Last Year's Talks and Events
KEYNOTE - The Age of Literate Machines: A Visionary Look at Open Source
Free Software and Open Source are understood to be reshaping technology. What is less understood is how critical FOSS is to the future of free societies. During this session, we'll examine the past, present and future of our freedoms, stopping along the way to visit ancient god-kings, hacker heretics, long-dead muftis and our first computers.
Speaker: Zak Greant
KEYNOTE - The Future Face of the Web
The future of web technology, including standards and XML, with reference to the wide range of technologies encompassed in Open Source.
Speaker: Tim Bray
A Social Intranet with Drupal: Case Study
How can the philosophy of social networking be applied to an organization’s intranet to better capture knowledge? In this session, we will illustrate a case study where a small company uses Drupal to create a more usable intranet. Ronn Abueg and James Andres will discuss which Drupal modules are best suited for the task, common configuration, and various tips and tricks. Aside from the technical details, they will also apply basic social networking principles to make internal knowledge capture less painful. Drupal enables an organization to develop an intranet that actually gets used.
Speaker: Ronn Abueg
APC @ Facebook
Facebook's exponential growth and popularity would not be possible without APC, a PHP bytecode and variable cache. Facebook's engineer for PHP internals will introduce APC for intermediate and advanced PHP users. Attendees will learn about Facebook's scalability challenges and it's unique APC implementation details. Installation, configuration, and usage techniques will be presented that can be applied to improve performance and user experience.
Speaker: Brian Shire
Deployment Is Not a Four Letter Word
Application deployment is something that developers normally don't think about until it's actually time to push your code up into production. The purpose of this talk would be to highlight some of the open source tools that are out there that can help with application deployment, ranging from Ruby on Rails' use of 'migrations' to application-neutral solutions like Capistrano.
Speaker: Chris Hartjes
Embedded Mesh to the Web: the Technology Behind FreeTheNet
Ever since people have been able to hack embedded devices, people have been trying to add web interfaces to these devices with some success. This talk will examine the evolution of these interfaces from simple dashboards to larger, more elaborate services which can deliver specialized geo-specific content to the person who is using this system.This talk will examine in particular the case study of FreeTheNet.ca, the local Vancouver Community Wireless Mesh initiative, and how it uses both embedded and web technologies to create a different type of application.
Speaker: Joe Bowser
Fake It Until You Make It: Rapid Development with CakePHP and the CLI
The purpose of this talk would be to show how you can rapidly build a full-featured application using CakePHP's Bake utility. Many developers never touch the command line, so this talk would be a good way to show the strength of CLI tools, even if you're running on Windows.It would cover PHP and a little bit of MySQL, showing how if you start with just a database with some pre-defined tables, you can get going right away and build out the base functionality of your site in minutes.
Speaker: Chris Hartjes
Fearless City: Re-routing the Digital Divide with Mobile
This workshop explores the convergence of art, community and mobile technology in Vancouver, and in other urban centres of the world.
Speaker: Irwin Oostindie
From Free Software to Open Knowledge: Open Source as a Method for Progressive Social Change
Collaborative knowledge production characteristic of open source software communities holds the potential for a progressive social change. Open source as a method of knowledge production challenges modern copyright and intellectual property regimes. It also contests the underlying assumption that information can be commoditized like any other good in a market-based economy.
Speaker: Kate Milberry
Google Gears: Teaching the Open Web New Tricks
Gears is an open source plug-in that teaches current web browsers newtricks. Gears is a clever way to raise the bar cross-browser andcross-platform, today, running inside of Firefox and Internet Explorer.No more waiting years for features to show up across all browsers andplatforms. APIs include: A real embedded relational database for websites! Threads for JavaScript! Offline! Secure and fast cross-domainmashups! Desktop Shortcuts! Mobile devices! And more exclamation pointsthan you can shake a stick at! Come and learn how to use Gears from
Speaker: Brad Neuberg
Grassroots Open Mobile Technology
Mobile device hobbyists have traditionally been limited by the proprietary phone devices available from big companies such as Motorola, Nokia, Sony, Apple, etc. but there is an emerging world of open and mobile devices designed for the hardware and software enthusiast that unlike the big corps' devices are easy and cheap to tinker with.I'll review the current assortment of open, web enabled and mobile devices and discuss what the future looks like for mobile devices - Are these open mobile devices ahead of the curve? or non-starters destined for a small niche?
