Microsoft at OSCON 2016

A planeload of open source enthusiasts from across Microsoft are joining the more than 4,200 participants at OSCON this week, to focus on how the open source ecosystem is playing a key role in technology innovation – from mobile development and IoT to microservices and containers.
Openness is crucial to enabling a thriving technology ecosystem and Microsoft continues to invest in delivering a great experience for any developer, with any app, on any platform. From making the full server-side .NET stack open source to delivering Bash on Ubuntu on Windows and Visual Studio Code, a free full featured code editor for Linux, Mac, OSX and Windows, we’re showing that openness is ingrained in our approach to doing business and supporting developers around the world. We also continue to invest in community collaborations, recently joining the Eclipse Foundation to work more closely with the Eclipse community and deliver a great set of tools and services for all development teams, and continuously improve our cloud services, SDKs and tools.
This open approach is essential to Microsoft’s cloud strategy as well. Microsoft Azure, our cloud platform, is a growing collection of integrated services—analytics, computing, database, mobile, networking, storage, and web. Azure supports a large number of open source applications, frameworks, and languages, as a result of Microsoft’s work with open source communities. In fact, one in four Azure virtual machines are Linux today and 60% on the images in the Azure Marketplace are Linux-based. Azure continues to gain rapid momentum by meeting customers and developers where they are, with more than 85% of the Fortune 500 using Microsoft cloud services.
We hope you stop by the booth to see open source and Microsoft technologies in action, including Bash on Ubuntu on Windows, and test your skills with one of the many Quick Start Challenges and pick up some prizes. And of course, it wouldn’t be the Microsoft OSCON booth without Julian Cash there to capture some priceless pictures — this time using the light painting technique that got him a standing ovation on America’s Got Talent. Follow us @OpenAtMicrosoft to get the latest from the booth.
In addition to training sessions earlier in the week and catching up with us in the booth, here is a rundown of Microsoft sessions during Wednesday and Thursday, covering topics from large-scale GitHub projects to NodeBots and the premiere of ConnectedNES, a unique project that “wirelessly and seamlessly connects a beloved NES 8-bit game console to the Internet.”
“Fearless” open source contributors with Maria Naggaga
11:05am–11:45am Wednesday, 05/18 Location: Ballroom C
Contributing to an open source project can be one of the most daunting things to do as a developer. Your code is out there, but is it good? Will people like it? Will they accept you? We can get overwhelmed by the fear of being publicly rejected and harassed by the open source community. Maria Naggaga covers the techniques she uses to be a “fearless” active contributor and contributor advocate.
Follow Maria @ladynaggaga
Practical performance tips to make your cross-platform mobile apps faster with Doris Chen
1:50pm–2:30pm Wednesday, 05/18 Location: Ballroom E
Apache Cordova is one of the most popular frameworks for cross-platform mobile development. To build Cordova apps that perform well, it’s important to understand how to use the technologies in the most efficient ways. Doris Chen outlines what impacts “native performance,” demonstrates how to measure mobile app performance, and shares practical tips for building faster Cordova apps.
Follow Doris @doristchen
Open source lessons from the TODO Group with Jeff McAffer (Microsoft) and members from Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Google, Netflix, SanDisk, and Simon Data
1:50pm–2:30pm Wednesday, 05/18 Location: Meeting Room 9C
Members of the TODO Group—an open group of companies who collaborate on practices, tools, and other ways to run successful and effective open source projects and programs—discuss why they started open source offices in their respective companies (Twitter, Netflix, Box, Google, Microsoft, and SanDisk) and share the lessons they learned along the way.
Follow Jeff @jeffmcaffer
Analyzing GitHub events with R with Barbara Fusinska
1:50pm–2:30pm Wednesday, 05/18 Location: Ballroom B
Every day, there are millions of contributions to open source GitHub projects. GitHub Archive’s job is gather that data and make it accessible for further analysis. The R platform is the perfect tool to accomplish this task. Barbara Fusinska demonstrates how to use R to turn unstructured data into actionable statistics.
Follow Barbara @basiafusinska
Build your child their very own Node.js Frozen bot with Gabrielle Crevecoeur
11:05am–11:45am Thursday, 05/19 Location: Meeting Room 10 A/B
Gabrielle Crevecoeur dives into the world of NodeBots. Using Node.js, the Johnny-Five framework, and an Arduino, Gabrielle walks participants through creating a bot, step by step. Although the NodeBot you build will respond to voice recognition, you’ll leave able to create NodeBots with any functionality you like.
Follow Gabrielle @nowayshecodes
Large-scale GitHub insights with Jeff McAffer, Georgios Gousios  (TU Delft), Kevin Lewis
1:50pm–2:30pm Thursday, 05/19 Location: Ballroom E
GitHub hosts tens of millions of people collaborating on more than 20 million repositories—an unprecedented treasure trove of data for software engineering researchers, companies, and project teams alike. Jeff McAffer, Georgios Gousios, and Kevin Lewis explore tools and techniques for sifting through terabytes of content, present key insights they discovered, and explain how you can follow suit.
Follow Jeff @jeffmcaffer and Georgios @gousiosg
ConnectedNES: The world premiere of a WiFi-enabled 8-bit game console with Rachel Weil
4:20pm–5:00pm Thursday, 05/19 Location: Ballroom C
Rachel Weil premieres ConnectedNES, a unique project that wirelessly and seamlessly connects her beloved NES 8-bit game console to the Internet, and introduces its first custom application: a real-time Twitter client. Rachel describes the technical challenges of building ConnectedNES and talks about its future as a collaborative platform.
Follow Rachel @partytimeHXLNT
For those not in Austin, the keynotes can be streamed live, including two Wednesday morning keynotes, with our very own Scott Hanselman kicking off the festivities and Microsoft Corporate Vice President Joseph Sirosh discussing “the unreasonable effectiveness of open data, open source, and open science” at 10am CT.
Follow the team @OpenAtMicrosoft or me @TheRealMarkHill to stay connected during OSCON. Hope to see you there!

Mark Hill

Mark Hill is the Vice President for Open Source Sales and Marketing at Microsoft and responsible for growing the Microsoft business around the open source ecosystem globally and helping customers and partners derive value from a combination of Microsoft and open source technologies.

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