questions are not about sorting algorithms, but how you’ll work in a team, how you’ll resolve conflicts, and what it will be like to manage and work with you. This workshop exists to address the skills and theories of presenting yourself as confident, capable, and coachable.

Find out what it took to get Certbot’s Nginx parser working, which is an… exciting… tale at the intersection of programming language theory, regular expressions, formal grammars, and the utter lack of these in a fine, aged codebase.

WTF are containers anyway? And what aren’t they? And what is all this other … stuff? Come find out.

How do you load code faster? Load less of it! I’ll talk about how we used static analysis and aggressive refactoring to reduce the time to reload code after a change by 85%.

The Open Steno Project is dedicated to the creation of open source software, hardware, and educational materials to bring machine stenography to the masses! Want to be a speed demon typist like the court reporters you see in movies? Now you can!

Flatpak is a technology by the GNOME Project that runs applications in a runtime and sandbox. This talk will explore the shift in how applications will be distributed in the future and how it is lowering the bar of entry of hacking on increasingly large codebases like GNOME.

If you’re on a budget but you need a website that doesn’t suck and actually helps your business / organization / cause, I’ll show you how to create one for under $1000 / year and a lot of sweat equity.

Conventional wisdom says that using the cloud means giving up privacy and control. But maybe crypto is actually literally magic and we can have our cake and eat it too? We’re mostly not there yet, but let’s talk about some of the ways that we’re getting close.

Learn about the unexpected use cases of your online content and the technologies available to help expand the breadth of its distribution.

Open Data Kit (ODK) replaces paper surveys with smartphones. ODK tools are open-source and are primarily used by social good organizations to collect data quickly, accurately, offline, and at scale. ODK has been used to collect billions of data points around the world.

In this talk, Yaw Anokwa and Hélène Martin, two of the leaders of the ODK community discuss the problems that inspired ODK’s design, demonstrate the impact the tools are having, and describe how the Open Source Bridge community can contribute to an open-source, community-driven future for mobile data collection tools.

On the surface, this story shares vignettes about my Mom. But its purpose is to increase awareness of human resources in technology, and overlooked pathways of young technologiests. “c. 1973 RCA hired her for the chip prototyping lab. Her new co-workers compared each other’s crochet at lunch. A marathon week of late-night needlework bought her acceptance and promotion to supervisor. She told me stories about the ladies who wrapped wires for NASA a few years before, about women’s centuries of fingers in technical fiber-crafts finally being noticed when it put men on the moon.”

How-To-Create rapid, reusable, web-based User Interface design prototypes with Open Source tools and Creative Commons licensed assets

A great product has a built-in “unboxing” planned from the start. It never leaves customers thinking about how to do something or figure it out. The funny thing about the companies that make those product experiences is that they usually don’t give the same treatment to their employees. Let’s start thinking of onboarding as unboxing – and start thinking of our team members as humans!

The Open Source Movement has a few defining traits, such as the the do-it-yourself, stick-it-to-the-man scrappiness; the caring about the people around us and their experience with the software or workplace; and, the way it is forever adaptable to the needs of the situation. Open source and unions have a lot in common – lets get started unionizing open source shops!

Duplication of effort, flawed funding models, and overall lack of project maturity has led to the failure of most open source projects in the international development space. In this talk, we’ll discuss the plans of the Digital Impact Alliance at the United Nations Foundation to help increase those projects’ maturity, quality, and reach — with a goal of advancing an inclusive digital society using open source for the poorest places on the planet.

See how easy and cheap it is to design and build your own ergonomic keyboard with open hardware and software.

The word “code” means different things to different people. In this talk, we explore cryptography and how it’s evolved over time. We look at some key historical events and see how the art of encryption affected our lives.

By 2020 each person will create 1.7 MB of new data per second flooding us in 44 trillion GB of data! What’s this mean? From Uber’s “ride of shame” scandal to the role of Facebook’s news recommender in the presidential election we as developers must ask how we use data and what the implications are for open source software.

