Sponsors

Diamond Sponsors

  • Intel
  • Microsoft

Platinum Sponsors

  • Google
  • Sun Microsystems

Gold Sponsors

  • BT
  • IBM
  • Yahoo! Inc.
  • Zimbra

Silver Sponsors

  • Atlassian Software Systems
  • Disney
  • EnterpriseDB
  • Etelos
  • Ingres
  • JasperSoft
  • Kablink
  • Linagora
  • MindTouch
  • Mozilla Corporation
  • Novell, Inc.
  • Open Invention Network
  • OpSource
  • RightScale
  • Silicon Mechanics
  • Tenth Planet
  • Ticketmaster
  • Voiceroute
  • White Oak Technologies, Inc.
  • XAware

Premier Media Partner

  • ZDNet

Sponsorship Opportunities

For information on exhibition and sponsorship opportunities at the conference, contact Sharon Cordesse at scordesse@oreilly.com.

Download the OSCON Sponsor/Exhibitor Prospectus

Media Partner Opportunities

Download the Media & Promotional Partner Brochure (PDF) for more information on trade opportunities with O'Reilly conferences, or contact mediapartners@oreilly.com.

Press and Media

For media-related inquiries, contact Maureen Jennings at maureen@oreilly.com.

OSCON Newsletter

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Contact Us

View a complete list of OSCON 2008 Contacts

OSCON 2008 Schedule

Below are the confirmed and scheduled talks at OSCON (schedule subject to change).

Monday, 07/21/2008

7:30am

Monday, 07/21/2008
Location: Expo Hall
Breakfast (60 mins)

8:30am

Add to your personal schedule
Monday, 07/21/2008
Python, Tutorial
Location: Portland 251
Steve Holden (Holden Web LLC) Moderated by: Steve Holden
This half-day tutorial presents enough of the Python language to allow you to read and understand moderately complex programs. If you already know one or more programming languages then this is a great way to prepare for the OSCON Python track. Read more.
Add to your personal schedule
Monday, 07/21/2008
Emerging Topics, Tutorial
Location: Portland 252
Damian Conway (Thoughtstream) Moderated by: Damian Conway
The Vim editor incorporates a full programming language, with which you can reconfigure just about any aspect of its interface and functionality. This half-day tutorial explores the core syntax and semantics of that scripting language. If something about the way Vim works has annoyed or frustrated you, you'll leave this tutorial with the knowledge and understanding needed to fix it. Read more.
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Monday, 07/21/2008
Fundamentals, Tutorial
Location: Portland 255
Akkana Peck (*) Moderated by: Akkana Peck
Akkana Peck, author of "Beginning GIMP: From Novice to Professional," will demonstrate how to use GIMP to improve your photographs or create digital art. You'll learn how different image formats compare, basic photo manipulation skills (crop, rescale, and brightness correction), several different selection techniques for cutting objects out of photos, and an assortment of other useful tricks. Read more.
Add to your personal schedule
Monday, 07/21/2008
Databases, Tutorial
Location: Portland 256
Robert Treat (OmniTI) Moderated by: Robert Treat
PostgreSQL is quietly taking over the world. Or at least your data center. Get up to speed on what you need to know to administer the world's most advanced open source database, including installation, configuration, tuning, and how best to use PostgreSQL's community resources. We'll also discuss how PostgreSQL's newest release, PostgreSQL 8.3, will make your life easier. Read more.
Add to your personal schedule
Monday, 07/21/2008
Perl, Tutorial
Location: D136
brian d foy (Stonehenge Consulting Services) Moderated by: brian d foy
Go beyond the syntax and idioms of Perl to manage your code base so it doesn't manage you. Show your Perl code who is in charge through benchmarking and profiling, configuration, logging, and fixing third party modules. Read more.
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Monday, 07/21/2008
PHP, Tutorial
Location: D135
Sebastian Bergmann (sebastian-bergmann.de) Moderated by: Sebastian Bergmann
PHPUnit is an open source framework for test-driven development in any PHP-based code that automates unit testing and reduces the effort required to frequently test code while developing it. Held by the tool's creator, attendees of this tutorial will learn how to test both the backend and frontend of their web applications with PHPUnit and Selenium. Read more.
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Monday, 07/21/2008
Ruby, Tutorial
Location: D137/138
Clinton R. Nixon (Viget Labs) Moderated by: Clinton R. Nixon
Ruby on Rails has made web development easier than ever, but there is a hurdle that comes with that convenience. When you want Rails to work differently, what do you change? We'll walk through the architecture of Rails, the top plugins already in existence, and learn how to radically change the behavior of Rails and of others' plugins. Read more.
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Monday, 07/21/2008
Perl, Tutorial
Location: D139/140
Jim Brandt (SUNY at Buffalo) Moderated by: Jim Brandt
This tutorial will introduce people to mod_perl 2 and demonstrate the different ways it can be used as an effective Apache server tool. The tutorial is divided ito three sections: using mod_perl 2 for fast content serving, using mod_perl 2 to enhance and extend Apache 2, and converting mod_perl 1 code to mod_perl 2. Read more.
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Monday, 07/21/2008
Ruby, Tutorial
Location: E143/144
Gregg Pollack (Rails Envy), Jason Seifer (Rails Envy) Moderated by: Gregg Pollack
ActiveRecord, the glue between the database and Rails, is certainly one of the bigger reasons Rails has impressed so many people. We will walk through some advanced uses of the ActiveRecord Gem, including polymorphism, association proxies, the law of demeter, conductors, and creating plugins. Even if you're not a Ruby or Rails programmer, you'll find some useful design patterns hidden in this Gem. Read more.
Add to your personal schedule
Monday, 07/21/2008
Keynote, Open Mobile Exchange
Location: F150/151
Surj Patel (GigaOM), Raven Zachary (The 451 Group) Moderated by: Allison Randal
This opening talk frames the opportunities, challenges, and unexpected directions mobile is going--and where it's taking us as a society. Read more.

