On Thursday, April 14, I attended Triangle Open Source Open Mic. The event featured several speakers giving what were ostensibly “lightning” talks about open source projects they’re working on. There weren’t a huge number of speakers, which did mean that they all ran over their time, but I didn’t mind. Given that each developer was eager to share what he had to present, I appreciated that they had more time.

There were two projects presented that I was particularly interested in. The first was Leaflet (which you can find at leaflet.js). It allows maps to be embedded in websites using data pulled from Open Street Map. Leaflet is intended to be as lightweight as possible. I don’t know much about web programming, but it was very cool to see how little code was needed to pull in the map and set it up.

The second project was echo-sonos, which you can find at https://github.com/rgraciano/echo-sonos. It gives the Amazon Echo the ability to control a Sonos system. I definitely can’t afford either piece of tech. However, I do like playing with what I do have, and I thought it was interesting to see how this developer had taken the opportunities afforded by the Echo and expanded on its capabilities.

Open Source Open Mic was a lot of fun. I had the chance to meet a few local developers, and I enjoyed hearing about the projects they were working on. Hopefully I’ll have the chance to go again in the future.