Let’s be real: tech companies value engineering skills over most other skills, and it shows in both salaries and decisionmaking. This talk is about why this happens, why it’s problematic, and how we can refocus importance on all the skills that make companies successful.

“topics include research, not losing your way, and not losing your mind.”

Experiences balancing Open Source Community and a viable vendor/consultancy model to promote a sustainable eco-system.

Making open source software translatable is easy, right? You just take out all the strings, put them in a translation file in your git repository, and start accepting pull requests. Simple! Well, not so fast. There’s a lot more to this than meets the eye, and if you take a quick and dirty approach you’ll end up with upset translators, complaints from users, and mysteries like “what is ١٢٬٣٤٥٬٦٧٨ and why does my code want to parse that as a number?”. Thankfully, there are open source resources and libraries that can take care of these things for you.

The developer community has many ways of determining who belongs and who doesn’t. Some of these are helpful, but others intimidate beginners who could go on to be good developers. This talk will provide a framework for differentiation between the good and the bad.

A talk about Google Summer of Code and Outreachy Internship Program with Debian. Discusses Urvika Gola and Pranav Jain’s work with Debian on an open source project for an android ‘Lumicall’ application.

Learn how to devops successfully while automating your infrastructure.

This is intended as a tutorial session for bringing up MicroPython on a common, and reasonably easy to obtain, microcontroller platform. From bare bones, to blinking LEDs and beyond.

How do you make an emulator cross-platform without tying it to a bunch of OS-specific display and user input subsystems? And how do you avoid wasting CPU (and draining the user’s battery) while idle? I’ll tell you how I did it for my own emulator, and help you make your own interactive graphics demo.

Getting a project off the ground is daunting, and most of us aren’t trained in project management and community building skills. At this session, Mozilla Science Lab will help you take your project from idea to reality and give you technical, project management, and community building skills to kickstart your work.

Come on an expedition into the dark corners of your project’s code basement, deep in that directory everyone avoids because it’s filled with spiders and booby traps and two mysterious old versions of JQuery from 2012 that no one even remembers using. Instead of getting exasperated by variables called data and poor command-query separation, learn to use code archaeology as a way to understand your organization better.

I feel passionately that women and epecially minority women in tech need mentors and that those already in tech have a duty to step up for them, even though it means getting out of their comfort zone. How do you mentor minorities? How do you mentor anyone? With kindness and respect.

The new space industry is expanding rapidly, with huge opportunities for open-source contributions. This talk focuses on the case study of Asterank, software that makes space data easier to access and explore. Its analysis and visualization tools have been used in government, private industry, and schools. The project has made public space data more open and usable for millions of people.

This presentation explores an ongoing project to incorporate digital repository building for community archives within a master’s level library and information sciences classroom. The class taught under the pedagogical methods of service learning highlighted (and continues to highlight) the complex relationship between proprietary technology and archival ‘best practices.’ By reimagining this relationship, students were able to look at how open source tools and technologies better accomplished their desired outcomes to build a small-scale repository for their community partner, one whose narratives and materials were representative of feminist activism in the American South.

For many novice speakers, especially technical speakers, the hardest part of presenting is not figuring out what to put in but what to leave out. But what works for an academic paper doesn’t work in a 10 minute presentation, and you risk boring your audience long before you manage to convince them of anything. This talk is intended to be a fun (and perhaps a bit silly) look at the science and the art of being convincing. I will cover how logical fallacies are used in propaganda, lying, and how you can use them to get your point across quickly. And don’t worry, we’ll also talk about how to do this ethically!

A year and 4 months ago, I turned thirteen. According to many sites I use, however, I turned twenty-six. It’s a little odd, so here’s why:

If we’re going to be so religious about our standards and patterns, why not use religious tools to analyze and improve them?

Exegesis is a tool for nuance and understanding in the absolutes found on bikesheds everywhere, such as “replace all vars with const” and “arrow functions will save your eternal soul”.

