Allison Randal

Allison Randal is Program Chair for O'Reilly's Open Source Convention. Her first geek career was as a research linguist in eastern Africa. But eventually her love of coding drew her away from natural languages to artificial ones. Allison is the architect of Parrot (a virtual machine for dynamic languages), on the board of directors of The Perl Foundation, and founder and president of Onyx Neon. She co-authored Perl 6 and Parrot Essentials, and has edited various O'Reilly books on dynamic languages including Perl Hacks and Programming PHP.

OSCON 2009 Highlights

by  |  5 June 2009

OSCON 2009 is just around the corner, this year in San Jose, California. When I spoke at the Silicon Valley Linux Users Group last night, they asked me for a few highlights. It's tough to pick from over 200 sessions, all the best-of-the-best out of 800 submissions (and there were at least 100 more I wish I could have fit...

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Nominations For Google-O'Reilly Open Source Awards 2009

by  | 22 April 2009

The 5th annual Google-O'Reilly Open Source Awards will be hosted at OSCON 2009 in San Jose, CA. The awards recognize individual contributors who have demonstrated exceptional leadership, creativity, and collaboration in the development of Open Source Software. Past recipients for 2005-2008 include Angela Byron, Karl Fogel, Pamela Jones, Gerv Markham, Chris Messina, David Recordon, Doc Searls, and Andrew Tridgell. The...

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Linux Kernel Worth $1.4 Billion

by  | 22 October 2008

The Linux Foundation has released a report estimating the Linux kernel to be worth $1.4 billion, and the Fedora 9 distribution to be worth just over $10 billion. The report is an update of a 2002 report estimating the worth of Red Hat Linux 7.1 (Fedora is the community edition of Red Hat Linux, renamed in 2003). The report doesn't...

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OSCON moves to San Jose

OSCON moves to San Jose

by  |  1 October 2008

The official word is out, OSCON 2009 will be moving from Portland, Oregon to San Jose, California. We've received significant positive feedback on the move, and messages of welcome from Bay Area open source contacts, but also some messages of disappointment from the local Portland open source community, and from non-local attendees who enjoyed visiting Portland every year. We're also...

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RailsConf Europe Early Registration

by  |  9 July 2008

The schedule for RailsConf Europe just went up last week. It's shaping up to be another great conference. A few sessions and tutorials that particularly catch my eye are David Heinemeier Hansson's keynote on Wednesday morning, "Meta-programming Ruby for Fun & Profit" by Neal Ford, "Offline Rails Applications with Google Gears and Adobe AIR" by Till Vollmer, "From Rails Security...

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Popular OSCON Sessions

by  | 29 May 2008

One great feature of the new conference website software O'Reilly is using this year (developed by my co-chair Edd Dumbill) is the "Personal Schedule". When you're surfing the schedule or any list of talks you can click the star beside it to add it to a private list. During the conference you can quickly view your list to make sure...

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