8:35am

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Monday, 07/21/2008
Open Mobile Exchange
Location: F150/151
Jim Zemlin (The Linux Foundation) Moderated by: Jim Zemlin
Jim Zemlin the chair of the Linux Foundation shares some insight on the future of the open mobile platform and its benefits to business and the FOSS community. Read more.

9:00am

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Monday, 07/21/2008
Open Mobile Exchange
Location: F150/151
Jason Grigsby (Cloud Four) Moderated by: Jason Grigsby
More often than not FOSS software is used to create code for commercial projects. Gaining recognition as a ground breaking and eye opening analyst, Jason talks about the new explosion of opportunity in the "Mobile Web" and how FOSS advocates out here can help to support and profit from them new boom. Read more.

9:30am

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Monday, 07/21/2008
Open Mobile Exchange
Location: F150/151
Stefano Maffulli (Funambol) Moderated by: Stefano Maffulli
This presentation discusses how we have entered a new golden era of mobile apps and how mobile open source enables developers to rapidly deliver compelling new mobile services for the mass market. Read more.

10:00am

Monday, 07/21/2008
Location: Expo Hall Foyer
(30 mins)

10:30am

Add to your personal schedule
Monday, 07/21/2008
Open Mobile Exchange
Location: F150/151
Jennifer Minor (Vernier Software & Technology) Moderated by: Jennifer Minor
Jenny Minor takes through a case study of developing a mobile data product from concept, to initial hardware and tool chains to final product. The pain points, the learnings and the outcomes are all explained for your learning and future application. Read more.

11:00am

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Monday, 07/21/2008
Open Mobile Exchange
Location: F150/151
Prakash Narayan (Sun Microsystems) Moderated by: Prakash Narayan
Zembly is a hosted platform with which you can quickly author widgets, iPhone apps, Facebook apps, etc. from your browser. Learn how zembly is revolutionizing the authoring of social applications by introducing a paradigm of participation around live, editable code. Read more.

