GitHub / OCTO Speaker Series

How Visualization Is Changing How We Work With Data

The rising complexity of modern software and data is pushing the limits of human understanding. While open source collaboration is connecting millions of developers and collaborators, we need new ways to explore data and make better decisions. Data visualization is changing how we understand and sharing insights about the world.

Melody Meckfessel is the CEO and co-founder of Observable, the destination for data visualization. Observable empowers people to explore, analyze and visualize data on the web, together. Melody is a hands-on leader with decades in engineering at both startups and enterprises. Prior to Observable, she was a VP of Engineering at Google.

twitter: @mmeckf

http://octo.github.com

What Would Open Source Look Like If It Were Healthy?

When I think about open source sustainability, I think about money, sure. But I also think about what configurations of funding would be more likely to keep legacy infrastructure ticking along AND provide R&D opportunities for innovators; what tooling we need; how a stronger ecology of consultancies would change the interactions among volunteers, companies, and other institutions; etc. I'll discuss what I've learned about healthy maintainership, and what a healthier future would look like for the open source industry.

Sumana Harihareswara is a project manager and programmer who has worked on PyPI, Zulip, Mailman, MediaWiki, HTTPS Everywhere, and several other open source projects. Most recently she has managed improvements to pip's dependency resolver and user experience, expedited the release of new versions of pipenv and autoconf, and written a somewhat frightening number of successful grant proposals to fund urgent work in critical open source projects. She earned an Open Source Citizen Award in 2011 and a Google Open Source Peer Bonus in 2018. She lives in New York City and founded Changeset Consulting in 2015.

twitter: @brainwane
GitHub: brainwane
wen: https://changeset.nyc/

Why Invest in Developer Community?

Who builds developer communities, why are companies investing in them, and why now?

swyx is passionate about Developer Tooling and Developer Communities. He is currently the head of developer experience at temporal.io, and recently published the Coding Career Handbook for Junior to Senior developer careers. In his free time he teaches React, TypeScript, Storybook and Node.js CLI's at Egghead.io, and helps run the Svelte Society community of meetups.

twitter: @swyx
GitHub: @sw-yx
YouTube: @swyxTV
web: https://temporal.io

Local-first Computing

We were promised "bicycles for the mind", but the vision of computers as tools for thought remains elusive. In our pursuit of this ideal, we have identified design principles we call "local-first software" that can help our software run faster, last longer, and cost less to build. We'll start by talking about the ideas that motivate our research, then look at some real-world prototypes and the technologies behind them, and finally talk about the challenges still outstanding.

Peter van Hardenberg has worked as an Arctic oceanographer, a game developer, wrangled a (literal) million Postgres databases, and is now Executive Director of Ink & Switch where he plots the future of tools for thought.

twitter: @pvh
GitHub: pvh

web: https://inkandswitch.com/

JavaScript: The Next Ten Years

What's next for JavaScript, web development, and the internet as a whole? Explore the global trends and specific technologies that will come to define the best tech stacks of this decade.

About Fred K. Schott
Fred K. Schott is the founder of Skypack, a next-gen CDN for JavaScript and modern web development. Fred also created Snowpack, a modern build tool for web developers that leverages new JavaScript features to speed up traditional development workflows by 10x or more. Fred lives with his wife in Oakland, CA. He has spent the last 8 years working in JavaScript and Open Source Software at companies like Box, Google, and Ripple.

Twitter: @FREDKSCHOTT
GitHub: FREDKSCHOTT

Web: https://fredkschott.com/

Building and Measuring Developer Relations

How do you build a solid DevRel organization? How do you measure and connect your DevRel org activities to the core outcomes of your company? Come learn form Amir Shevat, VP of Developer Experience at Twitch how to build, measure and justify an awesome Developer Relations org.

About Amir Shevat
Amir Shevat is the co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Reshuffle.com. Previously, Amir was the VP of Product at Amazon’s Twitch, Director of Developer Relations at Slack, Head of Scalable Developer Programs at Google, and Developer Advocate at Microsoft. Amir lives in Palo Alto, with his wife and two kids. In his spare time, he loves to bike and cook.

