Ben Fry spends most of his time thinking about, and making pictures of, patterns and structures found in complex and dynamic sources of data. Drawing on a background in graphic design and computer science, he pursues this fascination as principal of Fathom Information Design in Boston, Massachusetts, where he produces software, printed works, installations, and books that explain and depict topics from the human genome to baseball salaries to the evolution of text documents.
He’s also a co-founder of the Processing project, which seeks to ruin the careers of talented designers by tempting them away from their usual tools and into the world of programming and computation. Similarly, the project is designed to turn engineers and computer scientists to less gainful employment as artists and designers.
Mr. Black most recently cofounded and was CEO of Boundary. He is a recognized expert in large-scale technology infrastructure design, implementation,and operation. Previously, he was an engineering director in the ECN group at Microsoft Windows Live, where he helped build one of the largest content delivery networks in the world. As the manager of website engineering at Amazon, he lead the design and implementation of a new, layer 3 network for Amazon’s production network. As principal engineer for Amazon infrastructure, he co-authored the first documents on what later became EC2. As senior manager for information security, he owned and successfully delivered Sarbanes-Oxley and PCI DSS compliance for Amazon infrastructure, including the critical payments processing systems. His work in the Internap R&D team resulted in his being awarded 3 patents in Internet routing and traffic optimization. Mr. Black is also co-author on several IETF RFCs on MPLS control protocols and IPv6 network operations.
Michelle Levesque has worn many hats in the past few years: working as a tech lead / manager at Google, studying web literacy with the Mozilla Foundation, aimlessly wandering south-east Asia, and researching internet censorship with the Citizen Lab. She graduated with a Software Engineering degree from the University of Toronto and has spent the last six years making trouble in Silicon Valley. She has run a marathon, deadlifted over 200 lbs, loves a good videogame, and knows how to grill a perfect steak.
She still has no idea what she wants to be when she grows up.
Abstract
Five Hacks for Hacker Brains
Life’s Konami Code. Don’t play through every level like a chump. Learn the cheats and skip to World 8!
Ian Goldberg is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and a University Research Chair at the University of Waterloo, where he is a founding member of the Cryptography, Security, and Privacy (CrySP) research group.
He holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, where he discovered serious weaknesses in a number of widely deployed security systems, including those used by cellular phones and wireless networks. He also studied systems for protecting the personal privacy of Internet users, which led to his role as Chief Scientist at Zero-Knowledge Systems (now Radialpoint).
His research currently focuses on developing usable and useful technologies to help Internet users maintain their security and privacy. He is a Senior Member of the ACM and a winner of the Early Researcher Award, the Outstanding Young Computer Science Researcher Award, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award.
Jessica McKellar is a founder, software engineer, and open source developer from Cambridge, Massachusetts. She helped bring rebootless kernel updates to the world at Ksplice and is busy building and shipping at a new early-stage startup. Jessica is a Python Software Foundation board member and an organizer for the largest Python user group in the world, as well as a veteran open source contributor and a maintainer for several open source projects, including OpenHatch and the Twisted event-driven networking engine.
Maciej Ceglowski is the founder and sole employee of Pinboard, a paid bookmarking site and personal archive he started in 2009. He has been an outspoken advocate of small, self-funded online businesses as an alternative to venture capital and angel investing. Prior to founding Pinboard, Ceglowski worked as a contractor at Twitter, LiveJournal, and Delicious, and was the first engineer hired at Yahoo’s Brickhouse project. Before becoming a full-time programmer, he served as Assistant program officer at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
In addition to Pinboard, Ceglowski also runs the Bedbug Registry, a popular crowdsourced forum for tracking bedbugs in major North American cities.
Ceglowski was born in 1975 in Warsaw, Poland, and lives and works in San Francisco. You can find his personal website at http://idlewords.com.
Abstract
Earn hundreds of dollars a day while working from the comfort of your own home! I’ll discuss three very different career paths in computerland (working at a large company, a funded startup, and building your own project) and what’s wonderful and not so wonderful about each one. I’ll also talk about the nuts and bolts of running Pinboard, a one-person project with nearly thirty thousand paying users, and what I see as opportunities for smart young tech people who value their independence to make an interesting living on their own terms.
