OSCON: Programmer Insecurity and the Genius Myth

Two of my favorite presenters, Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian Fitzpatrick, did an OSCON session on "Programmer Insecurity and the Genius Myth." Brian and Ben talked about how programmers' insecurities cause all manner of troubles in programming projects, and then presented a number of tips for how to avoid these problems. They also asserted that there are very few genius "lone ranger"programmers in the real world -- most highly successful and productive programmers work smart and collaborate well.

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OSCON: The saga of MySQL

At OSCON in 2006, I followed sessions that discussed how open source companies would fare when big corporations come in. Back then there were only a handful of examples of big companies purchasing small open source companies. Three years later, we've witnessed MySQL AB get swallowed by Sun, only to have Sun be swallowed by Oracle. Now there are more open questions than ever and at least three versions of MySQL that are jockeying to continue the MySQL blood-line. Yesterday I attended talks by two of these groups and I have to wonder how the MySQL game will play itself out over time.

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OSCON: Standing Out in the Crowd

Kirrily Robert gave the first keynote speech this morning, entitled "Standing Out in the Crowd." She spoke about the gender imbalance in open source and shared her experiences working on open source projects that have a higher-than-average percentage of women participants. She laid out statistics about the current gender balance of various projects, looked at trends in open source, and closed with a number of tips on how open source projects can get -- and keep -- more women contributors.

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OSCON: Building Belonging (in communities)

I dove right in to OSCON by attending Jono Bacon's "Building Belonging" community talk. Jono, who is the community manager for Ubuntu, started out his presentation by asking what communities can do to build and improve the sense of belonging that people have in their community. After talking a little about what belonging means, he threw out the first concrete concept that builds belonging: Stories.

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ETech: Wrapup

I've been attending ETech and the P2P conference that preceded ETech and this conference, and this year I've noticed the best gender balance ever. Granted this conference's focus has changed from the very geeky P2P and Web Services focus it started with and meandered through a host of topics to arrive at a less geeky, but still thought provoking set of topics. I feel that this change in focus has made the conference more accessible to women and as a result we've seen the gender balance improve over the years.

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ETech: Mobile Phones Reveal the Behaviors of Places and People

[Quinn managed to scoop me blogging about Tony Jebara's presentation! But after I chatted with her, we both agreed that I should continue with my blog post and see if I can augment her post a little.]

Tony Jebara's presentation "Mobile Phones Reveal the Behaviors of Places and People" really opened my eyes to what amazing things you can derive from large data sets. Tony co-founded Sense Networks which specializes in taking GPS and mobile phone location data and deriving as much useful information as possible from it. Sense Networks works with mobile phone service providers who collected data from users who opted in to have their data be collected and mined. All the data they receive from the service provider is GPS location data -- no personal information at all was ever made available to Sense Networks.

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Uncommon Knowledge and Open Innovation: Building a Science Commons

The first session I attended today was John Wilbanks' "Uncommon Knowledge and Open Innovation: Building a Science Commons" presentation. John talked about the process of establishing the Science Commons and how creating a science oriented commons presented unique challenges. John first pointed out that Metcalfe's Law works for both networked computers and documents. But, he went on to extend the law to more general data as well -- something I've believed in and espoused for a number of years now.

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ETech: Priorities for a Greener World: If You Could Design Anything, What Should You Do?

The second session today I'd like to share with you was presented by a personal friend of mine, Jeremy Faludi. Jer started his session entitled "Priorities for a Greener World: If You Could Design Anything, What Should You Do?" by pointing out that if we want to change the world, we ought to know what the most important issues are, right? Good thinking! And with so much news about how humans affect the planet its hard to accurately determine what really is important and what we can safely ignore. Jer set out to educate future green hackers about the most important things to focus on. Jer provided a vast amount of information that I can't hope to adequately convey in one blog post. He covered: Climate change, species extinction and habitat Loss, resource depletion, pollution and overpopulation. At the end of his presentation, Jer provided us with an overall list of priorities -- I'll focus on those and will try to augment that summary with points from his main sections.

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ETech: I Just Don't Trust You: How the Tech Community Can Reinvent Risk Ratings

My favorite conference of the year, ETech kicked off its general sessions today and its looking as stimulating as ever! While the topics covered by the conference have become less hard-core geeky, they have become more green and more broad. Sustainable topics, the environment and becoming better global citizens are just a few of the topics that have been struck this morning. ETech continues to make me think, which is the primary reason I keep coming back for more.

The first session I'd like to share with you was Toby Segaran and Jesper Anderson's "I Just Don't Trust You: How the Tech Community Can Reinvent Risk Ratings" presentation. Toby and Jesper posited that the system for rating credit instruments is horribly broken. Right before Lehman Brothers crashed, Moody's credit rating agency gave Lehman Brothers a AAA A2 credit rating. Moodys immediately down-rated Lehman Brothers after they crashed -- a little too late! Jesper and Toby outlined four reasons why the current system fails to do its job:

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OSCON day 3: Reflections on OSCON 2008

Today was the last day of OSCON and I'm in the mood to think about the conference and share some of my random observations that didn't make it into any of my other blog posts.

First up is a comment that Brian Aker of MySQL fame made during the "Tim O'Reilly Interviews Monty Widenius & Brian Aker" interview:

Microsoft is irrelevant. ... We're more worried about Apple.

Woah. That's a tall statement! One that resonates with me since just a few weeks ago I realized that my life is now fully free of Microsoft. And I used to be a full time Win32 programmer 10 years ago. While Microsoft may not be fully irrelevant in all scopes, a comment like this shows that the open source movement has made an amazing amount of progress in the last 10 years. Consumers have a lot more operating choices today than they did 10 years ago. And to think that Apple had been written off for dead -- now they're back and they're feared!

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Recent Posts

• OSCON day 2: Do You Believe in the Users? on July 25, 2008
• OSCON day 2: Prophet, your path out of the cloud on July 24, 2008
• OSCON day 1: An Open Source Project Called "Failure:" Community Antipatterns to Know and Avoid on July 24, 2008
• OSCON day 1: Beyond REST? Building Data Services with XMPP PubSub on July 23, 2008