For the Love of Code

Coding is about more than code. Whether it's building a solid community, writing good documentation, or hacking space exploration, CodeConf is about improving the software ecosystem through best practices. Come with an open mind and leave a better programmer.

~~Only 300 seats available — register today!~~

Special thanks to our sponsors:

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Speakers

Below is a list of our amazing speaker lineup and their talk descriptions. To get the most up-to-date info follow @codeconf on Twitter.

@ginatrapani
@photomatt
@ryah
@stubbornella
@jacobian
@jashkenas
@arielwaldman
@mikeyk
@rentzsch
@commanda
@coda
@mojodna
@drnic
@petdance

Gina Trapani @ginatrapani

Gina Trapani is the award-winning author, blogger, and programmer whose work translates cutting-edge technology into insights that boost personal productivity. Gina was the founding editor of Lifehacker.com, the seminal blog which garnered nominations for Blog of the Decade and yielded the best-selling book, Upgrade Your Life. Currently located in San Diego, CA, Gina is a project director at Expert Labs leading development on ThinkUp, an open source crowdsourcing platform the White House uses.

Talk Topic & Description

OSS on GitHub: Your Community is Your Best Feature

Open source software is only as good as the community that surrounds it. Social coding tools help you build that community. This talk will cover how to empower your OSS project contributors to learn from and teach each other on GitHub and beyond, how to convert interested users into first-time OSS contributors, and how (and why!) to attract and empower open source enthusiasts who don't write code to your project.

Matt Mullenweg @photomatt

Born and raised in Houston, Texas, Matt is the founding developer of WordPress, the blogging software that runs millions of sites around the world.

Ryan Dahl @ryah

Ryan created node.js. His work invariably involves interruptible parsers, event loops, and response time histograms. He is the creator of several open source projects including the Ebb web server and the "EY" load balancer module for Nginx.

Talk Topic & Description

Networks with Node.js

Node presents a simple environment for scripting a single threaded process. The non-blocking nature of the system allows for many hundreds or even thousands of concurrent connections to that single process. For many use-cases, one process is enough, however massive internet programs are expected to be distributed not only across the different CPUs on a machine but across the world. This talk will describe why Node is a good foundational building block for these massive scale programs and announce a new framework for building networks of Node processes.

Jonathan "Wolf" Rentzsch @rentzsch

Wolf is an indie software contractor who writes Mac and Web applications.

Talk Topic & Description

Assumptions Are Awesome

Improve code quality with a strategy so old it came on vinyl.

Dr. Nic Williams @drnic

Dr Nic works at Engine Yard as VP Technology, and is responsible for Engine Yard’s Open Source program and Advanced Weapons Lab. He’s written, maintained and contributed to over a 100 open source projects.

Seth Fitzsimmons @mojodna

Seth lives in Boulder, Colorado, having forsaken the indeterminate-yet-predictable weather of San Francisco and the extreme seasonal variance of Boston. His interests include the Real Time Web, the outdoors, working with geospatial data, and exploration of the softer, social side of being a cog in the corporate machine. He currently works for SimpleGeo on whatever needs doing.

Talk Topic & Description

The Ethics of Abandoning Software

Much has been said about the process of software creation. Let's talk about the when, why, and how of abandoning a software project responsibly.

Jacob Kaplan-Moss @jacobian

Jacob Kaplan-Moss is one of the lead developers and co-creator of Django. Jacob's an experienced software developer with a focus on web application architecture and. He's a consultant with Revolution Systems, where he helps companies deploy and scale websites using Python and Django.

Talk Topic & Description

Documentation isn’t optional

If it’s not documented, I won’t use it. Learn the tips, tools, and techniques you can use to produce great technical documentation.

Jeremy Ashkenas @jashkenas

Jeremy Ashkenas is the lead developer at DocumentCloud, helping news organizations analyze and publish the documents behind the news. He works on CoffeeScript, Backbone.js, Underscore.js, Docco, and Ruby-Processing, among other open-source projects.

Talk Topic & Description

Can Code be Literature?

Code is a written artifact, but should it be treated like writing? Discuss code in the context of open source, high-level languages, and literate programming.

