User:Mlveis/FSOSS 2013

Free Software and Open Source Symposium

Introduction

This was my first time attending FSOSS and I had a great time. I had always thought about attending this event in the past, but I never got around to doing it. Seeing as this year I was taking an open source course and had learned such great things about the open source community, I thought attending this event would be a great learning experience. I arrived at the event quite early and met some very friendly people. I even met some people for our open source class that I either hadn’t met or spoken to in a while and we discussed our open source projects. It was really interesting just talking to some other people about what they were working on. I attended quite a few talks throughout the event, but I am only going to summarize two of them. Then I will just give a brief run through of a few other presentations that I attended that I found interesting. Then I will compare the main presentations I attended, give my views on open source and conclusions from the event.

Processing.js

The first talk that I attended was about processing.js and was presented by Dylan Segna and Andrei Kopytov, who work at CDOT. We learned during the presentation that they are creating a game that will be in beta soon that will teach math to younger children. I had heard brief talks about processing.js in the past but this talk was more in depth. They started off by providing the audience with a brief history about processing.js. They mentioned how processing.js was derived from processing and it was meant to bridge the gap between artists and programmers. We learned that processing.js was created by the creator of jquery, who is John Resig. The talk then went into more detail about functionality in processing.js. Processing.js was built for 2D graphics, however 3D functionality is currently being added. There is matrix functionality and scaling as well. The mouse is supported when processing is being used, for example when the mouse is being clicked or dragged. There is also support for a variety of images such as PNG and Jpeg.

During the presentation they presented a game engine that was made by Pomax. I found this very interesting because I have spoken to Pomax on irc and knew exactly who he was talking about. I didn’t know Pomax had created this great game engine and was really nice to know. They then demoed their game that they are making and mentioned the benefits of processing.js, which was that you can generate HTML, CSS and Javascript right inside it. They also told us the shortcomings such as debugging the code in the browser. They showed an example were they purposely made an error and then used Firefox’s debugging tools to try and fix the issue and the browser reported that there was a an error on a line they didn’t have in their code. They suspected that the error reported may have been some code deep in the browser, but they said they really weren’t 100% sure why that was happening. Also during the entire presentation they were really trying to stress that using process.js was not hard to do even though it looks complicated. Dylan mentioned that he was hosting the processing.js workshop on Thursday and people with no experience were doing some really good things in only about three hours of learning.

From the presentation I felt that Dylan and Andrei were really enthusiastic about open source. I know they realized that the subject they were talking about seemed complicated, especially to the novices in the room, but they kept trying to stress that it was not that hard and that you can get all your questions answered on IRC as long as you are patient.