Twitter: @ASHEVAT
GitHub: ASHEVAT
Web: https://medium.com/@ASHEVAT

Personal Data Warehouses: Reclaiming Your Data

Every nerd deserves their own personal data warehouse - a system that gives them the same kind of analytical capability that is usually reserved for giant tech companies. I've figured out how to build one, using SQLite, Datasette and a handful of open source scripts and APIs.

I'll demonstrate my own personal Dogsheep, built using data from GitHub, Twitter, Foursquare, Apple Photos, Google, LinkedIn, 23AndMe and more. I'll show how legislation such as Europe's GDPR have made it easier for us to build our own personal analytics platforms, and discuss the way forward towards a world where we can empower even non-nerds to finally take control of their personal data.

About Simon Willison
Simon is the creator of Datasette, an open source tool for exploring and publishing data.

Datasette is based on Simon's experiences working as a data journalist at the UK's Guardian newspaper.

Simon is also a co-creator of the Django web framework. He recently completed the JSK Fellowship program at Stanford.

Twitter: @SIMONW
GitHub: SIMONW
Web: https://simonwillison.net/

Learn more about the OCTO Speaker series here: https://octo.github.com/

Computer Science Meets Education, at Scale

The UK is in the throes of a wholesale reform of school (K-12) education in computing, one that establishes computer science as a foundational discipline that all children learn from primary school onwards, just as they do maths and natural science. It’s pretty exciting: I will sketch the context and describe our progress.

But I will focus on one particularly exciting development: Project Quantum. So-called “diagnostic questions” are multiple choice questions that promote learning (rather than measurement). But it’s hard to know which ones work well, and which don’t. In partnership with an ed-tech startup (Eedi) we now have hundreds of millions of data points and are beginning to apply both statistics (Rasch analysis) and machine learning (variational autoencoders) to distilling insights from this data.

About Simon Peyton-Jones
I fell in love with functional programming when I was 20, and I am still in love today. I helped design Haskell, and I spend a lot of time on GHC, Haskell's most widely-used compiler (including inside GitHub).

I got involved in education because I was dissatisfied with the computing education my children experienced. It has turned out to be much more rewarding than I expected, and I hope to share some of that excitement in my talk.

Twitter: @SIMONPJ0
GitHub: SIMONPJ
Web: https://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj

Learn more about the OCTO Speaker series here: https://octo.github.com/

Experiences with QuickCheck: Testing the Hard Stuff

If you've ever wondered whether there is a better way to test software than by writing and maintaining thousands of test cases, then this talk is for you. I'll explain "property-based testing", which combines test case generation, test case simplification, and using properties to specify your code. I'll show you what you need to think about to make it work in practice, and tell you tales of some of our more entertaining bugs.

About John Hughes
I've loved functional programming all my career; I wrote "Why Functional Programming Matters", a manifesto for the field, way back in the eighties. I urged lazy evaluation on John Backus (but failed to persuade him). I was a co-designer of Haskell. I moved to Sweden, home of the Lazy ML compiler, in the nineties, and at the turn of the millennium I co-invented property-based testing. I co-founded a startup in 2006 to bring PBT to industry, and I've learned to love (other peoples') buggy software! My motto: "make hard things easy with functional programming".

Twitter: @rjmh
GitHub: rjmh
Web: http://www.cse.chalmers.se/~rjmh/

Learn more about the OCTO Speaker series here: https://octo.github.com/

Golden Rules of Building Online Communities that Matter: Online communities for programmers, like Stack Overflow and GitHub, have norms that are not obvious nor inclusive to the 50 million programmers visiting monthly.

In this talk, Dr. Denae Ford Robinson, Senior Researcher - Microsoft Research will 1) offer a perspective of understanding what can inhibit participation, 2) describe what mechanisms developers are using to alleviate their own frustrations with communities, and 3) outline what on-platform mechanisms can intervene to better support engagement based on rigorous research.

Learn more about the OCTO Speaker series here: https://octo.github.com/

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