Episode: 1626
Title: HPR1626: Opensource.com: Recalling OSCON 2014.
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1626/hpr1626.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 06:00:47

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its Monday 27th October 2014. This is an HBR episode 1,626 entitled Open Source.com, Recalling
Oscar 2014. And is part of the series' newscast. It is hosted by semiotic robotic, and is
about 22 minutes long. Feedback can be sent to Brian at semiotic robotic.net, or by leaving
a comment on this episode. The summary is, open source.com told around table discussion
about their experience in Atoscan 2014. This episode of HBR is brought to you by An
HonestHose.com. Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HBR15. That's
HBR15. Better web hosting that's honest and fair at An HonestHose.com.
Hello Hacker Public Radio. This is semiotic robotic with an open source news break from open
source.com. Today's episode is a round table discussion. So joining me are open source.com
community manager Jason Hippets. Hello HBR. Open source.com social media strategist Michael
Harrison. Hi everyone. And back once again is open source.com content manager Jen Wike. Hey,
hey. In July, Jason and Jen attended OzCon. O'Reilly's world-renowned open source conference
in Portland, Oregon here in the US. So I thought we'd take a moment to sit down and chat with them
about their experiences. So those of us who couldn't attend might get some sense of what that
conference is like. So Jason, Jen, thanks for joining us today. I'll have to be here.
Excited. So why don't we talk a little bit about the tone of the conferences here? What you thought
was the overall theme or how it felt to be at OzCon? Leslie Hawthorne gave a keynote on I think
the second day of OzCon and it was about checking your privilege how to do hard things and the hard
thing is allowing other people to be part of open source. And so this is usually women minorities,
people who aren't technically coders or programmers and maybe have some other skills and design or
writing and just allowing them to be part of the process. And so I felt like that was sort of a
big theme at OzCon this year. It was great keynote and it was great here. Yeah, I think the one part
I liked about Leslie's keynote was that she basically kind of she talked a lot about defaults.
And so when you think about programming or other things that you do in normal life when the default
are set for you, it's really simple. But when the defaults aren't set for you, then it makes
really things a lot of difficult. You can imagine just filling out an average web form on the internet
and the default language is set to English. Well, it's great if you speak English but what if you
don't speak English? Then you've got to search the form and look for your language. So just
the little things like that that we could kind of that could kind of trigger how we can how we can
process those type of things. Yeah, she started out with talk with greetings humans or
fellow humans. Yes, hello humans. Yeah, I said it and published everyone and everything. And
that was intentional. I would say like so last year was my first year at OzCon. So comparing
it year over year, I thought at least from an open source.com perspective that last year I was
telling a lot of people about the project and what we do in the publication and the community.
And this year as I approached people and introduced myself, the tone was much different. I was like,
oh, hey, we read that all the time or I love the article that you published about this. So that
was a really kind of energizing piece for me. Just just to know last year I was spending a lot of
my time just explaining what the site was and what we do and what our purposes. And this year was
more like getting high five as we like, we'd love what you do. I want to contribute. So that's
that was a testament, I think, to attending last year. And just a lot of the work that we've
done over the last year in general. We've arrived. Yeah, very cool. Yeah, it was great to mean a lot
of the people that I email with and we've worked on content with and meet some new people.
Yeah. So Jason, you just mentioned that this is your second year. Jan, this was your first year.
So what brings you? What motivates you to go to OzCon? What takes the team there?
Last year we were a media sponsor. That really kind of got things going for us as far as
covering the conference. Again, this year we were also a media sponsor and we did, I think,
much more intensive, much more intensive coverage of OzCon. In advance of that, the team worked on
almost 20 interviews with speakers at the conference. And we were doing live blogging
there as well. We did that last year. I was there so low, so it was a little bit more difficult.
