Jeff Frick, theCube host, had the opportunity to quickly interview Jarrod Overson – Software Developer at One Health Solutions, in a session as short and concise as the Ignite Talks he was referring to at the Fluent Conference 2013.

For those unfamiliar with the concept, the Ignite Talks are a series of events where participants are given only five minutes to speak about their projects and ideas, and only 20 slides to support their presentation. Ignite has a very confined format: it is rushed, requires lots of preparation, and, according to Overson, it was the hardest presentation he had to give in his entire life.

The variety of topics was spectacular, from the Ten Commandments of Start-ups and Embracing Imperfection to the Change in the World and in the Way We Do Things.

Developer toolbox

As a developer, Jarrod Overson is heavily reliant on tools and automatization. He is trying to inspire people to bring such tools into the world, affecting behavior change, because humans cannot be trusted to choose the best behavior.

His impression of the Fluent Conference is that it focuses on tech that will be important in the next decade. He admits he comes to this event primarily to show his support to O’Reilly, whose books were formative during his learning years. He’s now proficient in perl, Java, and all web related technologies, focusing on JavaScript application development.

He believes the open source movement turly democratized developing. A self proclaimed “web addict of moderately unhealthy proportions”, Overson is a huge advocate of open source, promoting it as a benefit for developers.

Open source is the best technology that exists out there, and the web platform is indicative of how successful open source really is. It is completely open and accessible and it has succeeded time and time again. Despite massive forces that tried to change it or move it, open source has stood its ground. The past 20 years have been amazing, according to Overson, who is “almost scared” to fathom what the next 10 years will be like.

See Overson’s entire segment below: