Making Open Work
May 8–9, 2017: Training & Tutorials
May 10–11, 2017: Conference
Austin, TX

Schedule: In Real Life (IRL) sessions

Hearing about how a company or team has succeeded with a new initiative, implemented a new language, or reconfigured their architecture is fascinating; so is listening in on the failures. Both success and failure have a lot to teach us. As individuals we have a limit to how many of those we can complete in one year so this track is about sharing war stories and life on the front lines. Help the person beside you and tell your story. How did you go from a monolith to microservices? Now that you’ve migrated to microservices, how do you manage them in production? How did they hack your system?

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11:00am–11:40am Wednesday, May 10, 2017
Adopting open source in your organization
Location: Meeting Room 12
Level: Non-technical
Edward Thomson (Microsoft)
Average rating: ****.
(4.00, 2 ratings)
Recently, Microsoft went from calling open source "a cancer" to being the biggest contributor on GitHub. Edward Thomson explains how Microsoft, one of the unlikeliest software vendors, began to embrace and even extend (but not extinguish) open source software and how you can begin using and contributing to open source software in your organization. Read more.
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11:50am–12:30pm Wednesday, May 10, 2017
The Paved Road at Netflix: At the junction of freedom and responsibility
Location: Meeting Room 12
Level: Beginner
Dianne Marsh (Netflix)
Average rating: ****.
(4.25, 8 ratings)
The Paved Road, a concept formalizing a set of expectations and commitments between centralized and local teams, is absolutely critical to Netflix's culture of freedom and responsibility. Dianne Marsh shares how Netflix uses this promised path of well-integrated, supported tools toward its polyglot strategy, creating boundaries so that the company can provide value without being overwhelmed. Read more.
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1:45pm–2:25pm Wednesday, May 10, 2017
Is it too late to learn how to program? How I become a developer later in life
Location: Meeting Room 12
Level: Non-technical
Alicia Carr (Purple Evolution Inc. (PEVO) | Women Who Code Atlanta)
Average rating: ****.
(4.00, 1 rating)
Adages like you can’t teach an old dog new tricks presume that certain pursuits are for young people only. Some people believe that older people are out of touch with technology—that’s the stereotype, anyway—and programming is no exception. Alicia Carr explains how and why she became an iOS mobile developer at the age of 51. Read more.
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2:35pm–3:15pm Wednesday, May 10, 2017
React properly
Location: Meeting Room 12
Level: Beginner
Ben Ilegbodu (Eventbrite)
Average rating: ****.
(4.50, 2 ratings)
Eventbrite recently transitioned to a React-based stack. Ben Ilegbodu walks you through the guidelines Eventbrite adopted to prevent immediate technical debt from poorly written React code so that you can apply them to your own teams and projects. Read more.
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4:15pm–4:55pm Wednesday, May 10, 2017
Building and growing your InnerSource practices
Location: Meeting Room 12
Level: Non-technical
Margaret Mayer (Capital One), Kranthi Dandamudi (Capital One)
Margaret Mayer and Kranthi Dandamudi share Capital One's experience building and growing its InnerSource practices. This case study touches on the rationale behind the change and the agility at which large organizations can shift to InnerSourcing. Read more.
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5:05pm–5:45pm Wednesday, May 10, 2017
The excitement and mundanity of building Hillaryclinton.com/donate
Location: Meeting Room 12
Level: Intermediate
Bethany Andres-Beck (Independent)
Average rating: *****
(5.00, 1 rating)
Bethany Andres-Beck shares her experience building a product guaranteed to see hockey stick growth while knowing her company would die on November 8. Here's how it went. Read more.
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11:00am–11:40am Thursday, May 11, 2017
Build better stuff faster by talking to strangers: A case study
Location: Meeting Room 18 C/D
Level: Beginner
Jane Davis (Dropbox)
Average rating: ****.
(4.00, 2 ratings)
Jane Davis shares how Dropbox used a research- and design-led development process to de-risk and identify assumptions for both engineering and design and explains how the company effectively integrated research into the development process and involved engineers in the research and design process. Read more.
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11:50am–12:30pm Thursday, May 11, 2017
The people’s code: Learning how to open source the federal government
Location: Ballroom E
Level: Non-technical
Joseph Castle (US General Services Administration), Matthew Bailey (Office of the Federal Chief Information Officer, The White House), Michelle Ibarra (US Environmental Protection Agency), Jason Duley (NASA), Tom Berekyei (Defense Digital Service (DDS))
Average rating: ***..
(3.50, 2 ratings)
Joseph Castle, Matthew Bailey, Jason Duley, Sharon Woods, and Michelle Ibarra discuss the implementation of the White House open source policy: M-16-21: Achieving Efficiency, Transparency, and Innovation through Reusable and Open Source Software (OSS). Read more.
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11:50am–12:30pm Thursday, May 11, 2017
Making cross-browser testing beautiful
Location: Meeting Room 18 C/D
Level: Beginner
Meaghan Lewis (GitHub)
Average rating: ***..
(3.75, 4 ratings)
How many times have your Selenium test suites run beautifully on one browser only to fail when run in any other? This is a common problem faced with cross-browser tests. Not all browser drivers are created equal, but that doesn’t mean you can’t create a robust suite with cross-browser tests. Meaghan Lewis shares strategies for making cross-browser tests invincible. Read more.
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1:45pm–2:25pm Thursday, May 11, 2017
From Africa with love
Location: Meeting Room 18 C/D
Level: Non-technical
Isaac Kamga (Google Developer Group Buea)
Isaac Kamga discusses his contribution to the Ballistic Research Laboratory–Computer-Aided Design (BRL-CAD) community implementing a heart-shaped primitive and explains how this catapulted him into a role as a community organizer for Silicon Mountain, Africa's next tech hub. Read more.
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2:35pm–3:15pm Thursday, May 11, 2017
Leaving an open source project
Location: Meeting Room 18 C/D
Level: Non-technical
Gareth Greenaway (SaltStack)
There is a process for leaving your job in the professional world. But what happens when you decide to leave a leadership position within an open source project? Are you no longer a member of the project's community? Can you easily come back to the project? Gareth Greenaway answers these questions, sharing the good, the bad, and the ugly and how to make the transition as easy as possible. Read more.
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5:05pm–5:45pm Thursday, May 11, 2017
What’s taking so long? A visualization story
Location: Meeting Room 18 C/D
Level: Beginner
Ivan Kornienko (BP3)
When a large financial institution implemented a customer onboarding process, average onboarding time jumped from two days to two weeks. Given the complexity of the process, traditional BI tools were ineffective at helping the bank understand what was taking so long, let alone communicate it to their customers. Ivan Kornienko explains how Spark and a unique visualization cleared things up. Read more.