All Things Open 2015

Ready for ATO2015

This is the third year that I’ve had the pleasure of attending All Things Open in Raleigh, NC.

The conference has gotten bigger every year. This year there were 1,700 attendees across thirteen tracks. The tracks cover a variety of technical topics ranging from JavaScript/web development to big data, to community management.

I haven’t previously blogged about the talks I go to. This year (I tell myself) will be different.

This year is big enough that I’m going to highlight several different themes and projects that really caught my attention over the two days. I’ll write a post on each of the following topics:

  1. Community: community is a big part of All Things Open, and many of the talks are either specifically about open source communities, or peripherally mention them as a key to technical success. I think there were a lot of good takeaways on how to engineer communities to be inclusive, productive, and self-sustaining.
  2. Development & Deployment Environments: While I’d previously been aware of tools like Docker and Vagrant, hearing experts talk about them and give live demonstrations really cements what these tools are for and how they can be used to simplify my life as a developer, researcher, and systems administrator.
  3. Big Data: I went to several of the big data talks — this year there were two great talks on using Apache Nifi and Apache Spark to ingest and explore data.
  4. Graph Databases: Graph databases (like Neo4J) are an interesting take on databases. Again, it was instructive to see an expert talk about graph databases and give a live demonstration.
  5. Rust: The Rust programming language is an interesting new programming language that’s seen a considerable amount of development over the previous year.
  6. SrcML.NET: There was no talk on SrcML.NET this year — however, as its primary maintainer, I hope to apply many of the social and technical ideas I learned this year to the project.

As I write each post, I’ll update this post with a link.

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