Another fantastic All Things Open

Open source keeps rising in a world looking for AI’s place.

The beautiful Raleigh Conference Center was hosting the twelfth edition of All Things Open mid-October.

All Things Open is a major open-source conference. It has been around for 12 years, has grown significantly, and survived the pandemic. It occurs at the Raleigh Convention Center in the middle of the North Carolinian capital. Todd Lewis has created a wonderful event where I enjoy sharing knowledge yearly for seven years.

The sticker exchange table is always a huge success.

Data Contract

This year, my talk focused on modern data engineering, with a focus on data contracts, data products, and Data Mesh. Of course, being at an Open Source conference, I demoed some open-source tooling for building data contracts. This is some of the tooling we use at ProfitOptics, whether Open Source or under license from some of our partners.

A new happy bunch is going to build Data Products.

Open source and artificial intelligence

The open source communities are eager to have a better understanding of AI. Of course, there are clear winners like PyTorch (backed by the Linux Foundation AI & Data) but the real question is really about models and more transparency. OpenAI and its clearly non-open philosophy is challenging those communities by not revealing their sources and having a very closed model. This is clearly a spot where Hugging Face and IBM with watsonx.ai have a clear advantage, although neither were exhibiting at the conference, despite IBM being a regular supporter of All Things Open.

This is an area where ProfitOptics is heavily investing and continue to grow its expertise through taught leadership, AI prototypes, POC, projects, and embedded products.

DevRel everywhere

The rise of the evangelist, developer relationship manager, community, or developer advocate is obvious. Every company that has something developer-oriented will send their developer advocate there to have a chat with you and onboard you on their project. Good or bad, they all try to have inspirational talks. I’d argue that stretching too many parallels to history, human behavior, dog behavior, or any trending topic might be a big miss, as… we are geeks. Show us code!

Interesting Tech

I chatted with multiple vendors, exhibitors, and (potential) ProfitOptics partners. I limited myself to three I wanted to share here.

FerretDB was founded to become the de-facto open-source substitute to MongoDB. It is an open-source proxy, converting the MongoDB v6+ wire protocol queries to SQL. The really smart idea is to leverage PostgreSQL or SQLite as a database engine; it means that you can leverage your existing PostgreSQL skills and engines while adding new capabilities.

Jumpmind SymmetricDS is not new but is worth mentioning. SymmetricDS is database replication and file synchronization software that is platform-independent, web-enabled, and database-agnostic. It is designed to make bi-directional data replication fast, easy, and resilient. It scales to a large number of nodes and works in near real-time across WAN and LAN networks.

Accessibility (A11Y) Theme Builder is the first Discover Open Source project and is a system for generating machine-readable asset types, allowing design systems to publish accessibly inclusive products.

Discussion & implementation

Come talk to us if any of those technologies, innovations, or methodologies talk to your business. Whether it comes to a modern data engineer stack or traditional needs, we are here to help.