The second talk I attended was The Easy Problems are the Hard Problems by Paul Reinheimer who gave some practical tips on how to improve security of your websites. A very simple to use improvement is to keep a user's displayname and username separate, ideally keeping a username as secret as the users password because why give a hacker half the information needed to login to an account? Another nice tip he shared was to use a captcha after failed logins, to prevent automated scripts trying a dictionary attack on your website. All in all the talk was a bit short, Paul made it up with some good humor though so it was a nice talk but if the full hour slot was used it would definitely have been better.

After lunch I went to see the 'Contribute!' talk by Matthew Weier O’Phinney, which was a general talk aimed at getting people to contribute to Open Source Software projects. When you want to contribute to an OSS project it is important to first get yourself informed about it before you start asking questions to others, there is a good chance your questions have been asked before and it annoys others if they have to repeat their answers all the time. After informing yourself about the project you should start gaining some karma by answering other people's questions, writing documentation, writing tests, or submitting patches. When submitting patches it is important to verify the bug you fixed still exists in the latest release of the OSS project you are using, a lot of projects offer nightly versions which you can use for this purpose. The most important message in this talk was that you should above all be nice to others at all times. After seeing this talk I almost felt guilty for using OSS software without actively contributing back, so maybe this talk will turn out to be a nice wake-up call for me.

The last presentation of the day was from one of my colleagues, Peter C. Verhage, who did a talk on NU.nl and gave the visitors a pretty detailed insight in the software used to build the website. I liked the talk because instead of just summarizing the techniques used, the reason behind the decisions was explained very well. I was sitting near the back of the room, and I have seen people writing down a lot of details Peter was sharing with us. I honestly think people were amazed to hear the number of servers used to run NU.nl, and the number of development hours it took to actually build it. I won't go and summarize this talk because Peter already wrote an article on the subject for the Ibuildings Techportal, if you are interested you can read it here.

During the evening we had a nice conference social at Strand Zuid where I had a few beers after which it was time to go back to the hotel and get some sleep in preparation for the second conference day of DPC09.