Did you know there’s a digital sound synthesizer in your browser? There is! It’s called the Web Audio API and it’s accessible from any JavaScript library or framework. I’ll show you how I hacked Web Audio to make microtonal music in the browser.

In this talk we will share why we decided create Refocus: our internally developed, self-service tool for monitoring computing systems. We’ll cover how it is extensible, describe its tech stack of open source components including Node.js, how it differs from other monitoring tools on the market, and how data is modeled in Refocus.

This talk is for you, the documentarian, developer, student, or community member wondering what you can contribute to open source and how to get started. Lucy Wyman discusses several ways open source projects need your help, what to look for in a project you’re contributing to, and some first steps to making your first pull request.

Shared application servers are a vital building block for creating resilient information networks. Recent advances have made them dramatically easier to deploy and maintain in your home/workplace/community. Come for a tour, stay for a deep dive.

Peter Levine, a partner at Andreessen-Horowitz, famously said Red Hat would be the last successful OSS business. A dire forecast for the multitudes building their business atop of open source today. This talk is will dive into basic economic theory, how we’ve applied it at CoreOS, and ultimately describe what the current and next generation of open source business looks like.

Apps and websites routinely expose user information in service of social and interactive goals. But what happens when your user has a stalker? Many of these services will compromise the safety of users who are already at risk. Making things worse, some developers resist making changes, with justifications such as “If someone’s in that much danger, they shouldn’t be doing anything online,” and “It’s basically impossible to defend against a state actor.”

This overview will help developers take the risk factors into account, and make development decisions that puts control back into the hands of the users. There’s no way to perfectly remove the risk of going online if you’re in danger, but people will go online anyway. Many more users at risk are facing technically naive attackers than are facing highly skilled attackers such as state actors.

Icon fonts! CSS-only illustrations! High-resolution GIF animations! Today’s web designers still regularly and enthusiastically employ these techniques… yet they’re all a better fit for SVG, a powerful vector image format that’s already old enough to drive a car.

Threats to personal information security and privacy are proliferating at a rapid pace, as are countermeasures based on open hardware. This talk will review the open hardware information security landscape, from personal password managers and cloud devices to alternative processors that are open all the way down to the transistor level, with a focus on how open silicon is poised to change everything.

As moderators and admins of a mastodon/gnu social instance called Toot.Cat we were quickly propelled into navigating the strange new world of decentralized community stewardship.

Browser automation based on the WebDriver standard is a key step toward web compatibility happiness and web developer happiness. In this session you’ll learn how WebDriver is built into Firefox, why that makes the web better for everyone, and how you can get involved.

Futel has provided free public telephone service, telephone-mediated art, and live human interaction for several years, and was recognized as Portland’s most prolific payphone installer of 2016. Now that we are finally living in the cyberpunk dystopia promised in the 80s, we are poised to seize this moment.

This talk will hype several “homemade” open source video tools specific to the audiovisual digital preservation field built on broadly-used existing open source tools such as FFmpeg and mediainfo. We will discuss how these communities have grown to benefit the field of archiving and how we’ve grown to be able to give back to the main communities.

In this session, we explore ways to improve team cohesion, cooperation, connection, and presence for each other via song.

This presentation talks about how the culture of technology is built around the cultural influence of those who’ve come first to the table. We’ll look into how these narratives are made, what we can do about it, and the best ways these narratives can be challenged to make tech more open and accommodating to those on the outside.

Open source allows anyone to use their skills to change the world—for better or for worse. In an era where the phrase “Fake News!” echoes from the highest office of the land, we have to cast a critical eye on the works that we promote and participate in. Open Data is no exception, and the use of Open Data to generate Fake Analyses is a real issue that can undermine social progress.

