Hi all,
Brief post (I know, haven't updated in ages!) to advertise the London Java Community's first Unconference on the 28th of November! I'm helping organise this one and time permitting I'll also be presenting at a couple of the sessions with juicy? topics such as "How to run a successful Open Source project" and "How to be a Rock Star Developer!".
See http://londonjavacommunity.wordpress.com/ for details of the Unconference.
Hope to see you there!
P.S: For those of you who don't know what an Unconference is, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconference for details.
Monday, 2 November 2009
Friday, 12 June 2009
How to run a Successful Open Source project
So I never posted about the recent talks I did :). Since using ones blog is great for self advertisement here goes!
The talks were delivered to members of the London Java Community, London Open Source & Agile Community and the London Open Source Jam group, it's a shame that there isn't one overriding interest group that can get together for this sort of thing, but I guess it's human nature to build small tribes.
The first talk covered off a wide range of topics that you need to deal with when setting up a successful Open Source project including:
* Getting started (Choosing your project name, Mission Statement, etc)
* Setting up your technical, social and political infrastructure
* Money
* Communications
* Packaging, Releasing and Daily Development
* Managing your volunteers
It's a long and involved topic, so you're best off seeing the Podcast or reading Producing OSS by Karl Fogel.
The second talk was actually an open forum debate covering licensing and legal issues for Open Source projects. We had some great panelists come in for this one including:
* An actual IP Lawyer!
* The chairman of the UK Open Source Consortium
* An Apache project lead
* An expert in academic licenses.
I decided to switch off the video camera as we wanted a full and frank debate on the issues and it certainly proved to be interesting (the lawyer didn't cop too much flak)!
One overriding message that came out of this talk was that individuals really need to check their contracts for the IP clauses contained within. Often organisations use a default agreement which states that the work you do in your spare time is still owned by them. Most organisations are actually quite reasonable once you approach them about this, so don't hesitate to ask them!
The talks were delivered to members of the London Java Community, London Open Source & Agile Community and the London Open Source Jam group, it's a shame that there isn't one overriding interest group that can get together for this sort of thing, but I guess it's human nature to build small tribes.
The first talk covered off a wide range of topics that you need to deal with when setting up a successful Open Source project including:
* Getting started (Choosing your project name, Mission Statement, etc)
* Setting up your technical, social and political infrastructure
* Money
* Communications
* Packaging, Releasing and Daily Development
* Managing your volunteers
It's a long and involved topic, so you're best off seeing the Podcast or reading Producing OSS by Karl Fogel.
The second talk was actually an open forum debate covering licensing and legal issues for Open Source projects. We had some great panelists come in for this one including:
* An actual IP Lawyer!
* The chairman of the UK Open Source Consortium
* An Apache project lead
* An expert in academic licenses.
I decided to switch off the video camera as we wanted a full and frank debate on the issues and it certainly proved to be interesting (the lawyer didn't cop too much flak)!
One overriding message that came out of this talk was that individuals really need to check their contracts for the IP clauses contained within. Often organisations use a default agreement which states that the work you do in your spare time is still owned by them. Most organisations are actually quite reasonable once you approach them about this, so don't hesitate to ask them!
Tuesday, 26 May 2009
Presentations - Argh!
So once more I find myself preparing to give a presentation to a group of (mostly) strangers, scary much? This time it's on "How to run a successful Open Source project", a topic that I have lots of opinions on having spent the last 8-9 years involved in several projects.
There is a ton of good literature on how to run an effective presentation ("talk like so", "make slides like that"), but since I'm a geek I'm just going to mention the help that modern technology has given me :).
Firstly on the way back from a Hi-Di-Hi! style holiday camp (much fun, go the Falconry lesson!), I was able to use my Wife's Samsung NC10 Netbook to hastily finish off the first draft of the presentation. It's amazing what you can type out on that little monster even when crammed into the back seat of a non people carrier. Oh and thank you good genes for not making me carsick, very useful trait that.
Next up is the use of MS Powerpoint. Yes it's much maligned but it still beats writing notes up on a whiteboard with your back to the crowd. It also helps to have a Wife who happens to be a Graphic Designer, pretty Powerpoint template heaven!
Then there's the borrowing of my Flatmate's Macbook Pro to run the presentation from (not all of us can wear turtlenecks ;p).
Last but not least there's the use of the iClicker utility for the iPhone. I can go back and forth through the slides and have a mini representation of each slide in front of my nose, again I don't have to turn my back on the audience which is a good thing. Bonus points to the developers of this utility for allowing you to swap between the notes for the slide and the slide contents itself.
I'll post the post-mortem on the talk sometime tomorrow, assuming I don't incite the crowd into rioting (IT people are generally far more passionate than people give them credit for).
There is a ton of good literature on how to run an effective presentation ("talk like so", "make slides like that"), but since I'm a geek I'm just going to mention the help that modern technology has given me :).
Firstly on the way back from a Hi-Di-Hi! style holiday camp (much fun, go the Falconry lesson!), I was able to use my Wife's Samsung NC10 Netbook to hastily finish off the first draft of the presentation. It's amazing what you can type out on that little monster even when crammed into the back seat of a non people carrier. Oh and thank you good genes for not making me carsick, very useful trait that.
Next up is the use of MS Powerpoint. Yes it's much maligned but it still beats writing notes up on a whiteboard with your back to the crowd. It also helps to have a Wife who happens to be a Graphic Designer, pretty Powerpoint template heaven!
Then there's the borrowing of my Flatmate's Macbook Pro to run the presentation from (not all of us can wear turtlenecks ;p).
Last but not least there's the use of the iClicker utility for the iPhone. I can go back and forth through the slides and have a mini representation of each slide in front of my nose, again I don't have to turn my back on the audience which is a good thing. Bonus points to the developers of this utility for allowing you to swap between the notes for the slide and the slide contents itself.
I'll post the post-mortem on the talk sometime tomorrow, assuming I don't incite the crowd into rioting (IT people are generally far more passionate than people give them credit for).
Monday, 20 April 2009
Symbolic Linking ahoy!
Learned a handy new trick today! I was trying to roll out some pre-prepared Jboss servers with some symbolically linked directories. I completely forgot that when you unzip these that the symbolic linking is gone.
A quick hopeful trip to the man page for zip reveals this:
-y Store symbolic links as such in the zip archive, instead of compressing and storing the file referred to by the link (UNIX only).
They think of everything :). It's little things like this that remind me to RTFM before I go and blindly do things.
As a side note, applying customer patches for Jboss-eap-4.3 is not as straight forward as it should be. You effectively have to roll out brand new servers and their associated server instances and then copy your applications and configurations across (making sure of course that they're customer patch compatible). Jboss responded and say they're going to try and do better the next customer patch, will be interesting to see if they succeed...
A quick hopeful trip to the man page for zip reveals this:
-y Store symbolic links as such in the zip archive, instead of compressing and storing the file referred to by the link (UNIX only).
They think of everything :). It's little things like this that remind me to RTFM before I go and blindly do things.
As a side note, applying customer patches for Jboss-eap-4.3 is not as straight forward as it should be. You effectively have to roll out brand new servers and their associated server instances and then copy your applications and configurations across (making sure of course that they're customer patch compatible). Jboss responded and say they're going to try and do better the next customer patch, will be interesting to see if they succeed...
Tuesday, 31 March 2009
Twitter just isn't enough
Well after a bit of thought I've decided that yes I will try to have one of these crazy blog things, I'm mean sometimes 140 characters isn't enough :)
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