Upcoming talks at Monki Gras and FOSDEM

In the next few weeks, I will give five talks: one at our own conference in London, Monki Gras (tickets still available), and four (yeah that’s right) at FOSDEM, the primary European conference for free/open-source software:

• “What can data scientists learn from DevOps?” at Monki Gras. I’ve found that some of the best insights come from applying methods across different disciplines that don’t interact enough or at all. Turns out this is part of the RedMonk model too, knowing about developers rather than narrow verticals. I’ll be turning a piece I wrote last fall into a talk.
• In the community devroom at FOSDEM: “Bringing data science to community management: The importance of context.” The most important part of metrics is context — you need to compare them to something, whether it’s historical trends or other open-source projects. Furthermore, by understanding the qualities of data, including statistically expected variation versus unusual outliers, you can gain a true understanding of, and even predict, community health and growth.
• Again in the community devroom: By request, an updated and customized version of my popular talk “Assholes are killing your project.“
• In the X.Org devroom: “X.Org community: Health, metrics, resurrecting Google Summer of Code, and more.” This will go over some metrics on the community, using many of the techniques described my talk on context from the community devroom. X.Org didn’t get into GSoC last year so it’s also going to be a discussion of problems and solutions there, based on my experience helping administer GSoC for Gentoo as well as X.Org.
• In the cross-distribution devroom: “Package management and creation in Gentoo Linux.” This talk is designed for developers and users of other Linux distributions to gain an understanding of the Gentoo approach and philosophy to package management. The goal isn’t to get people using Gentoo but rather for attendees to walk away thinking about how they might be able to apply that to their own distributions or other projects. It will cover how the package manager (Portage) works, what packages (ebuilds) look like, the focus on ease of use for package authors, how Gentoo’s iterated on its package format over time, etc.

If you’ll be in London or Brussels, let me know!

Edit: Forgot about one! I’ll be speaking in the main auditorium at #BigDataMN on “Deciphering the present and future of software by mining developer communities and code.” It’s about the things we’ve done at RedMonk and some ideas I’m working on now.