Coda Hale @coda

Coda Hale is a software engineer and a cyclist. He lives in San Francisco, CA, and works for Yammer, an enterprise social network, as their infrastructure architect.

Talk Topic & Description

Metrics, Metrics Everywhere

If you don’t measure it, you can’t optimize it. I’ll talk about Yammer’s service-level performance metrics, how we use them to guide our development strategy, and how you can improve the transparency of your own software.

Ariel Waldman @arielwaldman

Ariel Waldman is an open science strategist, interaction designer and the founder of Spacehack.org, a directory of ways to participate in space exploration. Recently, she founded Science Hack Day SF, an event that brings together scientists, technologists, designers and people with good ideas to see what they can create in a weekend. Previously, she was a CoLab Program Coordinator at NASA and a Digital Anthropologist at VML (an interactive WPP agency) for 8 years.

Talk Topic & Description

Hacking Space Exploration

From creating remote-sensing CubeSats to analyzing aerogel: how the public is hacking into open source space exploration.

Amanda Wixted @commanda

Amanda Wixted has been a game programmer for 6 years, riding the wave from J2ME phones to iPhones to the web. She has worked for Octopi and Namco Networks and was the first iPhone developer hired at Zynga. Some of her App Store #1 hits are FarmVille, Live Poker, Mafia Wars, PAC-MAN and Ms. PAC-MAN. Outside of mobile, she worked on PoxNora and PetVille. She splits her time between New York City and San Francisco.

Talk Topic & Description

Bringing FarmVille to iOS: A Retrospective

The gaming community assumed they'd never see FarmVille on the iPhone because there was no Flash runtime, but then we made it happen. Come hear about how it was done: from using the game engine Cocos2D, to the SWF asset converter we built, to how we hooked into the existing game servers, to how we managed a giant amount of textures.

Nicole Sullivan @stubbornella

Nicole is an evangelist, front-end performance consultant, CSS Ninja, and author. She started the Object-Oriented CSS open source project, which answers the question: how do you scale CSS for millions of visitors or thousands of pages? She also consulted with Facebook and the W3C, and is the co-creator of Smush.it, an image optimization service in the cloud. She is passionate about CSS, web standards, and scalable front-end architecture for large commercial websites. She co-authored Even Faster Websites and blogs at http://stubbornella.org.

Talk Topic & Description

Our Best Practices are Killing Us

For years, we have been suffering with the myth that if we just tried harder, our CSS would stay clean. Each time we start a new project, we valiantly follow best practices and commit ourselves to writing beautiful code. Then, a few months into the project, we're once again faced with a mess. Maybe it was the contractor who committed crappy code? The project manager who would never give us time to refactor? The truth is that our best practices are killing us. In this talk, we will debunk the best-practice-myths that are making a mess out of our sites.

Mike Krieger @mikeyk

Born in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Mike is the co-founder of Instagram, which brings fast, beautiful photo sharing and storytelling to the iPhone and beyond. He is a graduate of Stanford's Symbolic Systems program, and worked at Meebo as a Visualization Engineer.

Talk Topic & Description

Engineering for Startup Uncertainty

Startups often start out with only a vague idea of what they're building, and the path to launch is full of twists, turns, and abandoned explorations, and at least one git reset --hard HEAD^^^. I'll talk about how we dealt with this on the road from Burbn's initial prototype to Instagram's launch, and which decisions we made early on helped us iterate quickly—and which didn't.

Andy Lester @petdance

Andy Lester has been a developer for 25 years, and jumped into Perl and open source in the 90s. He's the creator of code search tool ack and has written or maintains dozens of Perl modules such as WWW::Mechanize. Andy also blogs about work life for techies and is the author of the book Land the Tech Job You Love from Pragmatic Bookshelf.

Talk Topic & Description

Project and Community Management with GitHub

Managing an open source project is more than managing code. Managing the contributors and community is a big part of it, too. GitHub's collaboration tools make this easy, but also bring certain challenges to project managers used to other code management systems.

Conference
Schedule

Here is a list of all the amazing events you can expect to experience. For more info, download the Conventionist app.