Speaker: Roland Tanglao
How Open Source Technologies and Open Content Bring Value to Music
In 2006, Yahoo! put out a challenge for the development of technologies and services to enhance the value of digital audio files, an eXtensible Interactive Packaging Format (XIPF). Project Opus, a local Vancouver Company took up the challenge and with the help of the Canadian Government invested over $400,000 into research and development to address the challenge. The resulting service is called JAMM.
Speaker: David Gratton
Lego Blocks for PHP
The eZ components is a general purpose library of PHP components that solve a whole range of problems that developers often have to write themselves. The eZ components are developed with interoperability and a clean design in mind, allowing its users more flexibility and freedom, while keeping a consistent and well documented API. It is thoroughly documented, New BSD licensed with clear IP rights and available free of charge.In this session I will explain to you the structure, contents and workings of the eZ components library.
Speaker: Derick Rethans
Mapping the World by You: the OpenStreetMap Experience
The OpenStreetMap community has exploded in the past year with huge numbers of mappers and lots of donated data. Come find out what is the latest in the OSM community, all the new tools and editors and most of all, how you can help edit the map. I plan to cover, at a high level, the OSM platform, the data structure and API. I will also cover the major editors of OSM, Potlatch (Flash) and JOSM (Java), their evolution and how you can get involved in helping them. Finally I will cover how to build local community around mapping your area.
Speaker: Corey Burger
Microformats (+DiSo)
Social networks are becoming more open, more interconnected, and more distributed. Many of us in the web creation world are embracing and promoting web standards - both client-side and server-side. Microformats, standard apis, and open-source software are key building blocks of these technologies. This model can be described as having three sides/legs/arms/spokes - pick your connection: Information, Identity, and Interaction.
Speaker: Chris Messina
Microformats with Ryan King
Microformats are an important building block of many open technologies on the web. They've been around for a few years and have been growing slowly. In this talk, Ryan will give an overview of the history, philosophy and current state of microformats.
Speaker: Ryan King
Off the Rails - Why You Should Use Merb for Your Next Project
I feel that 'web services' is the future of the web and Merb is more suited for this due to its speed and flexibility (it's perfect for building an API). This talk is a quick primer on Merb: what its benefits are and why these benefits are important for a developer that is thinking about the web of tomorrow.
Speaker: Brock Whitten
OpenSocial, a Standard Programming Model for the Social Web
OpenSocial is an Open Standard defining a set of common APIs that work on many different social websites, including MySpace, Plaxo, Hi5, Ning, orkut, Salesforce.com and LinkedIn, among others. This allows developers to learn one API, then write a social application for any of those sites, reaching over 200M+ users in dozens of countries: Learn once, write anywhere.
Speaker: Kevin Marks
OSS and Understanding Codebases "In the Large"
Problem: you have a large codebase: (tens or hundreds of thousands of files, millions of lines of code). Examples: a Linux distribution, a large framework based project (Drupal, Eclipse, Mozilla,...) You need to "understand" some global questions about the code, for example, to
- make an adoption decision
- put a dollar value on the code (make an acquisition decision?)
- evaluate the security of the code
- assess code quality
Speaker: Djun Kim
Reusable Components in Django
I will talk about how reusable components are created for the Python-based Django web framework and what useful reusable components have already been created by the Django community.
Speaker: Mike Cantelon
RIA with Open Standards
Rich Internet Applications don't have to be built on proprietarytechnology like Flash or Silverlight. Using Firefox, Remote XUL, PHPand jQuery it is possible to build great-looking applications that arehighly interactive and use open standards.
Speaker: Jeff Griffiths
Scaling up With JavaScript Without Annoying Your Users
Technologies like Ruby on Rails and the Google Maps API now make iteasy for many people to build interesting web-based applications.The risk in that wealth of data is weighing down your users browser.The key to writing responsive applications is to learn from those whohad to figure out how to write nimble code for Windows and theMacintosh in the early days of those applications. Back then machineswere a thousand times slower than today's boxes.
Speaker: Eric Promislow
Security for Web Applications
Nowadays, security is a major concern to Web appplications, and for PHP /MySQL developpers. Being the dominant language on Internet, PHP is now an obvious target for all kind of attempts. During this session, we'll present the common security problems that occurs on Web applications, the defenses available to prevent them. We'll focus on PHP and MySQL Web applications, and their configuration recommandation, but most concepts will be platform agnostic.