11:30am

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Monday, 07/21/2008
Open Mobile Exchange
Location: F150/151
David "Lefty" Schlesinger (ACCESS Co. Ltd. ) Moderated by: David "Lefty" Schlesinger
This session will provide attendees with a comprehensive overview of the architectural principals and components of the LiMo Platform. The LiMo Foundation embraces a “collaborative source” development model whereby its platform reflects a combination of frameworks developed and contributed by LiMo member companies as well as by the Open Source community. Read more.

12:00pm

Monday, 07/21/2008
Location: Expo Hall
Lunch (90 mins)

1:30pm

Add to your personal schedule
Monday, 07/21/2008
Python, Tutorial
Location: Portland 251
Jacob Kaplan-Moss (Django) Moderated by: Jacob Kaplan-Moss
Django is a high-level web development framework designed for rapid development of database-backed web sites. This tutorial is designed to introduce developers to Django. It will take attendees from a blank screen to a fully functional web application. Learn the basics you need to know to get started with Django. Read more.
Add to your personal schedule
Monday, 07/21/2008
Programming, Tutorial
Location: Portland 252
Josh McAdams (Google) Moderated by: Josh McAdams
Test-driven development is becoming an accepted development methodology in the programming world. It is not a new topic; however, it is still a developing art and a challenging practice that requires not only an expertise at programming, but initially also requires a discipline that takes even seasoned programmers to task. Read more.
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Monday, 07/21/2008
Perl, Tutorial
Location: Portland 255
Paul Fenwick (Perl Training Australia) Moderated by: Paul Fenwick
Despite its ubiquitous presence, Perl possesses both unique security pitfalls and features. Join Paul Fenwick, director of Perl Training Australia, as he examines Perl's handling of files, complex data, permissions, databases, taint mode, sandboxing, race conditions, compartmentalization, and more. Particular attention is paid when using Perl for system administration and untrusted data. Read more.
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Monday, 07/21/2008
Databases, Tutorial
Location: Portland 256
Alan Kasindorf (Six Apart), Brian Aker (MySQL) Moderated by: Alan Kasindorf
Large MySQL deployments and Memcached go hand and hand. This tutorial details how to get started, the ins and outs of deploying Memcached as a key caching layer in your applications, and how to keep scaling. Read more.
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Monday, 07/21/2008
Tutorial, Web Applications
Location: D136
Ben Tilly (Pictage) Moderated by: Ben Tilly
A/B tests can tell you which changes to your web site worked, and how much of a difference they made. This tutorial will teach you how to set up and run A/B tests. Read more.
Add to your personal schedule
Monday, 07/21/2008
PHP, Tutorial
Location: D135
Marcus Boerger (Google), Wez Furlong (Message Systems) Moderated by: Marcus Boerger
PHP has become an extremely powerful web development platform. PHP furthermore allows easy integration with legacy applications by developing dedicated extensions. In this tutorial, two of the most active core developers of PHP will share their knowledge and get you started coding right away. Read more.
Monday, 07/21/2008
Location: D137/138
tutorial TBC
Add to your personal schedule
Monday, 07/21/2008
Tutorial, Web Applications
Location: D139/140
Randal L. Schwartz (Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc.), Tom Phoenix (Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc.) Moderated by: Randal L. Schwartz
Introduction to the Smalltalk Seaside web application framework: an open-source (but vendor supported) challenge to the classic web design strategies, using test-driven development, continuations for easy workflow abstraction, and view components for consistency and reuse. Includes introduction to Squeak Smalltalk, but general OO principles won't be covered. Read more.
Add to your personal schedule
Monday, 07/21/2008
Event
Location: E145
Moderated by: Matthew Johnson
Participate 08, sponsored by Microsoft, on July 21, 2008. The afternoon session is from 1:30-4:30pm and is open to all OSCON attendees. It will be a panel discussion moderated by Karim Lakhani of Harvard Business School and include Allison Randal, O’Reilly Radar; Jon Wilbanks, Science Commons; Siobhan O’Mahony, UC Davis; and Bryan Kirschner, Microsoft. Read more.
Add to your personal schedule
Monday, 07/21/2008
Tutorial
Location: E143/144
Michael Dory (Socialbomb), Adam Simon (Socialbomb), Scott Varland (NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP)) Moderated by: Michael Dory
Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. This session will feature an introduction to physical computing and interfacing with microcontrollers, as well as the basics of Arduino (hardware and software) and using it with the Processing programming environment. Read more.
Add to your personal schedule
Monday, 07/21/2008
Open Mobile Exchange
Location: F150/151
Benoit Schillings (Trolltech, a Nokia Company) Moderated by: Benoit Schillings
Nokia acquired mobile linux pioneer Trolltech. Benoit a founder and CTO of Trolltech talks about the future of Mobile Linux and more importantly Nokia's plans for QT , the desktop , the mobile and how you can access the tools and code to start your own projects. Read more.

