Highlights from the Free and Open Source Software conference in Aalborg
Today I went to the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) conference in Aalborg. It concerned two main topics, secure programming and real-time/embedded systems. Here are some highlights and reasons I was glad that I went. While it was incredibly relevant for my education, I didn’t find the real-time/embedded part very interesting. It was plain boring, so I won’t comment on that.
Development tools
During the day several helpful tools for software development were introduced and recommended. That included tools for bug tracking, documentation, etc. Especially interesting ones were doxygen, doxygen-gui, graphviz, valgrind and splint.
Git eye-opener
A guy named Esben Haabendal talked about git through practical examples. As opposed to some documentation about git I’ve read online which I found a bit arbitrary and complex, this talk was really an eye-opener for me. Even though the presentation itself wasn’t particularly good, the talk provided an introduction to some terminology within git, basic commands/operations and more importantly the context in which they are used. Also the brief explanation of distributed version control systems and how they implement various workflow models was very interesting. I can definitely see why git outrules subversion or other centralized version control systems in larger projects.
The OpenBSD guys
There were two german OpenBSD developers, Henning Brauer and Sven Dehmlow, present. Two funny but also extremely OpenBSD religious characters. I really enjoyed their presentation about code security and rightness. Particularly, I found the part about chroot and privilege seperation interesting. But also their slides. They were different with colors, beers as progressbars, legos as flowchart, etc.
Book recommendations
Henrik Lund Kramshøj talked about security tools, mainly for programming also. His talk was alright and he recommended a couple of books. They were:
- Secure Coding: Principles & Practices – Principles and Practices by Mark G. Graff and Kenneth R. Van Wyk
- 19 Deadly Sins Of Software Security – Programming Flaws And How To Fix Them by Michael Howard and David LeBlanc
Wrapping up
There are several other things from the conference on my list that I plan to look more into, so I guess in all it was 200 dkr well spent. The food there was also much better than expected, but I was disappointed that we didn’t get a t-shirt.
To zoom out a bit, the conference reminded me what great community exists around the open source idea. Once again I’m really motivated to contribute.
Finally, all talks were video recorded, so they should become available online together with slides etc. at some point. The talks from last year’s conference are available at http://mirrors.dotsrc.org/blivklogere/foss_aalborg/2008/.
