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Open Source Bridge: Day 2

June 18th, 2009

Loggin’ in, and bloggin’ in from Day 2 of Open Source Bridge in Portland. After a couple beers last night and a recharge of the batteries, I was eager to jump back into the conference this morning. As in day 1, I’m finding this event very interesting and informative. I’ve had my eyes opened to a ton of new technology, philosophies, and the open source community in general. Here’s a summary of some of the sessions I checked out today:

How idealist.org uses technology to change the world

The best thing that came out of this session was learning about idealist.org, which is essentially a social network for non-profit organizations. The speaker, Michel Pelletier, went over the redesign they are currently working on, as well as an overview of what the website is about. If you are a programmer who is looking to work or volunteer in the non-profit sector, this is a great place to start.

Is the web down: a practical tutorial on how the web works

This was a great session for anyone (like myself) that doesn’t have a huge knowledge on how the inner tinkerings of the interweb work. The presenters, Michael Schwern and Joshua Keroes, did a great job of making it fun by using some props and keeping the mood light.

The guys covered topics like: troubleshooting your network, UDP, TCP, DNS (did you know there is only 13 domain name servers in the world and they’re all in the US? News to me), telnet, pinging, and traceroute. One of the more interesting things they quickly covered was the coming of custom TLDs. With in the year, we will probably start seeing these. Some examples would be www.mail.google, www.search.google, www.shoes.nike, etc… I’m looking forward to that hitting the net and all the new domain possibilities it will generate.

I sat in on a few other sessions today, but these were the two I enjoyed the most. The organizers of this event have a done a great job, especially considering it’s the first year! I’m looking forward to coming back next year, but for now it’s time to get some food and some beers!

» Check out the Open Source Bridge website

Tags: idealist, non-profit, open-source, open-source-bridge, social-networking