2:00pm

Add to your personal schedule
Monday, 07/21/2008
Open Mobile Exchange
Location: F150/151
Chris Blizzard (Mozilla Foundation) Moderated by: Chris Blizzard
With the boom in mobile internet, the new Mobile Platform may be the mobile browser. Mobile Browser expert and developer Chris Blizzard takes us on a journey through the mobile browser landscape, covering all major players and focusing a few more details on Mozilla and their proposition within the mobile landscape. Read more.

2:30pm

Add to your personal schedule
Monday, 07/21/2008
Open Mobile Exchange
Location: F150/151
Ben Leslie (Open Kernel Labs) Moderated by: Ben Leslie
From Android, GNOME Mobile (and friends such as Maemo, Moblin, OpenMoko), and OKL4 (including Linux on L4) to ACCESS Linux Platform and LiMo, expert practitioners will take the stage to compare and contrast the growing number of platforms crowding the mobile field. Read more.

3:00pm

Monday, 07/21/2008
Location: Expo Hall Foyer
(30 mins)
Add to your personal schedule
Monday, 07/21/2008
Open Mobile Exchange
Location: F150/151
John Forsyth (Symbian Software Ltd.) Moderated by: John Forsyth
What happens when the worlds most popular smartphone OS decides to go open source? John Forsyth from Symbian will outline the road ahead as the operating system on millions of handsets becomes open to developers around the world. Read more.

4:00pm

Add to your personal schedule
Monday, 07/21/2008
Open Mobile Exchange
Location: F150/151
John Todd (Digium Inc. ) Moderated by: John Todd
Many of the open platforms for mobile are making a serious ommission. The Voice Channel. The phone is very good at handling voice and users are comfortable with it as a communication channel. In this Session John Todd, the lead tech evangelist for Asterisk looks at how you can develop for voice services off the handset and on the network using Asterisk and similar platforms. Read more.

