Open Source Rookies of the Year

Brad Larsen had the opportunity to speak at a small a developer conference in Chicago and for a topic, came up with an idea for GPU-accelerated video processing. As he blogged:

“I've been invited to give a talk at the SecondConf developer conference in Chicago, and I'm writing this to accompany it. I'll be talking about using the GPU to accelerate processing of video on Mac and iOS. The slides for this talk are available here. The source code samples used in this talk will be linked throughout this article.”

The response he received from his audience was more than enthusiastic, helping jumpstart the GPUImage project and to open up new application opportunities that leverage the GPU to process real-time video.

The ability to apply filters and effects to live video allows applications to do things like detect shapes and lines that appear in the video stream, which allows applications to then use that data as input. “Machine Vision is the real goal,” said Brad in our interview, “so our phone can analyze the world around us as we roam about.”

Once Brad posted the project to GitHub, people got super excited. In fact, the EC2 server where he originally posted the code went down due to the excessive load from people accessing the project. Since starting the project, dozens of apps using GPUImage have been created and introduced to the Apple App Store, many of which have become top downloaded apps. That’s pretty impressive for a project that started out as an idea for a talk at a small developer conference!

To effectively prepare for future floods, earthquakes or tsunamis, you must first understand the likely impacts that need to be managed. For example, to prepare contingency plans for a severe flood, emergency managers need to answer questions like:

• What are the areas likely to be affected?
• How many people will need to be evacuated and sheltered?
• Which schools will be closed?
• Which hospitals can still take patients?
• Which roads will be closed?

InaSAFE provides a simple but rigorous way to combine data from scientists, local governments and communities to provide insights into the likely impacts of future disaster events. The software is focused on examining, in detail, the impacts that a single hazard would have on specific sectors, for example, the location of primary schools and estimated number of students affected by a possible tsunami like in Maumere, for instance, when it happened during the school hours.

Effectively preparing for a disaster requires people from a wide range of sectors and backgrounds to effectively work together and share their experience, expertise, and resources. Using InaSAFE to develop a scenario requires the same spirit of cooperation and sharing of expertise and data.

InaSAFE is designed to use and combine existing data from science agencies, local governments, and communities themselves. While geodata is readily available in more developed countries, it is not always the case in many regions where significant natural disasters occur. To solve this problem, the InaSAFE team reached out to local universities and asked for help mapping everything from building-footprints to the demographics of the people who inhabit them. The more communities, scientists and governments that share data and knowledge, the more realistic and useful InaSAFE scenarios will be.

InaSAFE was conceived and initially developed by Indonesia’s National Disaster Management Agency (BNPB), the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID) and the World Bank. In an effort to share this important project with other nations, InaSAFE was contributed to the public domain as an open source project licensed under the GPL and is looking for additional team members who want to contribute their efforts in-kind.

InaSAFE is a Python project built on top of the QuantumGIS project (QGIS) as a QGIS plugin. It is designed as an extensible platform that can be used to assess the impact of any kind of disaster supported by geographical population data from virtually any geography.

Like many people, Rigo Neri has a personal website where he posts info about himself and the activities he’s involved in. Last year he started thinking about the fact that his life was fragmented across many social media sites, and wondered if he could come up with an easy way to aggregate these sites into his personal site. In his own words:

“In June I started a new side project to rebuild my personal website. However I didn’t want it to be just a blog, I wanted to do something different; I wanted to plug in all the social networks I was part of. I called it Syte, and when I built it I decided to make it open source so other developers could use it -- turned out that developers all over the world loved the idea.”

You can see Syte in action on Rigo’s personal web site, where he has aggregated his Twitter, GitHub, Dribbble, and Instagram activity, among others. As more people started using Syte, additional integrations have been added, making Syte probably the fastest, easiest way to consolidate your personal, digital world. Syte already has integrations for Twitter, GitHub, Dribbble, Instagram, Foursquare, Tumblr, WordPress, Last.fm, SoundCloud, Bitbucket, Stack Overflow and Steam, and most pull requests are to integrate other new social networks.

Syte, like many of our other Rookies this year proves what a first-class citizen JavaScript is and how new frameworks are emerging in so many areas to help developers use JavaScript to accomplish big things.

TypeScript is a language for application-scale JavaScript development, providing a typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JavaScript. TypeScript adds optional types, classes and modules, and supports tools for large-scale JavaScript applications for any browser, for any host, on any OS. TypeScript compiles to readable, standards-based JavaScript.

For organizations with large teams working with JavaScript at scale, there are lots of challenges. Finding development tools that allow teams to work together efficiently using a structured development approach is a big one. Started in early 2012 and open sourced in October, TypeScript is breaking new ground in an effort to offer large development teams a more efficient approach to working with JavaScript. Anders Hejlsberg, the architect for TypeScript, was also the primary architect in the creation of Delphi, C# and other highly successful technologies, making TypeScript a project to watch.

One of the big benefits of TypeScript is to enable IDEs to provide a richer environment for spotting common errors as you type the code. Designed for the development of large applications, TypeScript, when compiled, produces JavaScript to ensure compatibility. Tooling for JavaScript development is desperately needed by large-scale development teams and TypeScript is helping to facilitate this. Tools like Cloud9 have already added support for TypeScript.