tag presentation

“XMMS2 Collections” presentation at Metaweb

On my way to the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit 2009, I accepted DraX’s invitation to give a 1-hour talk about XMMS2 Collections at his work, i.e. Metaweb, in San Francisco.

The topic was somewhat relevant for them as it’s reminiscent of MQL, the query language they developed for Freebase. It’s worth noting that although both share a pool of buzzwords such as “graph”, “loosely-structured”, “querying”, etc., they are not quite the same:

  • Freebase is essentially a giant graph-database, which you query with MQL to retrieve graph fragments.
  • The XMMS2 database is a flat denormalized store, which you query with graph-structured Collections to retrieve a list of entries.

Note: Collections 2.0 should however allow fancier querying to retrieve tree-shaped structures.

About 10-20 people showed up and listened to me babbling about the concept of Collections, the rationale behind them, the API, Collections 2.0, possible UI uses, what it represents for the user, pointers to S4, etc.

It’s all in those over-engineered slides that I have no choice but to put online, under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 License, for them to live on forever on the internets. And yes, it’s still either in evil Keynote format (source), or in PDF.

Oh and Metaweb, thanks for the food!

Git presentation at Purple Scout

On April 17, I was invited to do a presentation on Git for Purple Scout in Malmö, Sweden. Around 40 people showed up (including many XMMS2 folks) and endured 2-hours on what Git is, why it’s so awesome and all the fancy stuff you can do with it. I think people liked it and although most seemed to be using Git already, they were nice enough to say that they’d learned something anyway.

I’d given talks about Git previously in Switzerland, but for this occasion I reworked and pimped up my slides quite a bit to cover more material and have more cute diagrams. As before, you can get the slides for the Git presentation (PDF), or even fiddle with the source file, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 License. Reuse, modify or poke fun at at will!

Sorry it’s still in proprietary Keynote format, because that’s the only vaguely acceptable software I found to make lots of diagram easily… Any Free alternative would be welcome, if someone knows of one.

It was great fun preparing and giving this course, and being back in Sweden and seeing friends again, so tusen tack till Purple Scout for making this happen!