OpenSourcery

OpenSourcery project manager Sean Larkin will attend his seventh River Rally this week and weekend, where he'll hobnob with some of his favorite people, manage technology needs as a volunteer, and present a talk titled "Technology Planning and Funding for River Groups."

Taken directly from the presentation description:

"So...you got a couple of old, rickety computers and a website from 1995. How do you take your organization's technology resources to the next level? How do you find technology funding? How do you select the right technology providers? How do you come up with a technology plan? In this session, we will walk participants step-by-step through the process of identifying technology needs, coming up with a roadmap for adopting these services, and most importantly, finding the $$ to make these crucial changes."

Sean will also be providing mentoring services through a service called River Rally Members Can Help You.

Thank you for reading.

Two of OpenSourcery's Perl developers will travel across the country for the 2009 YAPC (Yet Another Perl Conference), the premier conference for Perl developers. It's a quality, affordable conference with roots in the Perl Mongers user groups across the world.

Dieter will present two 50-minute presentations and one 20-minute presentation during the course of YAPC. The first is called Code Reuse with Moose, which covers how to create your own reusable extensions in Moose, with roles, type constraints, and Moose::Exporter. The second is called CPAN, A Big Enough Lever to Install the World. Dieter (aka confound) will share tricks on how Perl developers can convince their operations staff to trust CPAN, using techniques such as:

• CPAN Distroprefs
• cpan2dist, PAR, local::lib
• CPAN::Mini
• and more!

Finally, Dieter will hold forth for twenty minutes on the topic of Dist::Zilla - Automating quality since 2008.

Schwern, who's also speaking at OSCON and the Open Source Bridge, will deliver two presentations. First, he'll give a talk that literally only Schwern could give: "Trapped in a Room with Schwern." Details on that talk are sketchy at best. Second, he'll lead a session on "Better Programming through Testing," which will cover everything from basic testing to specific best practices for version control, debugging, and so on.

The spring conference season is fully upon us, and various OpenSourcerers have hit the circuit to spread the good word on open source technologies. Michael Schwern has been particularly active.

Schwern begins close to home, presenting "Is the Web Down: A Practical Look at How the Web Works" at the Open Source Bridge conference. In this session, Schwern and Joshua Keroes will lift the veil that keeps many users from understanding "how the Web and its plumbing works." This talk is part of the Chemistry track at Open Source Bridge, which is dedicated to "Understanding how our systems work, in order to improve and extend."

On Thursday, July 23rd, Schwern will share "How to Lie Like a Geek" at OSCON. In short, the talk will cover how geeks, while relentlessly pursuing the Truth, sometimes find themselves accidentally perpetrating lies: Lies by Omission, Lies by Precision, Lies by Irrelevancy, and, perhaps most painfully, Lies rooted in the word "should." As in, "The user /should/ have realized."

Stay tuned to learn what Schwern will deliver at the upcoming YAPC (Yet Another Perl Conference).

This April, InnoTech Portland will light up the Oregon Convention Center with two days of speakers, a CIO summit, an eMarketing summit, and amazing exhibitors.

Over 2000 local, regional, and national technology professionals attend the event every year, so we're happy to support the cause. Among the feature speakers is Rahaf Harfoush, the New Media Strategist for President Obama's Social Media team. Of course, you can also find OpenSourcery CEO Brian Jamison speaking about the business case for open source software.

You can read more about the various events and sign up at the InnoTech website. We hope to see you there.

On April 22nd and 23rd, InnoTech will hold its sixth annual technology conference here in Portland, Oregon. OpenSourcery is proud to present at the 2009 conference for a number of reasons: InnoTech is local, it's run by good, smart people, and it provides an opportunity for us to demonstrate the value of open source software to a wider technology community.

To that end, OpenSourcery is teaming with partner Acquia to bring a truly professional approach to open source web publishing frameworks. As we've said here a few times, OpenSourcery is proud to be an original Acquia Drupal Gold Partner: together we provide world-class discovery, development, design, and support to our clients. In a space that has traditionally leaned toward proprietary solutions, this coordination between two of the country's premier open source development shops aims to disrupt old standards.

Attendees will find OpenSourcery and Acquia in the exhibit hall, but they can also find us speaking about the business case for open source software. The panel brings together four executive- and management-level professional who have successfully implemented open source software while improving their business' bottom line. We're very pleased to have Deborah Bryant, director of GOSCON and Public Sector Communities Director of Oregon State University's Open Source Lab (OSL), to moderate the panel.

Registration for the event is now open. If you are interested in being a guest of OpenSourcery, please contact thomas@opensourcery.com to enquire about complimentary registration passes.

Thank you for reading. We hope to see you at InnoTech.

This week, the Drupal team is out in Washington, DC for DrupalCon - an unconference for Drupal lovers getting together to share knowledge, exciting developments in the field, better practices, and actually meet face to face.
We're just back from the pre-parties and discussing the session topics, expect posts from me, Jonathan, Dylan and Stacy about what we're excited about, people we've met and good discussion.