OpenSourcery

Randall Hansen, OpenSourcery's Director of Engineering, will be speaking at Open Source Bridge, Portland's home grown conference on open source technology.

Randall will be talking about Practical Paper Prototyping, something he does weekly
with our clients. Paper prototyping is the simplest possible way to start sanity checking web page and web application ideas. It allows clients, designers and developers to get on the same page by promoting communication and collaboration early in the process.

Randall's been doing user interface design since the mid-eighties, and building websites since 1996. If you have an interest in design and user experience, you'll want to attend this session.

Thursday, June 18th, 2:45 to 3:30 at the Oregon Convention Center. Register at the Open Source Bridge site.

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.

OpenSourcery CEO Brian Jamison will present at the Open Source Bridge conference on Wednesday, June 17th, at 10am. The presentation — How to Earn an Open Source Living without Taking on Investors or Selling Your Soul — is a topic about which Brian is particularly well versed. As co-founder of a successful, bootstrapped open source development company, Brian has overseen OpenSourcery's growth from three to twenty-plus people, without compromising the company's ideals.

Brian will cover the simple formulas that led to OpenSourcery's success, explore the some of the dubious business models and side adventures we tried along the way, and hopefully assist in the launch of successful new open source businesses.

If you are an experienced open source entrepreneur and would like to join this presentation, please contact us at inquiry (at) opensourcery (dot) com.

To learn more about Open Source Bridge, an all-volunteer conference, please visit their site. You can peruse the schedule, register, and, if you're not from Portland, find an affordable hotel room in town.

Hope to see you there.

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).

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.

The Open Source Bridge is an all-volunteer, all-awesome conference that will take place in Portland, Oregon this summer, June 17-19 at the Convention Center. When OSCON fled south, did Portland cry itself to sleep? No. It organized across languages, across disciplines, and on both sides of the mighty Willamette to stage an even more impressive event.

But the success of the conference relies on real people presenting real content. That's where OpenSourcery and other development shops come in. That's right, it's time to submit proposals. We're encouraging our developers, project managers, systems administrators, and business developers to do so.

A few words about why the Open Source Bridge exists, taken from their website:

"Our primary objective will be to explore what it means to be a responsible Open Source citizen.

"Our conference structure is language-agnostic by design, in hopes of facilitating broader community growth by focusing on Open Source development as a discipline–divorcing the techniques of development from the language used for that development. In so doing, the conference will encourage and foster cross-pollination and widespread knowledge sharing, regardless of each developer’s chosen programming language."

That sounds like the kind of activity Drupal developers should participate in. Please feel free to contact thomas@opensourcery.com if you have further questions about the event or if you would like to volunteer your time as an OSB advocate. We're looking for developers across the country (world?) to visit our fair city during the most beautiful time of year. Come June you'll see why they call us the Rose City.

Thank you for reading.