4:30pm

Monday, 07/21/2008
Location: F150/151
TBC

7:00pm

Add to your personal schedule
Monday, 07/21/2008
BoF
Location: Portland 251
Moderated by: Stephen Simms
From content management systems for running web sites to the infrastructure that can support thousands of field workers around the world, open source software offers great value for church workers and missionaries. If you're involved in tech stuff at your church, a missions organization, or a company serving this industry, come meet other like-minded people, and share what's working well for you. Read more.
Add to your personal schedule
Monday, 07/21/2008
BoF
Location: Portland 255
Moderated by: Colin Charles
MySQL, has moved version control systems to Bazaar, from BitKeeper. Find out how we're coping with a new VCS, how moving to Bazaar helps open MySQL to community contributions, and how you can host your project on Launchpad, and build off MySQL Read more.
Add to your personal schedule
Monday, 07/21/2008
BoF
Location: Portland 256
Moderated by: Sean Sullivan
This BOF is for developers who want to learn about Google's Android platform. We'll discuss the Android toolset and platform API's. Read more.
Add to your personal schedule
Monday, 07/21/2008
BoF
Location: D136
Moderated by: Kevan Miller
This BoF will review and demonstrate the new (and existing) features of the WAS Community Edition 2.1 server. We will also discuss new features being developed in the Apache Geronimo community. Read more.
Add to your personal schedule
Monday, 07/21/2008
BoF
Location: D135
Moderated by: Alan Olsen
A keysigning party for GPG/PGP keys. Get your key added to the web of trust and meet your fellow GPG/PGP users face to face. Read more.
Add to your personal schedule
Monday, 07/21/2008
BoF
Location: D137/138
Moderated by: Peter Scott
For Perl trainers to swap war stories, anecdotes, tips, tricks, and questions. Share what you've found to work, and ask others how they handle the tough stuff. Read more.
Add to your personal schedule
Monday, 07/21/2008
BoF
Location: D139/140
Moderated by: Sebastian Bergmann
As the PHP community grows however, it becomes harder and harder for people to come together from the various corners of the community. The emPHPower initiative wants to address these issues. Read more.
Add to your personal schedule
Monday, 07/21/2008
BoF
Location: E143/144
Moderated by: Franz Maruna and Andrew Embler
An introduction, demonstration, and under the hood peek at this newly popular CMS. Read more.

8:00pm

Monday, 07/21/2008
Location: F151
TBC

Tuesday, 07/22/2008

7:00am

Tuesday, 07/22/2008
Location: Expo Hall
Breakfast (90 mins)

8:30am

Add to your personal schedule
Tuesday, 07/22/2008
Programming, Tutorial, Web Applications
Location: Portland 251
John Resig (Mozilla Corporation) Moderated by: John Resig
This talk will delve into the secret techniques used by JavaScript library authors to create comprehensive libraries that work seamlessly across browser environments. We'll look at everything from fixes for strange browser quirks, tricks for gaining speed, to tips for writing an extensible architecture in JavaScript. Everything discussed will be backed up with publicly available, rock-solid, code. Read more.
Add to your personal schedule
Tuesday, 07/22/2008
Perl, Tutorial
Location: Portland 252
Damian Conway (Thoughtstream) Moderated by: Damian Conway
SelfGOL is a transdimensional, self-aware, multipurpose, viral meta-quine written in under 1000 bytes of standard Perl, without using a single control statement or module. By exploring the advanced programming techniques, and numerous lesser-known Perl constructs, that SelfGOL uses, this tutorial illustrates over a dozen vital Software Engineering principles...mainly by ironic counter-example. Read more.
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Tuesday, 07/22/2008
People, Programming, Tutorial, Web Applications
Location: Portland 255
Gavin Doughtie (Google), Andrew Hyde (TechStars) Moderated by: Gavin Doughtie
Interested in doing your own startup company, or starting a new project within your existing company? This 3-hour tutorial walks you through a compact version of the Startup Weekend experience, which has seen multiple companies go from nothing to a running prototype in 54 hours. Read more.
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Tuesday, 07/22/2008
PHP, Tutorial
Location: Portland 256
Rasmus Lerdorf (Yahoo! Inc.) Moderated by: Rasmus Lerdorf
Get the architecture right and modern web apps are easy to write. The Web lends itself well to a modular distributed architecture allowing you to split even large complex applications into a series of smaller manageable applications. This tutorial aims to show web developers at all levels how to build a modern web application with PHP. Read more.
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Tuesday, 07/22/2008
Emerging Topics, Tutorial
Location: D136
Arch Robison (Intel), Robert Reed (Intel) Moderated by: John McHugh
This tutorial explains the complexities of concurrency and how open source tools can simplify threading for performance and scalability. Illustrative examples will show how to design once and reap the benefits in current and future hardware architectures. Read more.
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Tuesday, 07/22/2008
Programming, Tutorial
Location: D135
Beth Tibbitts (IBM Research), Greg Watson (IBM Research) Moderated by: Beth Tibbitts
Eclipse is an open source integrated development environment (IDE) that has available extensions for a variety of languages and tools. We discuss the Parallel Tools Platform (PTP) which adds support for parallel programming development and analysis (including MPI and OpenMP) and runtime and debug support for a variety of target architectures including both local and remote control of the target. Read more.
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Tuesday, 07/22/2008
Python, Tutorial
Location: D137/138
Robin Dunn (wxPROs/UNMC) Moderated by: Robin Dunn
wxPython is a huge toolchest with lots of great and useful tools within it. To be a master craftsman you have to know your tools. This tutorial will help the attendees to become more familiar with the wxPython tool, and gain better understanding of how to use the more advanced widgets. Read more.
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Tuesday, 07/22/2008
Programming, Tutorial
Location: D139/140
David Maxwell (Coverity, Inc.) Moderated by: Jill Egel Batchelder
Since it began in March 2006 as a result of a contract with the Department of Homeland Security, the Coverity scan site has identified and helped open source developers eliminate defects in projects like PHP, Linux Kernel, and Mozilla. This tutorial will provide information needed to use Coverity’s open source static analysis scan project. Read more.
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Tuesday, 07/22/2008
Emerging Topics, Tutorial
Location: E143/144
Joe Born (Neuros Technology Intl, LLC) Moderated by: Joe Born
Neuros, in partnership with Texas Instruments, has developed an open multimedia set-top box platform (and device) using contributions from many community projects. This tutorial will discuss the platform and give an introduction on the many ways you can participate in developing for this platform. Read more.