Grassroots activists have to deal with many challenges – including the tools they’re using. Sounds like a great opportunity for open source! This session will survey progressive and transpartisan grassroots activists’ needs and today’s solutions (including techniques that work for explicitly intersectional groups), look at some existing open-source offerings and how they could evolve to better meet grassroots activists’ needs, and identify future directions that could be even more impactful.

People new to programming often have to work through barriers of language and learning in order to become proficient and being contributing. Does one of those barriers need to be one’s math skills? Most schools and textbooks seem to think so. Let’s discuss how we’re introducing new developers to programming and whether we can make it more inclusive by removing the mathematics and replacing it with logic.

Walk or ride your bike around Portland long enough and you’ll come across unsafe sidewalk and road closures. To paint a clear picture of this issue, Oregon Walks and The Street Trust (BTA) ran a social media campaign collecting hundreds of photos and videos from citizens using a little tech sauce we whipped up. The pressure was on for City Hall to pass new closure requirements, which they did unanimously. This talk covers the people, the methods, and the open tech used to help move the needle.

On a large open source project like Zulip, we were starting to see major productivity problems for the project, caused by longstanding limitations in GitHub’s permissions and notifications systems. Learn how we created zulipbot, an open source GitHub workflow bot written in Node.js, that patches these limitations in GitHub’s model and how you can use it to manage your own GitHub projects and organizations.

Imagine being called for jury duty and then getting forced into a Java bootcamp run by two instructors who hate each other and won’t stop saying the opposite things. Worse, both instructors are inconsistent with themselves.

This talk will focus on describing a matrix decomposition technique called Singular Value Decomposition that conveys important geometrical and theoretical insights about linear transformations. This technique is not as famous as it should be given the range of applications from science and engineering.

After making the smallest possible transistors, scientists are developing new computation methods based on quantum mechanics. This talk is an intro to: what makes quantum computing special, how to build assembly-like instructions for quantum computers in Python and JavaScript, and how we could start encrypting data to avoid quantum codebreaking.

Neurodiversity is the hidden diversity on our teams. Unlike obvious external markers, mental and personality quirks or invisible disabilities are not always easy for us to remember or adjust for. But sometimes diversity in this area is as important as any other.

I’m not saying that you have to speak parentese to beginning software learners. They might be quite offended with you doing that, actually. What beginners often need, though, is not just to be set in front of a tutorial and told to come back when they’re finished, but to have someone on hand to bounce questions off of or to talk them through problems and exercises so that they understand. Learners often pick up useful information by observing someone else at work using the language, but they can’t just be there while you do things and learn it all by observation alone.

One of the best skills a librarian has that goes mostly unnoticed is that they’re really great at narrating themselves to others. When demonstrating (sometimes for the sixteenth time) how to go through a procedure to obtain resources or run searches, librarians narrate what they are doing and why. When reading a book to tiny people, youth services librarians often ask questions about what the characters are doing or feeling, so that the tiny people can use both the text and the pictures to decode what’s going on in the story. Key information about the story is often communicated visually in a picture book, and sometimes in complete contradiction to the text. By providing scaffolding through narration, the librarian provides context and reasoning for the actions they’re taking. By asking questions at regular intervals, the librarian can check to make sure understanding is happening and adjust to include perspectives they may not have been taking into account before.
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Talking and explaining things to your learners, and with each other, is the best way to help them learn. So if you get the opportunity to have someone shadow you and ask you annoying questions about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it that way, take up the opportunity. (And request it all gets documented. Trust me.) By talking through things with someone who doesn’t have your expertise, you shore up your own knowledge and help someone get more of their own. That leads to literacy.

Come learn about the open source Mapbox GL native and web map renderer, how it is designed, the open specs on which it is built, and how to use it in your projects.

Learn how Meetup made the decision to create #Resist, a free network of over 1000 Meetups worldwide that anyone could organize with or join, and the questions we had to ask about how a private company could help self-empower the public in an actual way.

Paying people for their work is radical, whether we’re talking about open source contributions, second-shift diversity work, or even care at home. But giving people the resources necessary to make these community contributions is the only way to make our communities more sustainable.

