Google Tech Talks February, 25 2008 ABSTRACT We all love to hate large software systems. They are hard to build, hard to evolve, and don’t work very well. Why is this? A lot of reasons, some social, some technical, and some socio-technical. We believe that OSS provides an excellent source of data to test hypotheses about the factors that affect important phenomena/outcomes in software projects. Our group at UC Davis, comprising bio-informaticians, organizational behaviourists, physicists, and software engineers, is using a range of different approaches to the analyze the veritable torrents of data pouring out of open source projects to understand how things work in OSS, and what tools and techniques can help. One important issue is IMMIGRATION: how do new people join projects, and how can we help the difficult intellectual and social challenges they face. We present two results: 1.a) Can we build “recommender” tools that help programmers deal with “information overload” by helping them focus their attention? 1.b) Such tools have always been evaluated with user studies. Can we do something more quantitative? 2) What are the factors influencing immigration of new developers in Open source projects? Joint work with: V. Filkov, A. Swaminathan, G. Hsu, and students C. Bird, Z. Saul, and A. Gourley We gratefully acknowledge support from NSF (Science of Design and Human and Social Dynamics Programs), the IBM Faculty Fellowship Program, and the GrammaTech and SciTools …
Tag Archives: techtalks
Open Office Training
Google Tech Talks June 6, 2008 ABSTRACT Open Office Training Speaker: Michelle Murrian
Massively Multiplayer Open Source Game Development
Google Tech Talks October 16, 2008 ABSTRACT An MMORPG project is challenging for any development team, let alone a distributed team of “amateur” volunteers. This talk will explore the internal design of the FOSS MMO project called PlaneShift, and how that design was influenced by the strengths and weaknesses of the team structure and the community. Topics will include server design, network topology, NPC AI and management and player security, among others. Speaker: Keith Fulton Keith Fulton is the CTO at ChoicePay, Inc. in Tulsa, Oklahoma which is an electronic payments company. In his spare time, he has been the principal architect on the PlaneShift project since 2001, along with dozens of other contributors. PlaneShift has over 500000 registered accounts and maintains a small, tight-knit community of players, fans and developers. The game is entirely written in C++ under the GPL.
Greg Kroah Hartman on the Linux Kernel
Google Tech Talks June, 5 2008 ABSTRACT The Linux Kernel, who is developing it, how they are doing it, and why you should care. This talk describes the rate of development for the Linux kernel, and how the development model is set up to handle such a large and diverse developer population and huge rate of change. It will detail who is doing the work, and what companies, if any, are sponsering it. Finally, it will go into why companies like Google, and any other that uses or depends on Linux, should care about this development. Lots of numbers and pretty graphs will be shown to keep the audience awake. Speaker: Greg Kroah Hartman Greg Kroah-Hartman is a Linux kernel maintainer for the USB, driver core, sysfs, and debugfs portions of the kernel as well as being one half of the -stable kernel release team. He currently works for Novell as a Fellow doing various kernel related things and has written a few books from O’Reilly about Linux development in the past.