May 12, 2013
ApacheConNA: On Security # During the security talk at Apache Con a topic commonly glossed over by
developers was covered in quite some detail: With software being developed that
is being deployed rather widely online (over 50% of all websites are powered
by the Apache webserver) natually security issues are of large concern.
Currently there are eight trustworthy people on the foundation-wide security
response team, subscribed to security@apache.org. The team was started by
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May 11, 2013
ApacheConNA: On documentation # In her talk on documentation on OSS Noirin gave a great wrap up of the topic of
what documentation to create for a project and how to go about that task.
One way to think about documentation is to keep in mind that it fulfills
different tasks: There is conceptual, procedural and task-reference
documentation. When starting to analyse your docs you may first want to debug
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May 10, 2013
ApacheConNA: On delegation # In her talk on delegation Deb Nicholson touched upon a really important topic in
OSS: Your project may live longer than you are willing to support it yourself.
The first important point about delegation is to delegate - and to not wait
until you have to do it. Soon you will realise that mentoring and delegation
actually is a way to multiply your resources.
In order to delegate people to delegate to are needed.
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May 9, 2013
ApacheConNA: First keynote # All three ApacheCon keynotes were focussed around the general theme of open
source communities. The first on given by Theo had very good advise to the
engineer not only striving to work on open source software but become an
excellent software developer:
Be loyal to the problem instead of to the code: You shouldn't be
addicted to any particular programming language or framework and refuse to work
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May 8, 2013
Apache Hadoop Get Together Berlin # This evening I joined the group over at Immobilienscout 24 for today’s Hadoop Get Together. David Obermann had invited Dr. Falk-Florian Henrich from CeleraOne to talk about their real-time analytics on live data streams.
Their system is being used by the New York Times Springer’s Die Welt for traffic analysis. The goal is to identify recurring users that might be willing to pay for the content they want to read.
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May 8, 2013
ApacheConNA: Meet the indian tribe # ApacheCon is the ``User Conference of the Apache Software Foundation’’. What
should that mean? If you are going to Apache Con you have the chance of meeting
committers of your favourite projects as well as members of the foundation
itself. Though there are a lot of talks that are interesting from a technical
point of view the goal really is to turn you into an active member of the
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May 7, 2013
How to get your submission accepted at Berlin Buzzwords # Disclaimer: Intentionally posting on my private blog - these are my own criteria, not general advice from the review committee.
Berlin Buzzwords is in it’s fourth year. Probably the most tedious task of all is having to select talks to make it into the final schedule. With roughly 120 submissions and roughly 30 slots to fill the result is that three quarters of all submissions have to be rejected.
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February 20, 2013
Keepers of secrets - FOSDEM 09 # The closing keynote was given by Leslie Hawthorn whom I had the pleasure of meeting last year during Berlin Buzzwords. In her talk she shared insights into a topic commonly encountered in open source leadership that is way less often talked about than should be the case: Being in the role of a community leader people will talk to you about all sorts of confidential information and ask you to not share that information with other no matter how beneficial that might be for both parties.
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February 19, 2013
On making Libre Office suck less – a major refactoring effort - FOSDEM 08 # Libre Office is currently in a phase of code cleanup and refactoring that turns the whole code base upside down. What that means is that people need tooling to avoid quality from going down and allow for new features going in without too much risk. The project made good experiences with using gerrit for code review of patches, tinderbox for fast integration testing, strict whitespace checks to avoid unintended mistakes, use clang compiler plugins.
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February 18, 2013
E17 - FOSDEM 07 # I’m really glad the NoSQL room was all packed on afternoon – otherwise I’d have missed an amazing talk by people behind Enlightenment – a window manager that is older than Gnome, nearly older than KDE and has been my favourite choice for years and years (simply because they have sensible default configuration options: focus follows mouse, virtual desktops that allow for desktop switching when moving the mouse close to the screen edges, menu opening when clicking anywhere on the desktop background, options for remembering window placement and configuration on re-boot etc).
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