GitHub Satellite sessions preview

GitHub Satellite is the first-ever international event in the GitHub Universe series, and it’s happening May 11, 2016, in Amsterdam.

More than 500 developers, team leads, and open source contributors will gather at the Westergasfabriek to explore how people learn, build, and work together to define the future of software.

We’ll post a full schedule in the coming days–here’s a preview of what you can expect. Tickets are still available–get yours now, and we’ll see you in Amsterdam!

Prototyping for the Internet of Things

How do you begin to build a product that can take any shape, communicate with a user in a number of ways, and collect constant streams of data using an array of sensors? You prototype quickly and cheaply to allow for iterative validation. Fortunately for us, rapid prototyping for IoT has never been more accessible. Many tools are open source with vibrant maker-community support, but you have to understand what’s available in the toolbox to know what you can build.

This talk will help you understand the tools available to you, while also defining a process for bringing them together into a highly usable, well-integrated, connected device. We’ll discuss:

• how to use design thinking to brainstorm and refine your ideas
• interaction options beyond touch screens
• hardware prototyping
• the software and connectivity necessary to bring your idea to life

Erica Stanley is a cofounder of the Atlanta chapter of Women Who Code, as well as a software engineer, researcher, and tinkerer.

In pursuit of open source security

Open software platforms are helping the security industry achieve important goals by enabling better communication, information sharing, and code quality. But open source security differs from other open source communities in a number of ways, as we learned with osquery. The vision for open source security is for offensive and defensive security professionals to work together on important security challenges, benefit from shared knowledge, and drive the industry forward. During this talk, engineers from the Facebook security team will discuss what they’ve learned building and supporting the most popular security project on GitHub and how that lead to the development of a new open source project for the GitHub community that will be debuted during this talk.

Marjori Pomarole is a Software Engineer on the Security Infrastructure team at Facebook London. She currently leads development for Invariant Dectector, a security tool for finding and blocking anomalies in write requests on Facebook.

Javier Marcos is a security engineer at Facebook with experience working on both offensive and defensive teams. He is currently a member of Facebook’s Detection Infrastructure team and manages the Facebook CTF platform.

Using pull requests to drive continuous delivery

Developers all know this story. There is a piece of software that runs in the cloud. All the code lives on GitHub, and
is tested with Travis CI. You have a production app, usually have a staging app, and maybe, sometimes, a development app. And then you’ve got your local development environment.

Delivering the code to these environments tends to involve a series of manual steps, tweaking, fairy dust, and hoping for the best. We all dream for Continuous Delivery, where we’ve automated a good chunk of this work, and at the push of a button, this just, well, happens.

For the past year, Heroku has been working on addressing this problem, deeming it the “Heroku Flow:” a structured workflow for Continuous Delivery. This allows you to automatically deploy to staging when CI passes and manually promote to production when ready. Create and tear down ephemeral development environments for all of your pull requests.

Gudmunder Bjarni is a developer experience engineer at Heroku.