About OSCON

Experience OSCON | Who Should Attend | Why Attend | What People Are Saying | Program Chairs | Program Committee

Once considered a radical upstart, open source has moved from disruption to default. Its methods and culture commoditized the technologies that drove the Internet revolution and transformed the practice of software development. Collaborative and transparent, open source has become modus operandi, powering the next wave of innovation in cloud, data, and mobile technologies.

OSCON is where all of the pieces come together: developers, innovators, businesspeople, and investors. In the early days, this trailblazing O'Reilly event was focused on changing mainstream business thinking and practices; today OSCON is about real-world practices and how to successfully implement open source in your workflow or projects. While the open source community has always been viewed as building the future—that future is here, and it's everywhere you look. Since 1999, OSCON has been the best place on the planet to experience the open source ecosystem. At OSCON, you'll find everything open source: languages, communities, best practices, products and services. Rather than focus on a single language or aspect, such as cloud computing, OSCON allows you to learn about and practice the entire range of open source technologies.

In keeping with its O'Reilly heritage, OSCON is a unique gathering where participants find inspiration, confront new challenges, share their expertise, renew bonds to community, make significant connections, and find ways to give back to the open source movement. The event has also become one of the most important venues to announce groundbreaking open source projects and products.

"For those who have not been to OSCON, it's a great technical conference covering the whole spectrum of open source, including Linux, MySQL, the LAMP stack, Perl, Python, Ruby on Rails, middleware, applications, cloud computing, and more. OSCON always has great keynotes, tutorials, and evening Birds-of-a-Feather sessions. As with many conferences, a lot of the meat takes place in hallway conversations and impromptu sessions." —Zack Urlocker, InfoWorld

Experience OSCON

OSCON will educate, provoke, and inspire, with:

• Over a hundred sessions covering the full range of open source languages and platforms
• Practical tutorials that go deep into technical skills, new features and applications, and best practices
• Inspirational (and relevant) keynote presentations
• Thousands of open source developers, hackers, experts, vendors, and users of all levels—many of whom share your interests
• An Expo Hall packed with an impressive array of open source projects and products
• A vibrant "hallway track" where attendees, speakers, journalists, and vendors debate and discuss important issues
• Fun evening events and receptions, Birds of a Feather sessions, awards ceremonies, late night parties, OSCON activities around town, and plenty of networking opportunities for everyone

Who Should Attend

OSCON welcomes anyone who's passionate about open source:

O'Reilly is committed to promoting diversity and to creating a safe and productive environment for everyone at OSCON, and at all of our events.

Why Attend?

Open source has penetrated every aspect of business, ecommerce, education, and the Web. But open source doesn't mean free and easy—you have licensing compliance to understand, you need to know which technologies work well with each other, and how the open source projects you use are supported and by whom. In four information-packed days (and nights) OSCON gives you the tools you need to succeed:

• Learn techniques you can use to write great code
• Discover the advantages of using code that you can get your hands on, instead of wondering what other people have built into it, and for what purposes
• Find out how to migrate from expensive commercial installations to more efficient, cost-effective open source solutions
• Explore innovations in system and network administration that your company can start using immediately to increase efficiency
• Learn how to ensure that your code is really secure—don't take someone else's word for it
• Master essential techniques and advanced tips to scale and optimize your systems for trouble-free, time-saving performance
• Learn how to increase productivity and lower the cost of deployment, from databases to cloud computing
• Hear about to the most promising new projects, services, languages and tools
• Receive hype-free guidance to help your business build a solid footing for future success

What People Are Saying

"It's hard to explain the sort of impact that a good conference can have on your career and even your life, but we can't express how much you should go to one in order to gain inspiration, have fun and learn a whole bunch of new stuff you can take back to your workplace." — Martijn Verburg, London Java Community

"As Tim says, one never has trouble finding an interesting conversation at OSCON...the content, both hallway and in-session, shined... there are people I literally see only at this event every year, and while remote collaboration is all well and good, it's nice to have a beer with people every so often." — Stephen O'Grady, tecosystems, RedMonk

"For the past few years, we at NYTimes.com have been attending OSCON. It has become the premier conference for us because it offers so many opportunities to engage with fellow developers. We've met new friends, given talks, led Birds-of-a-Feather sessions..." — Derek Gottfrid, NYTimes.com

"Speaking at conferences like linux.conf.au and OSCON is great fun. It's challenging to speak to an audience that's so diverse that it includes both the creator of the Linux kernel and students who just discovered it exists. It's humbling to know that the intelligence and achievement in the audience dwarfs anything I've ever done." — Simon Phipps, Open Source Initiative

"OSCON is a great opportunity for us to really get our geek on and meet with some of the industry's sharpest people. Love the 'Birds of a Feather' sessions. We had a great time at what we consider the best conference we get to attend." — Nick Thuesen, Senior Software Engineer, NYTimes.com

Program Chairs

Rachel Roumeliotis

Rachel Roumeliotis, a Strategic Content Director at O’Reilly Media, Inc., leads an editorial team that covers a wide variety of programming topics ranging from full-stack, to open source in the enterprise, to emerging programming languages. She is a Programming Chair of OSCON and O’Reilly’s Software Architecture Conference. She has been working in technical publishing for 10 years, acquiring content in many areas including mobile programming, UX, computer security, and AI.

Scott Hanselman

Scott is a web developer who has been blogging at hanselman.com for over a decade. He works on Azure and ASP.NET for Microsoft out of his home office in Portland. Scott has three podcasts, hanselminutes.com for tech talk, thisdeveloperslife.com on developers' lives and loves, and ratchetandthegeek.com for pop culture and tech media. He's written a number of books and spoken in person to almost a half million developers worldwide.

Kelsey Hightower

Kelsey Hightower has worn every hat possible throughout his career in tech, and enjoys leadership roles focused on making things happen and shipping software. Kelsey is a strong open source advocate focused on building simple tools that make people smile. When he is not slinging Go code, you can catch him giving technical workshops covering everything from programming and system administration, to his favorite Linux distro of the month (CoreOS).

Program Committee