Category Archives: CloudComputing

All Things Open 2017

I went to the All Things Open (ATO) conference this year in Raleigh for the first time. I wanted to tap into the latest open source buzz and to meet up with old friends and make new ones. In its fifth year, the conference pulled in thousands of open source participants sharing their passion about their projects and latest tools. I expected the conference to be heavily Red Hat focused but found it, thankfully, to be warmly welcoming to the diverse open source community.

The conference mostly realized its clearly articulated values of promoting access, diversity, and providing world-class content and value. I had a chance to chat with the conference organizer Todd Lewis (@toddle) and appreciate his mission to build a space to gather, share and contribute. I learned about how volunteers are contributing to projects at Apache Software Foundation (ASF), Raspberry Pi and women tech non-profits. GitHub and CapitalOne’s DevExchange teams shared insights on popular collaborative tools used by their developer communities.

10 keynotes, 22 tracks of talks across 3 days included excellent presentations by Danese Cooper on Open Source Sustainability and Kelsey Hightower on Kubernetes. Fun lightning talks, facilitated by Jason Hibbets, featured 5 minute pitches on CSS, containers and even Lego projects.

While this year’s conference excelled in many areas, I would like to see more attention on some aspects next year. I’d like to see more women recruited to present and attend. I’d like see more diversity in the attendees. I’d like to see topics emphasizing the use of open source to connect the next billion users on mobile, web and cloud platforms. The conference could add build-your-own (BYO) workshops on Raspberry Pi and other platforms. Birds-of-a-feather (BoF) sessions, missing this year, would be another community favorite.

I’m looking forward to returning as an active participant at ATO next year. All Things Open was a great place to network and get a pulse of what’s inspiring the community at large.

Until next year.

MIT’s Top 10 Emerging Technologies for 2010

Emerging Technologies 2010

Emerging Technologies 2010

Every year MIT’s Technology Review selects and publishes a list of the 10 most promising emerging technologies. This year’s list picks some really futuristic technology ideas in internet and web applications, mobile computing, green technologies, biomedicine, and solar energy which are worth learning more about.

The list includes:

It lists technology areas such as cloud programming, real-time search, social TV and mobile 3-D where I think open source software has a big role to play. Especially in the arena of cloud programming, it is interesting to note that UC Berkeley researcher Joseph Hellerstein has been working on a project named BOOM (Berkeley Orders of Magnitude). This project has developed a software language named BLOOM which he proposes can make cloud programming easier for building complex cloud applications by tracking data and state. As MIT Technology Review points out,

“Hellerstein’s big idea is to modify database programming languages so that they can be used to quickly build any sort of application in the cloud–social networks, communication tools, games, and more. Such languages have been refined over the years to hide the complexities of shuffling information in and out of large databases. If one could be made cloud-friendly, programmers could just think about the results they want, rather than micromanaging data.”

The UC Berkeley team has also used BLOOM to build around open source cloud computing platform Hadoop.