Jason Porter

Presentations

Growing an OSS project by turning followers into leaders

Open Source is about building a community of developers and users around a project willing to cooperate, exchange ideas and provide peer review. Participating in the project provides mutual benefit to all parties, including better software, skill improvement, respect, and being a member of a group of peers. But how does it happen? What motivates people to join your project? How do you grow the community?

We'll use Seam 3 as a case study. We'll present the factors we believe led to a 3000% increase in the project team in just one year, with many contributors leading one or more modules of the project. By the end of this talk, you should have plenty of ideas about how to increase participation so your project can realize these benefits.

Bake better websites together on GitHub

Did you know GitHub can be a publishing platform? That a blog entry can be posted via a pull request?

Static is the new dynamic and git is the new way to collaborate. Learn how to use site-baking tools such as Awestruct and Jekyll to build and publish static websites and leverage the ever increasing capabilities of HTML5-based browsers to make your site more dynamic than ever before.

Static is the new dynamic. With the ever increasing capabilities of HTML5-based browsers, we can give the server a rest and put security problems behind us by publishing static HTML5 documents and shifting the dynamic behavior to the client. Not only does that let you blog out of static hosting sites like github pages, it also means you can put more processing power into the author tools.

In this session, you'll be introduced to Awestruct and Jekyll, Ruby-based tools for building and publishing static websites. You'll discover how you can leverage a wide range of lightweight markups languages and DSLs such as HAML, AsciiDoc, Markdown, SASS and CoffeeScript to keep your source terse and DRY. We'll use an extension pipeline to setup a blog, add comments to your site or add analytic tracking scripts to your pages, then build and publish the site to GitHub pages in a single command. Just because the pages are static doesn't mean they can't be dynamic too.