But Janet and I were able to work together and really summarize the key notes in a really quick
quick fashion. And then for me personally, I was going to meet all the speakers that we did
interviews with and to rehash old contacts. Yeah, and I was there to meet these interviewers
or interviewees as well and also make some new contacts, put some faces with some names,
and I gave out my card to quite a few people. So hopefully we'll be hearing from some people
about their stories and episodes. I do remember one of the first days during the conference.
Jen and I were just kind of walking around and because I go to a lot of book source conferences,
I tend to know a lot of people. So it was really just great for me to go up and say,
hey, I want to introduce you to Jen. I mean, folks like Simon Fips from the OSI.
You knew folks that were just meeting, but Deb Bryant, she was important in any way,
so that's kind of an inner backyard. But just some folks that are always attending a lot of
book source conferences and being able to make that connection with people.
So you said you've been to a lot of open source conferences.
What is the value of going to a conference? It's not just OS kind of general, but you know,
there's a lot of push for more remote work. Any more for people meeting remotely,
some hard, high profile events. We'll go into UDS, for example, just turned into an all-remote,
work week for folks. What's the value of something that brings everybody together in a shared
space like this? Well, Jason, just read an article about this that you'll see on opensource.com.
Okay. And it's around community engagement and managing a community and face-to-face has a lot
to do with engaging and nurturing that community. Yeah. And really, so before OSI kind of
attended the community leadership summit, and as kind of Jen just mentioned, the value is to actually
meet people. In particular, if you just look at an open source community in general,
not everyone is typically in the same place. So having them having a mechanism for them to come
together, whether it's a user conference, a meetup, or some type of in-person event provides a lot
of value, right? Because when you're on, when you're working over email or over IRC, you can't see
the facial expressions or the emotion. And so understanding maybe just someone's work habits,
or like how, just understanding how they view life in general can add a lot of value to the
relationship, right? And I would say it helps build friendships and relationships both professionally
and personally. And so as going to other open source conferences like Scale 12x, which is in
Los Angeles, we've got all things open here in Raleigh. Like having the open source community come
together in one place is really valuable. Not only is it from an organizational perspective,
obviously the conferences wouldn't happen without sponsorships, which always just takes
money to put some of these trade shows on. But having the community members and having folks from
Python and PHP and all these core components around open source come together. It's just great.
The other big value is you get to see the latest trends, right? So you've got the different sessions,
you're seeing, hey, what is Facebook doing with open source? What is Netflix doing with open source?
And really kind of it's that shared knowledge, right? So this is just another aspect of shared knowledge,
where it's not just reading a blog or watching a video, it's actually going to a talk and actually
being able to talk to someone who might do development for a project or that might do community
leadership for a project. So it's really that in person piece of it, right? On that note, you know,
when you get to see which sessions get the most foot traffic, what are people the most interested
in right now? It's like web analytics, but it is. Exactly. And also, too, I think, you know,
the keynotes too, during the keynotes, it's always interesting to watch the Twitter traffic.
Yeah. And so there's always, what I've noticed over the last few years is that with Twitter and
more people using Twitter, that there's a whole conversation happening about the conference
while it's going on. And you know, it's valuable for people to connect or people just to be like,
hey, maybe I should be in this session because everyone's talking about, you know,
it's such an XYZ. And you know, if you practice a lot of two feet, then you quietly remove
yourself from the session you're in and you go to the one that's popular, right? Very common
and unconversed, by the way. So speaking of those, those different events and those keynotes,
what were the most interesting talks, encounters, heels that you had? Yeah. Parties is great.
Yeah. I would say, for me, my probably, the session that I went to that's probably
was most interesting to me personally, was a session about data.gov. So Gene Home had actually
just flew in from vacation. She went to Alaska on vacation and she was kind of fresh off the plane.
Wow. And she had this, she had her presentation very prepared. And for me, I'm just very
interested in the open government and open data movement in general. But I actually learned a lot
of stuff about data.gov that I didn't know. So she shared a couple things that, and I don't
know how I missed the news, but they actually open sourced the entire data.gov platform.
