Ideas from Open Source Programmer Gatherings

Iconss and graphics associated with Java, Perl, PHP, Pythoin and Ruby

Over at my personal technical blog, Global Nerdy, I’ve got a few posts covering some presentations and goings-on at a few open source programming conferences and gatherings that you might want to check out.:

  • Fighting the Imperial Californian Ideology: A presentation by Jesse Hirsh at the recent FutureRuby conference, in which he suggests that Silicon Valley is just the latest manifestation of the San Francisco Bay Area has been ruling the world since the Gold Rush, how it’s not necessarily been a good thing and challenges us as programmers, techies and builders of the future to resist their rule.
  • Artisanal Retro-Futurism and Team-Scale Anarcho-Syndicalism: Another FutureRuby presentation, this time by Brian Masnick. It’s a call to Ruby and Agile programmers to take pride in their work the way artisans and dedicated craftspeople do (that’s the “artisanal” bit), to be excited about building the future the way we used to be (that’s the “retro-futurism” bit) and to take charge of our work and work environments (that’s the “team-scale anarcho-syndicalism” bit).
  • The Missing Link: A free talk being given by the amusing and enlightening Damian Conway on Monday, July 27th in Toronto in which he will tie together the concepts of watching trees grow, debugging debuggers, Greek mythology, code that writes code that writes code that writes code, the hazards of LaTeX, successful failures, the treacherous Vorta, objective syntax, anti-stacks, Danish mind-control, active null statements, synthetic standup, and the prospect of certain death and turn them into a “new and improbably useful module”.
  • Open Source Language Roundtable at OSCON: O’Reilly’s open source conference, OSCON, takes place this week and on Wednesday night, they’ll be webcasting a roundtable discussion in which five open source programming languages – Java, Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby – will be discussed and compared. The webcast is free to listen to – all you have to do to catch it is register.