I went to the Open Source Open Mic meet-up in Durham on Thursday evening. Other than 560 classmates, there were ten people at the meeting. Seven people presented, one twice, and some people seemed to know each other prior to the meeting. I found some of the topics very interesting, but others were less intelligible to a programming novice. I did get excited when I saw the familiar GitHub interface, appreciated how much a few lines of code can do, and understood words like “Jekyll” and “markdown.” There was one person who acted as the MC for the evening. A common theme was a lack of slides, and many of the presenters “winged it.” The talks were meant to be five minutes, with time for questions afterwards, but many ran over (which was okay - the questions and examples were much appreciated). Their ground rules are have fun: eat, drink, and learn. The entire event lasted roughly an hour and forty five minutes.

The first talk, which was about an open source mapping tool called Leaflet, was by far the most interesting and understandable. Similar to Open Street Maps, the program both can show maps (it uses JSON) and simulate activity. The tutorial and supporting documentation are both strong. The example was a preprocessing of 77 million taxicab rides in six months in NYC. The app moves through time showing drop off activity in red and pick up activity in blue, and the result was a colorful and moving map of lower Manhattan and parts of Queens and Brooklyn. The areas with high rates of movement changed depending on the time of day (are people going home from work or from a bar?). The downtown area got blurry because GPS signals don’t work as well with tall buildings. My second favorite talk was about Amazon’s music player called Echo. You must first initialize the API to talk to Sonos (the speakers, on GitHub as “echo_sonos”). The user can say things like “Alexa, play coding music in den” and pre-programs their specific version of Alexa to recognize the same command said with multiple phrases. One can play and pause the music in multiple rooms using only verbal commands. Echo also can check temperature and gas levels in the user’s car.

Other talks included topics such as Leningen (sp?, a Trinket-like tool for the language Closure), dockercraft (combination of docker and Minecraft which was very visually entertaining and involved destroying houses/containers), an announcement of the upcoming movie night, CAM (computer aided manufacturing/making), Pentahoe (I had no idea what this talk was about), and Hugo (a blogging tool that uses TOML, which looks like YAML). Overall, it was a good opportunity to see the variety of things people work on, presumably in their spare time, as one person mentioned a day job. I did see that the diversity problems in Programming that were described by the articles we read in class were alive and well. There was one other woman besides me in the room, and she was not one of the presenters (I’m not sure of the reasons, as we left right after the presentations and I didn’t get a chance to mingle), but I did notice and wonder.