Friday, April 8
Event	Time	Location
Drinks at Roe	7:00 pm – 10:00 pm	Roe Lounge 651 Howard Street

Saturday, April 9
Event	Time	Location
Registration booth open	7:00 am – 5:00 pm	Main Foyer
Breakfast	8:30 am – 10:00 am	Main Foyer
CodeConf Kick off!	10:00 am – 10:30 am	Main Ballroom
Dr Nic Williams	10:30 am – 11:00 am	Main Ballroom
Coda Hale	11:15 am – 11:45 am	Main Ballroom
Jonathan Rentzsch	12:15 pm – 12:45 pm	Main Ballroom
LUNCH	12:45 pm – 1:45 pm	Main Foyer
Ariel Waldman	2:00 pm – 2:30 pm	Main Ballroom
Jacob Kaplan-Moss	2:45 pm – 3:15 pm	Main Ballroom
Ryan Dahl	3:30 pm – 4:00 pm	Main Ballroom
Gina Trapani	4:15 pm – 4:45 pm	Main Ballroom
Wrap up day 1	4:45 pm – 5:00 pm	Main Ballroom
Lightning talks	5:00 pm – 6:30 pm	Main Ballroom
Shuttle service to Public Works	6:00 pm – 8:00 pm	Hotel Entrance
Dinner, DJ, open bar!	6:30 pm – 2:00 am	Public Works

Sunday, April 10
Event	Time	Location
Healthy Hacker 5k	8:00 am – 2:00 am	Ferry Building Main Entrance
Breakfast	8:30 am – 10:00 am	Main Foyer
Morning announcements	10:00 am – 10:30 am	Main Ballroom
Andy Lester	10:30 am – 11:00 am	Main Ballroom
Seth Fitzsimmons	11:15 am – 11:45 am	Main Ballroom
Amanda Wixted	12:00 pm – 12:30 pm	Main Ballroom
LUNCH	12:30 pm – 1:30 pm	Main Foyer
Mike Krieger	1:30 pm – 2:00 pm	Main Ballroom
Jeremy Ashkenas	2:15 pm – 2:45 pm	Main Ballroom
Nicole Sullivan	3:00 pm – 3:30 pm	Main Ballroom
Matt Mullenweg	3:45 pm – 4:15 pm	Main Ballroom
Closing Statements, sorrowful goodbyes, yearbook signatures	4:30 pm – 5:00 pm	Main Ballroom
Dine with a Speaker	7:30 pm – 9:30 pm	Various locations

Location

CodeConf 2011 will be held at the Hyatt Regency, located on SF’s famous Embarcadero.

Getting to San Francisco

The BART system makes it extremely easy to get from the airport to the conference location. The BART connects directly to SFO, and will let you out a block away from the hotel. Here’s how to find and use BART in the airport: http://www.bart.gov/guide/airport/outbound_sfo.aspx

You will want to purchase a ticket to Embarcadero Street stop. When you get off at Embarcadero, the hotel is 1-minute away. Here's a map!

Getting Around SF

Between the BART and MUNI systems, you’ll have no trouble navigating the 7x7 mile peninsula that we call home. We suggest getting a Clipper Card with Cash Value on it for the weekend. That way, no matter which system you use, you’ll be covered. You can buy a Clipper Card in any BART/Muni station, just look for the machines.

Stuff to See and Do

If you’ve never been to San Francisco (or even if you have) here are some of GitHub’s favorite must-dos:

Golden Gate Park
Musee Mechanique
Ocean Beach
Golden Gate Bridge
Ride a Cable Car
The Mission
North Beach

Golden Gate Park

Stretching from the ocean to three miles inland, it is one of the largest city parks – 20% larger than Central Park. While you could spend days exploring it, we recommend renting a bike and riding through.

GitHub Tip: Stop at the DeYoung Museum, which is located just off JFK Drive. Access to their tower is free, and it offers an amazing 360 degree view of the city. If you like science museums, be sure to check out the Academy of Science, right across the street.

Musee Mechanique

Hands down one of the coolest museums we’ve ever been to. Located near the über touristy Pier 39, this museum houses hundreds of vintage mechanical wonders – from turn of the century fortune telling machines to a vast collection of 80s video games.

