All Things Open will hold its ninth annual conference in October, a three-day hybrid event starting Sunday, Oct. 17, where experts and company leaders will share their expertise and experience with open-source technology.
People can register now to attend the event in-person at the Raleigh Convention Center, where there will not only be more than 250 speakers total, but also live demos, live programming and the chance to network with other attendees. All of the speaker events will also be live-streamed for people to watch virtually, for free.
The live demos will include the in-person return of RIoT’s Demo Night on Monday, Oct. 18, from 5-8 p.m.
All Things Open CEO Todd Lewis said one of the purposes of the “polyglot” conference is provide technologists and developers with educational sessions on a wide range of emerging open-source technologies.
“Open-source is becoming more and more the foundation of a lot of what we interact with daily,” Lewis said. “In today’s world, it’s in the best interest of technologists to understand the fundamentals of open-source so that they can remain competitive.”
For business-oriented attendees, there are also plenty of non-technical sessions in a case-study format where various companies will demo how they are using a particular technology within their platform, Lewis said. There will be speakers from Red Hat, Lenovo, Facebook and Salesforce. Even the lead engineer at NASA, Adam Steltzner, will be speaking about how open-source technology enabled the recent mission to Mars.
Another one of the keynote speakers is Peter Zaitsev, the CEO of Percona. Percona is a Durham-based company that provides software for managing open-source databases like MySQL, PostgreSQL and MongoDB. [Editor’s Note: Zaitsev was previously a subject of a Download Q&A.]
Zaitsev said that at the conference, he will talk about the history of open-source databases and how developers are increasingly relying on it—for instance, the platforms of Facebook, Instagram and Android are all built with open-source. He will also discuss recent trends and new technological innovations that have emerged in the industry.
“I think open-source is especially important for democratization of innovation around the world,” said Zaitsev, a native of Russia. “Because while capital is relatively accessible to founders in the United States, there are places around the world where it’s not. The fact that open-source can be used as a way to start innovating inexpensively is a very important driving factor.”
Besides the educational component, another aim of the conference is to create networking opportunities for people to get involved in open-source projects, Lewis said. People (like college students) don’t need to wait until they get a job to get started on their tech career, Lewis said. They can begin today by contributing to open-source projects on Github, which Lewis calls an “on-ramp to getting hired.”
“Open-source is so influential,” Lewis said. “It enables so much of the innovation in the technology space and it’s impacting our lives in such major ways. So, firstly, technologists need to know more about it and need to be as educated as they possibly can be. The second part of this is creating an opportunity for people to network and join an open-source community. Open-source really is a gateway to opportunity that anyone can join regardless of where they live or their experience.”