So I was just like, wow, it's, you know, I know they did that for we the people, which is the
White House petition platform. But I didn't know that data.gov was the whole platform was open
source. And just her sharing kind of some insights as to when they were actually doing the redesign
for data.gov, how they engaged their community and proposed different web designs for the platform
and how they got to where they are today. Right. They started off with this kind of very
illustrious and graphical and kind of more image heavy website and ended up with something that
was more functional for their users, which I think at the end is what they really wanted.
Gene, what was your favorite session? My favorite session was with Girl Develop It.
Catherine Farman and Corine Warnthice gave a talk about this program that has been
started out in Philly and they're pushing it out in countries or cities across the country.
So a little bit about Girl Develop It. They're an organization that teaches adult women to code.
So Girl Develop It, you might think it'd be younger women, but it's actually adult women.
And it's affordable and accessible programming in person. And their slogan is don't be shy
develop it. So it's all about judgment-free learning, programming, HTML, CSS, lots of different
classes like that. They also throw out a stat, 11% of contributors to free and open-source software
or women. And this is up from I think 2% over the past few years. So I think things they generally
their talk was about how things are going in the right direction. And there's a lot of great women
out there putting on programs for other women. One of the most interesting sessions that I went to
was with Justin Miller from Mapbox. Not only did I get, so first of all we did do an interview
with him. So one of my purposes was going was to introduce myself to him and meet him in person.
But beyond that, I was just kind of interested in what Mapbox is doing. But what I found most
intriguing is he spent a lot of his talk, time during his talk, explaining how they use GitHub.
And they use GitHub for literally everything. Pretty much they use GitHub, a private GitHub repository
for their internet. And so they do everything that they draft, any sort of internal blog post or
external blog post is all drafted in GitHub. And so I was taking copious notes on that because
this team has been very, the source of comp team is really just how we can use GitHub more.
And I just thought that was a really neat thing for him to share and really just to see how they're
using GitHub as a platform to kind of basically work as a company.
So I went to a kind of fun session called writing English. With Kristen Daydo, she was giving
programmers grammar and spelling lessons, which I just couldn't help myself but go to and just
drop in and see how that was going. Well, I'll all attended was that session by the way.
It wasn't very well attended, although it seemed like it should have been because there were some
questions in the audience that were really surprising. But that's okay, not everybody is a writer.
Well, that's two people in person. They recorded two. So hopefully we'll get that out to them later.
I don't go to too many technical talks now just because I'm a little bit removed from
coding side. But I did go to the Netflix API session with Daniel Jacobson and the room was packed.
Basically the title was kind of around the top 10 lessons learned from creating APIs.
And it was just really interesting to see how Netflix is using that and sharing their lessons back.
So it was just kind of, you know, the questions in the room were really technical. But it was
fascinating just to kind of learn more about some of their strategy and how they're deploying their APIs.
It's interesting. How is what sort of open source tools is Netflix using that they talked about?
Yeah, they, they, I don't want to say they glazed over them. But towards the end of the session,
they did put up a slide and it went by really quick. So I didn't quite capture all that.
I've been to a few Netflix sessions at previous conferences. So they definitely are using
open source tools. I can't think of anything specific at the moment. But one of my favorite things
that they mentioned is Chaos Monkey. And it's, it's basically they intentionally bring down their
network on Amazon to code for redundancy basically. So Chaos Monkey is a random tool that goes out and
kills a network node or drops a database and and they build for resiliency and that's and they
know that if someone's trying to watch a movie and that doesn't work that that's not a good experience.
