Open Source Day GHC15 - the story as it happened

New: the pictures from the event!

The Open Source Day 2015: 300 participants, 8 organisations, 15 open source humanitarian projects, 4 full hours of coding lead to an amazing open source contribution for humanitarian purposes.

We kicked-off at 10:00, directly after the first keynote of the event. After registration and a short demo everyone was ready to setup their environment and code. Despite the connectivity difficulties during the 12K people conference all the projects have had amazing contributions.

• Microsoft Disaster Response participants coded for helping people all over the world be more resilient and prepared for disasters.
• Systers attendees added new features to vital products for Systers community.
• UProxy (facilitated by UW and Google Ideas) coders submitted solutions to real bugs and added new features to the uProxy app, which is a globally used Privacy and Censorship project.
• OpenHatch participants had the opportunity to explore Github and how to use different tools to contribute to open source projects.
• Mozilla contributors had the chance to directly contribute to the “Mozilla Learning Networks” project to help more people to see themselves as citizens of the web.
• OpenStack participants have experienced working with OpenStack cloud and managed in a very short time to successfully launch application servers.
• Women's P2P Networks open source day coders have successfully contributed to application supporting women in developing countries to become to have a voice in their communities.
• Cloudera participants have contributed significantly to gain data insights for the Bay Area Discovery Museum.

For more information about the Open Source Day projects visit our wiki page.

Raymond Cheng (uProxy) testimony - "Our OSD contributors were incredible, most of whom were first-time contributors to open source. They all set up the same development environment that we use. They all chose real bugs from our issue tracker. They all made great progress and many of them have already submitted their code for review. It is amazing how much these talented engineers got done in one day and I am as excited as they are to see their changes in the next version of uProxy."

We are looking forward to the next Open Source Day event next year. During the GHC we also had a booth organised by Larissa Shapiro, where each org had the chance to reach to all Open Source enthusiasts participating at the conference.

I am proud to have worked across 2 continents with the awesome OSD team of 7 people for 8 month organising this event. Seeing the demos and the amount of features and fixes the participants of the Open Source Day have added to each project gave me a great feeling of achievement.

See you next year!

Get all the pictures from the event here! 

Hilary Mason - “all in one: Computer Scientist, Data Scientist, CEO, Entrepreneur and such a great speaker”

GHC15 first day main keynote speech was the perfect combination of tech, career advice, research questions while still keeping the discussion at a level accessible for everyone. 


Hilary Mason: “I am a Computer Scientist, Data Scientist, CEO ... and I look like all of them!” Like her starting paraphrase the talk was a very natural, relaxed pass through many of the different questions you can have when you are at the beginning of your career in tech. Creative way to use technology, Eg. neural networks algorithms to add spirit to your projects. How you can make your google map more lively by add a Mona Lisa background. Concise but descriptive overview of the different questions we might answer in data-science in the next 5 years. How the different technologies were key in the evolution of data science as we know it today. The Fast Forward research labs have so many creative, interesting projects. Take-away: Career in technology are hard to plan because it’s really hard to foresee how these are going to look like in 5 years.

Arriving at GHC

Last minute preparations at GHC look great. Looking forward to see you all there at the keynotes and Open Source Day.

Coding in a safe place

Follow the latest article within the Open Source GHC 2015 series with Carol Wiling, The Python Software Foundation's (PSF) Director:

Tips and tricks GHC15

Dear all, Here I forward the presentation by Stuti Badoni, 50 minutes of tips Tips and Tricks for GHC 2015. Enjoy it and make the best of your GHC 2015.

Romanians are writing history at the greatest physics experiment ever developed by the human kind

During my internship at CERN I had the chance be part of a series of interviews organized by the national TV media group in Romania - ProTV. For this I have given a full interview about my background and my take on how IT will be involved in our daily life and I also participated in a group interview with other CERN IT engineers.



The interview series covered all the research areas happening at CERN and it was a great outreach opportunity to share back home in Romania the work we are doing at CERN.  My interview was very well received by the IT community around me.

Great thanks to Andrada Fiscutean for having us glow in such a bright light and for telling our stories.

Here it the complete list of links for our interviews:

My story: http://www.yoda.ro/cern/interviu-exclusiv-cu-dana-dorneanu-povestea-romancei-care-lucreaza-la-biroul-inventatorului-www-ului.html

The Romanian IT at CERN story: http://www.yoda.ro/cern/romanii-care-lucreaza-in-locul-in-care-s-a-inventat-www-ul-centrul-de-date-de-la-acceleratorul-de-particule.html
The full story: http://www.yoda.ro/cern/romani-acceleratorul-de-la-geneva-cern.html

Great experience visit CMS@CERN

This visit was a amazing day which started at around 7 AM in Zurich.
At 10:15 a group of motivated 20 people were at Gare Cornavin ready to live their CERN experience.
15 more were on the by with cars.

There, half of the group split and went to see CERN Globe with Stefan and Andrei, and the other half joined me by public transport directly to Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS).

11:45 - We got to the point 5 of CERN (CMS) after confronting heavy rain and passing one border.
There we have met Lars and Joao, two passionated physics researchers who work at CERN CMS. They were very welcoming and willing to give us first hand information about the research they were pursuing.

Before going 70 meters under-ground, we needed to have the right protection... Hence, the abundance of orange helmets in the following pictures.

In the underground Lars explained us how the CMS was build, why so many wires, how heavy it is ...but most importantly how the particles are accelerated and then how each collision is analyzed through the CMS detector. Here is where particle Higgs was discovered. Attention and curiosity was at maximum level.

13:00 Big group picture.

13:45 Shift change. Our great guides were very enthusiastic throughout the entire Saturday to tell us all about CMS in the second round of visits. The rest of the group went exploring Geneva and the other parts of CERN: Patek Philip and ONU Geneva, CERN Globe

14:00 CERN Globe and CERN Museum.
There, we had just the right amount of geekiness for one day as you can see below. Some discovered proofs of crashed services, others played a bit with matter while others enjoyed taking pictures with the landmarks of CERN.



In the evening most of us had dinner at a small restaurant in Geneva. Afterwards, some went to take the train, others to see Palais des Nations Unies and others with me to have a small tour of Geneva old town.

Thank you all so much for joining, for your enthusiasm and special thanks for the pictures to Andrei Dumitru, Alexandru Băluț, Andrei-Valentin Plamadă, Valentin Eugen Dobrota.


The entire event started 2 months before. Having 35 showing up,  just made the entire organizing work very rewarding. Thank you guys!

Visiting CERN is open for public throughout the entire year. While the CERN museum is open during normal working hours, for visiting one of the big detectors (ATLAS or CMS) you need a prior rezervation. The underground is available only when the LHC is shut-down. :)