Staying safe in dangerous times is no easy task, especially when you’re speaking the truth to power. Despite giving a voice to millions, the internet is now also a place of danger for those who try to use it to amplify those voices and make them heard. I’ll be talking about by my experiences as a Nonprofit Security Advisor using Open Source tools and knowledge to help keep activists safe at the coalface.

They have started up democratic copies of major platforms. They are building ways to better collaborate using the internet. They’re even talking about citizens buying out and protecting important internet communities like Twitter. Who are these people? They are Platform Cooperativists.

When you’re writing software, fast feedback is key. The less you have to wait for your tests to run, the sooner you’ll know whether or not your code is correct.

Ruby’s two main test frameworks (minitest and RSpec) support several different techniques for testing only what you need for what you’re currently working on, and nothing more. In this talk, we’ll go through several of these practices for both frameworks, each more automated and awesome than the last.

Come learn an ancient model of pen & paper programming in order to change how you think about code

It’s a fact of life—software breaks.

But all is not doom and gloom. How we detect and handle errors drastically impacts the quality of both our systems and our lives. Knowing what to track, when to page, and how to find system weaknesses is critical.

This talk will focus on what happens when the internet infrastructure we know and love goes down – by natural disaster or human-instigated shutdown (think Mubarak in Egypt during the Arab Spring).

Many talks aimed at beginners to open source contribution assume that concepts like peer review and justification of intent are brand new. If you have ever experienced the thrills–and/or horrors–of a writing workshop, many ideas central to a successful pull request aren’t that new at all. Let’s talk about what experienced workshoppers and the field of writing critique can bring to your OS project.

Science Hack Day is a free-to-attend, open-source, worldwide, volunteer-organized event aimed at bringing together scientists, developers, engineers, students, and anyone else passionate or curious about science. The goal is simple: in 24 hours form a team and make something (fun, useful, nonsensical, anything!) with science. Hear from the organizers of the first Science Hack Day in Portland on how it was put together, just how awesome it was, and how open (science, source, hardware, web) played a vital part.

To test, or not to test? That is the question. With limited time and resources there are only so many tests we can write and run. How do you determine what features of a new project to test? How do you know when a test is obsolete, or needs to be updated? What gets run per-commit, nightly, or weekly? What should you test manually? This talk will give you a framework for thinking about how to assess risk on a project and prioritize your

There’s a lot that goes into a great open-source repository besides the code. How do you make your project easy for a newcomer to understand? What about easy to install, to test, and to contribute to? Big projects have whole teams dedicated to building robust releases, but you’re just a solo dev with a dream.

Great news! You don’t have to put your project on hold to study build engineering. Come learn a few simple tools that will put some professional polish on your personal project.

Debugging: the schedule destroyer, the confidence sapper, the mire in which thousands of working hours are lost every day. It’s time to stop staring at those four lines of code, desperately willing the solution to appear. This session is about the strategies that will steer you around bugs, tactics for dealing with them, and tools that can shorten a four-hour debugging session to five minutes.

This is the story of how focusing first on building a community of individuals who care about mentoring has allowed me to turn the idea of mentor matching for people learning to code into a multi-platform open source project.

Don’t let programming language designers have all the fun: you can design your own type system that is better than the current one.

Open source works best when the stakes are high, volunteers are pouring in and tons of stakeholders need to coordinate their resources, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that the open source movement is transforming how individuals and institutions respond to disasters.

Virtual Reality is on the rise. We keep seeing new devices and frameworks who promises to get the job done. All of them work and are awesome. But all of them are proprietary, binds you to their ecosystem and their expensive hardware. Not to mention they are not cross-platform, don’t run on other devices and the curve to learn the technology is too high.

What if we can get out of this walled garden? Build everything in open web technologies, run instantly in any device and still be able to enjoy similar experience? And can learn to build our own virtual world in a 45 mins session?

Meet aframe and Web Virtual Reality