So, we work with technology. Technology is fun, interesting, and provides many of us with intellectual challenges and careers. But technology is about people, not just computers. In this talk, Tim O’Reilly talks about the people who use technology, and how we should think about them. We should think about empathy and communication, at least as much as we think about lines of code. What are we contributing to the world — not just in code, but to our fellow humans, and to the society in which we live? If you work with technology, consider this short talk, which will hopefully inspire us to remember the people behind the technology, and the reasons why people use the products we make.
This talk is aimed at developers who spent their days (and nights) in high-level languages, and who are convinced that they couldn’t ever understand how the kernel works, let alone how to modify it. Julia Evans was like that until recently, and aims in this presentation to de-mystify the kernel, such that we can not only understand how it works, but even (maybe) try to modify and enhance it.
This talk introduces Hadoop, the open-source system for storing and analyzing big data. How does it work? And (perhaps most importantly) what are some of the tools that are now included in the Hadoop ecosystem, which allow us to analyze data in new and different ways? In this talk, Hadoop expert Adam Shook introduces the entire Hadoop ecosystem, demonstrating simple (but telling) examples of how and where to use Hadoop (and related tools) in your applications.
“Big data” is big, and tools to work with it are also big — in that they’re both numerous, and are growing in popularity and sophistication. One of the latest technologies aimed at making big data accessible and easier to analyze is Apache Spark — which operates in memory, is highly parallel, working with a number of programming languages (including Java, Scala, and Python), uses a variety of back ends, and can be queried using familiar tools such as SQL. In this talk, Spark developers Reynold Xin and Aaron Davidson introduce Spark, and describe what it can do for you and your organization.
How far should we go in making sure that our programs are robust? What techniques can we employ to make our code more readable? What stories can we tell via our object and method names? In this talk, Katrina Owen creates and evolves a set of programs, describing the trade-offs that we make when we create code, and what object-oriented design principles can teach us about improving our code.
Developing programs in Ruby almost certainly means using software developed by other people. This means that your software — and maybe even your business — now depends on the quality of software written by people you don’t know, and who don’t owe you any support. How can we improve this state of affairs? How can we improve the ways in which people within the open-source ecosystem improve their communication, trust, and general interest in working together for everyone’s mutual benefit? In this talk, Justin Searls describes the current state of open source, and describes different ways in which open-source contributors and their users might be able to improve not only the code, but also the ways in which that code is developed.
If you have written a Python program, then you have almost certainly used Python packages. A large number of packages are distributed via PyPI, the Python Package Index. The easiest way to download, install, and use packages from PyPI is “pip,” which is standard in all of the most recent versions of Python. It turns out that behind PyPI and pip is a group of developers known as the “Python Packaging Authority.” In this talk, PPA member and Python core developer Nick Coghlan describes what the PPA does, and how it tries to solve problems that Python developers face now and in the future.
Python has been popular for many years, but now its popularity is growing even faster. What does the future hold for Python? And why is it becoming so popular among so many different groups? In this talk, Jessica McKellar describes the current state of affairs, and where Python is weak — and thus needs to improve, in order to attract new developers. She especially encourages people who love Python to contribute to the community, so that the language can avoid the fate of Perl, whose popularity has declined significantly in the last two decades.
Firefox is a well-known open-source Web browser from the Mozilla Foundation. FirefoxOS is a new open-source mobile operating system, designed to comply with Web standards and be as open as possible. In this talk, Aimee Marie Forsstrom introduces FirefoxOS, describes the different parts of this architecture, and shows how it is similar to (and different from) Android.