9:00am

Add to your personal schedule
Tuesday, 07/22/2008
Event
Location: E145
Moderated by: Matthew Johnson
Due to unforeseen circumstances, Intel's Open Moblin Developer Camp has been postponed until a later date. We apologize for the inconvenience. For an overview of Moblin technology, please plan to attend, "Moblin.org: The Community for Linux on Mobile Internet Devices (MID), netbooks, nettops and more," happening Wednesday, July 23 at 4:30 p.m., room D136. Read more.

10:00am

Tuesday, 07/22/2008
Location: Expo Hall
(30 mins)

12:00pm

Tuesday, 07/22/2008
Location: Expo Hall
Lunch (90 mins)

1:30pm

Add to your personal schedule
Tuesday, 07/22/2008
Databases, Tutorial, Web Applications
Location: Portland 251
Neal Niemiec (Autodesk, Inc), Dave McIlhagga (DM Solutions Group), Geoff Zeiss (Autodesk, Inc.) Moderated by: Geoff Zeiss
An introduction to developing location-aware Web 2.0 applications on an open source platform, including both business and hands-on technical aspects of developing web mapping applications. This is intended as an introduction to web mapping development on an open source geospatial platform for both neophytes and experienced developers. Read more.
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Tuesday, 07/22/2008
Administration, Linux, Tutorial
Location: Portland 252
Darren Hoch (StrongMail Systems) Moderated by: Darren Hoch
This tutorial trains how to solve complicated server networking issues using standard Linux tools. It breaks troubleshooting down by each protocol in the network stack. The instructor will describe the important components of the protocol, how to use tools to monitor for errors, how to correlate the outputs, and appropriate corrective actions. All teaching is case study based from experience. Read more.
Add to your personal schedule
Tuesday, 07/22/2008
People, Tutorial
Location: Portland 255
Michael Schwern (Schwerniverse), Selena Deckelmann (PostgreSQL Project), Brian Fitzpatrick (Google), Ben Collins-Sussman (Google Inc.), Andy Lester (Perlbuzz.com), Kirrily Robert (Metaweb) Moderated by: Michael Schwern
Whether we like it or not, no matter how much you immerse yourself into technology, you have to deal with other people. Geeks tend to be bad at people, and there are few resources to learn from. This tutorial gathers together lessons from some of the best geeks who have learned to deal with people to make yourself or your project run smoother and happier. Read more.