Ocean Beach

If you ride through Golden Gate Park, you will find yourself at Ocean Beach.

GitHub Tip: If the weather isn’t in your favor, get a pint and a window seat at Beach Chalet, and enjoy a view of the Pacific while keeping toasty warm.

Golden Gate Bridge/Crissy Fields

For a fantastic view of our famous bridge, head over to Crissy Fields.

GitHub Tip: Rent a bike and ride it over the bridge. The view into the city from the other side is breathtaking, and how awesome will it be to tell people your biked over the Golden Gate?

Ride a Cable Car

A classic SF experience that always makes us feel like kids again.

GitHub Tip: Take the Powell & Hyde Street cable car to the Buena Vista and have an Irish coffee from the place where it was invented. (You can get it from the turnaround in front of the Gap, or if you want to skip the line—the stop in front of H&M, just down the block.)

The Mission

Between the dive bars, hip restaurants, tasty street food, and quirky shops, it's basically the best SF neighborhood.

GitHub Tip: Start off with a strong cup of Four Barrel coffee. Next try a delicious burrito at Papalote or Pancho Villa. Once you've recovered from your food coma, grab a cup of salted caramel ice cream from Bi-Rite Creamery and head to Dolores Park to do some people watching. After the sun sets, walk to Kilowatt and down a PBR while enjoying the 80s Metallica playing on the jukebox.

North Beach

Home of the beat generation and the best Italian food in the city.

GitHub Tip: For a true beatnik experience, get a drink at Specs. Part bar, part archive, it’s a place frozen in an era passed. Oh, and order the cheese plate. Fontina cut from a massive wheel paired with saltines. Goes great with a Guinness.

Conference
Events

Your CodeConf pass includes breakfast, lunch, and dinner on both conference days.

Both nights will have parties. Whether you want to stay at the hotel and hack or meet some fellow coders, we've got you covered.

Sunday

Join us on Sunday morning for a 5k fun run through and around beautiful San Francisco. This event is for everyone—if we can do it after a long night of drinking, we know you can too! Organized and sponsored by the awesome folks at a Brighter Planet. Post-party grogginess begone! There will be prizes!

Sunday night you'll have the opportunity to dine with one of CodeConf's fabulous speakers.

Sponsor Us

Interested in sponsoring?
Download the sponsorship prospectus then email us at plans@github.com.

Fine Print

GitHub Inc. events are working conferences intended for networking and collaboration in the developer community. Attendees are expected to behave according to reasonable standards of decency and in accordance with the Golden Rule and any other nondenominational but basically rational thought process that a normal thinking person might apply to a given situation.

While at GitHub Inc. events or related social networking opportunities, attendees should not engage in discriminatory or offensive speech or actions regarding gender, sexuality, race, or religion. Speakers should be especially aware of these concerns — this includes sexual or racist images in slides.

GitHub, Inc. does not condone any statements by speakers contrary to these standards. GitHub, Inc. reserves the right to deny entrance to any individual for any reason.

Please bring any concerns to the immediate attention of the GitHub, Inc. event staff, or contact Melissa Severini, Business Operations and Event Coordinator at melissa@github.com. We thank our attendees for their help in keeping GitHub, Inc. events sane, welcoming, and friendly.

OSS on GitHub: Your Community is Your Best Feature

Networks with Node.js

Assumptions Are Awesome

The Ethics of Abandoning Software

Documentation isn’t optional

Can Code be Literature?

Metrics, Metrics Everywhere

Hacking Space Exploration

Bringing FarmVille to iOS: A Retrospective

Our Best Practices are Killing Us

Engineering for Startup Uncertainty

Project and Community Management with GitHub

Friday, April 8

Event

Time

Location

Saturday, April 9

Event

Time

Location

Sunday, April 10

Event

Time

Location

Getting to San Francisco

Getting Around SF

Stuff to See and Do

Golden Gate Park

Musee Mechanique

Ocean Beach

Golden Gate Bridge/Crissy Fields

Ride a Cable Car

The Mission

North Beach

Sunday