So Chaos Monkey is really fascinating. I wrote an article for opensource.com on Chaos Monkey
two years ago. I think it is by this point. But when they open source the code for it and I,
it was a weird article to write because I was like, hey, great news everyone. We've now got an
open source tool that will deliberately wreck your infrastructure. Please download this. And it's
super popular. It's really great. But yeah, you're absolutely right. They open source this code
for this program. And this picture like the monkey from Family Guy or something like that,
like with a wrench, like going through a database center or something like that. Just deliberately
bringing down critical resources because they want their their IT teams to be able to attack those
problems and constantly be on guard against any real life Chaos monkeys that might be out there.
Let's keep that away from the open source.com site.
Well, we should also mention Jason's talk with Galrooper about how the city of Raleigh uses
open source and Raleigh is where we're recording from today. It's also where our team works from
the open source.com team. So Jason would tell us a little bit about that.
Yeah, so I co-presented with Galrooper. We actually did a talk at Code for Mayor here conference
last year. And you know, Gal went through and explained one of the hardest things I think she could
a job in the Seattle was to change the culture within the Raleigh IT organization.
And talking about the specific actions of getting an open government resolution passed,
having a road map in place to help actually take that beyond the paperwork and just say,
hey, this is how we're actually going to stand up in open data portal. And then really she did,
like as I mentioned, focus on changing the culture, hiring people that are pro open source and
that, you know, mentioning things like they look at GitHub accounts as people's resumes.
So things like that that were just for kind of inside the mind of a CIO and particularly more
of a public sector CIO, which you know, a lot of them don't get a chance to go in the speaking circuit
too much. And then I followed up with Gail's portion on what we're doing in the community.
So things like our Code for Raleigh, Code for America Brigade, and some of the kind of volunteer
civic hacking efforts that we've done. We have an event called City Camp North Carolina that we've
been running for the last four years here in the triangle area. And I'm just kind of complimenting
with the work that Gail's team is doing with IT and having kind of this kind of group of volunteers
on the side that's really willing to test things out and try things and be that a little bit of that
safety net and really just kind of look for new technology too. I talk a lot about the rise of
the citizen CIO and how every citizen has an opportunity to explore technology and suggest technology
to their government. But knowing the right channels and actually being able to implement that are
two different things. So we all use technology and love it most of the time. But, you know,
getting that to getting your government to use it is a different story.
So I went to your talk and it was well attended by Raleigh and other North Carolina folks that
I'm pretty sure. But there was a lot of interest afterwards. A lot of guys came up to you to chat
about how things were going. What were they asking you? Yeah, so there was a lot of folks actually
from this area that we're at, Oskahn, like a thing of the talk, and they were just like, how do we
get involved? Where do we start? And so we do have a meetup page triangle code for America and
pointed them to that. And actually Gail had a couple folks come up to talk to her as well. I think
they were just really, I don't know exactly what they were saying, but in speaking with Gail
afterwards, they were just kind of wanted some more insights as to how she changed the culture
and some of those kind of tactical things. Yeah, conferences like Oskahn, this is probably
a bad metaphor for a non-baseball fans and B folks that are listening to the podcast outside
the United States. But it kind of reminds me of the major league baseball all-star game.
You get people who come from all different teams, all different organizations. They all come
for this conference and some of them don't interact very much. Some of them are direct competitors,
but they all come together because they love the game and they play one for the fans,
you know? And this like conferences like Oskahn sort of remind me that and they all come to
celebrate like the shared love of the thing that they do, right? And that is that is open source.
They come to celebrate the open source way and they come to celebrate open source mentality,
right? So that is what I think is so interesting about these conferences some day. I hope to go there.
Like the all-star game metaphor, some of us have to sit behind it. That's a crest to get called.
Some of us have to get more votes before we can make it to Oskahn.
Well, folks, that's all for this open source news break from opensource.com. My gratuitous thanks to
Jason Hibbits, Michael Harrison, and Jen White for chatting with me today. And don't forget
dear listeners that you can always find more open source news on opensource.com and you too can
submit your open source story to the website just visit opensource.com slash participate.
That's all for this episode and until next time this is semiotic robotic wishing you peace, love,
and open source.
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