Selena Deckelmann

Selena Deckelmann is an enthusiastic open source advocate and a major contributor to the PostgreSQL project. She founded and is co-chair of Open Source Bridge, a developer conference for open source citizens. In her spare time, she likes to mix drinks for her local Perl and Postgres user groups, and fetch eggs from her chickens (when she has them).

BJ Clark

In this session we'll take a hands on approach to building reusable and scaleable front end code. We walk through building a modern web application UI using microformats, gracefully degrading CSS3 and Javascript closures. Finally, we'll see how the same code can be used throughout an application with little modification.

Bruce Williams

Riak is a modern, scalable key/value database with a great REST API and client libraries written for a variety of languages. This session will look at how Riak is put together, some important characteristics that make it suited (and not suited) for different problems, and how to get it up-and-running quickly in a real application, with examples in Ruby and Javascript.

Don Stewart

Galois has been building software systems in Haskell for the past decade. This talk describes some of what we’ve learned about in-the-large, commercial Haskell programming in that time. I'll look at when and where we use Haskell. At correctness, productivity, scalabilty, maintainability, and what language features we like: types, purity, types, abstractions, types, concurrency, types!

We'll also look at the Haskell toolchain: FFI, HPC, Cabal, compiler, libraries, build systems, etc, and being a commercial entity in a largely open source community.

Rob Sanheim

Motivating software developers is hard, whether it's yourself, your team, or your organization. The science of motivation has much to teach us about how to sustainably motivate creative knowledge work like programming. Nevertheless, most businesses are still using industrial revolution techniques in an information revolution age. Let's upgrade our ideas on motivation so we can be productive and happy while at work or play.

Matt Kirk, Steve Apel

Six months ago, Wetpaint set out on a mission to fix the broken publishing industry. As an engineering team, our goal was to build a large-scale publishing platform utilizing aggregate content and analytics-driven behavior via open source frameworks. As a prototype and a quick proof of concept, we initially built a simple blog platform without tests or any code reviews (*gasp*). After collecting data on what worked and what didn't, we built version 2 from the ground-up, without a database, on completely different software. And it was a success. While we broke a lot of what are typically considered best software development practices, by moving quickly and designing the prototype as a throw-away, we were able to establish the core set of features as well as identify those important in the future. This pivot point is vital to any project. Our experiment proved that while iterative development is important, getting over the prototype hump is equally so.

We’ll discuss the mental freedom that comes with abandoning the junk that comes out of the first stages of a product by prototyping first, then rebuilding. Along the way we will share some of the fun anecdotes that came with launching our new product. And of course we’ll talk about the technology. The sweet technology that helped us achieve so much in so little time.

Justin Marney

In this talk Justin won't talk about a particular distributed data store. Instead, he will show you some of the reasons why you might want to distribute your data in the first place. We'll talk about some of the consequences of distributing your data and how to manage those consequences in order to achieve ridiculous levels of scalability and availability. You'll leave with a better understanding of the fundamental design decisions that make things like Dynamo and Riak possible.

Michael Buffington

If you really love or hate aerodynamics, rainbow trout, the human brain and arms, comfortable socks, and/or Easter Island then attending this talk might be a really enjoyable or loathsome experience. Michael may or may not talk about how seemingly random or even truly random topics are important or unimportant for the fertile minds of creative developers.