Speaker: Damien Seguy
SocialCamp I: OpenSocial (MySpace, Hi5, Ning, LinkedIn)
Lightning talks, discussions and Q&As: an unconference-style meetup for anyone interested in building social web apps and services from Facebook and MySpace to LinkedIn and beyond.
We have a SocialCampVancouver event wiki @ barcamp.org/SocialCampVancouver. Tell us about your Facebook or social network web app and sign-up for a live demo and Q&A or a lightning talk.
More info and updates on the SocialCamp event blog @ socialcamp.wordpress.com.
SocialCamp II: Facebook (Bebo)
Lightning talks, discussions and Q&As: an unconference-style meetup for anyone interested in building social web apps and services from Facebook and MySpace to LinkedIn and beyond.
We have a SocialCampVancouver event wiki @ barcamp.org/SocialCampVancouver. Tell us about your Facebook or social network web app and sign-up for a live demo and Q&A or a lightning talk.
More info and updates on the SocialCamp event blog @ socialcamp.wordpress.com.
SocialCamp III: App Nite - 5 Facebook/Bebo + 5 OpenSocial Live App Demos and Q&As
An unconference-style meetup for anyone interested in building social web apps and services from Facebook and MySpace to LinkedIn and beyond.
We have a SocialCampVancouver event wiki @ barcamp.org/SocialCampVancouver. Tell us about your Facebook or social network web app and sign-up for a live demo and Q&A or a lightning talk.
More info and updates on the SocialCamp event blog @ socialcamp.wordpress.com.
State & Ajax - How to Maintain Browser and Application State in an Asynchronous World
This talk will examine the two greatest problems in Ajax development (except for that pesky browser issue): Exactly what that “Asynchronous” word means, what problems it creates, and how they can be effectively managed, next the YUI Browser History object will be examined, finally handing control of Ajax applications back to the user via their familiar back button.
Speaker: Paul Reinheimer
Test Driven Development
I will start with introducing what testing is, and which parts of a web application can be tested with different methods. I will continue with introducing the test-driven development model - as counter model against traditional software development models, followed by a summary of how a development team could be organized to produce better quality code.
Speaker: Derick Rethans
The Monday Night Social
To wrap up the first day of the conference, join us for conversation in one of Vancouver's most popular art galleries. Network and unwind with great art in this Gastown neighbourhood hot spot, enjoy complimentary tapas, drinks and music.
Sponsored by ActiveState and Fearless City.
When: Monday, April 14, 2008 - 6 pm onwards
Location: Gallery Gachet, 88 East Cordova
The Semantic Web and Creative Commons Licensing
"Creative Commons has recently published a paper describing the Creative Commons Rights Expression Language (ccREL) that may be interesting to your audience. ccREL is a Semantic Web approach to describing copyright and licenses, and attaching those descriptions to digital works using RDFa and XMP. I'd love to come to Vancouver to talk about ccREL and RDFa, specifically about how tool makers can publish and consume RDFa as a lower barrier way to enabling Semantic Web applications."
Speaker: Nathan Yergler
Web 2.0 Design Patterns, Models and Analysis
This talk I gave in Berlin last year was voted #3 overall and also has received more than 14,500 views in its first 4 months, even eclipsing Tim Oreilly's talk in popularity.
Many enterprises seek knowledge of the design patterns used by successful Web 2.0 companies. This session starts with Tim O'Reilly's list of Web 2.0 examples and distills the abstract architectural patterns from behind the examples. By using the patterns notation, the core knowledge of the design principles is preserved in a template which can be reused in multiple domains including government.
Speaker: Duane Nickull
Working with the Free Software Media
A discussion of how to interact with free software journalists. Topics to include: the role of journalists, how to cultivate them so that everybody wins, and how to promote your free software project.
Speaker: Bruce Byfield
Write Beautiful PHP
In this talk I'll present guidelines for writing, not just maintainable, but beautiful code in PHP. PHP is often criticized for ugly coding practices, and PHP programmers for being hacks. In this session we'll work through how to create PHP that is:- Simple- Robust and error resistant- Secure- Scalable and performant- Easy to produce and maintain Laura Thomson has worked with and around a lot of ugly (and some beautiful) PHP code over the years.
Speaker: Laura Thomson
