News
Rikki gives her talk titled, “The proper care and feeding of communities and carnivorous plants” on Saturday afternoon.
Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your background?
A: I’m the community manager and an editor for Opensource.com, a community publication supported by Red Hat. My background is in tech publishing, and before I joined Red Hat as a community evangelist for the Open Source and Standards team almost three years ago, I wrote for and/or edited a bunch of different publications, such as: Linux Magazine, Ubuntu User, ADMIN Magazine, UnixReview.com, Sys Admin Magazine, NetworkWorld.com, Linux.com, ITWorld, and more. I also worked as the Associate Publisher at Linux New Media USA, which means I wore lots of hats for our English publications.
Q: Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an idea of what we might expect?
A: I adopted a Venus fly trap, named Gordon, last summer, which ended up requiring a lot more thought and upkeep than expected. I don’t have a green thumb and manage to kill succulents and air plants, so I should have waded into the distilled waters of carnivorous plant care more carefully. As I tried caring for this cute, fun little creature that depended on me for its survival, I started seeing similarities between taking care of a carnivorous plant and an open source community. In my talk, I’ll share a few best practices for how to care for both, and I’ll give an update on what happened to Gordon.
Q: Is this your first visit to SeaGL? If so, what are your expectations? If not, can you give us your impressions of the event?
A: This will be my first visit, but I’ve wanted to attend it every year. I don’t have any specific expectations, so go ahead and surprise me.
Q: What do you want to get out of SeaGL?
A: I’m looking forward to seeing friends and Opensource.com writers, and I’m hoping to meet lots of new people. I’d love it if I found a few new contributors for Opensource.com.
Nithya gives her talk titled, “Many ways of Contributing to Open Source without Coding” on Friday afternoon.
Q: Could you introduce yourself and tell us a little about your background?
A: I run the open source office at Western Digital which is a very large storage company storing the world’s data. I first encountered Open Source in 1998 when I worked at SGI and have never looked back. Have worked in many aspects of open source from being a part of a community to product managing an open source based product to running an open source program office. I enjoy the intersection of opensource, business and community.
Q: Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an idea of what we might expect?
A: There are 3 main takeaways from my talk for the attendee:
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Why open source needs other forms of contribution besides code and that they should be valued
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How women are contributing to open source in all aspects
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Opening the audience’s eyes to new careers in open source and how to get started in them
Q: Is this your first visit to SeaGL? If so, what are your expectations?
A: Yes! And I am very excited about it. I have heard wonderful things about the SeaGL community and want to experience it for myself. And when Deb Nicholson calls I listen.
Q: What are you passionate about?
A: I am passionate about opening doors in open source to new and underrepresented people. This is why I am involved in Women of open source at the Linux Foundation and at OpenStack, as well as participating in numerous other activities and events to share how people can become more familiar and learn how to contribute to open source.
John Dulaney gives his talk titled, “Naval Gunnery Fire Control in WWI” on Friday morning.
Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your background?
A: My name is John Dulaney. I am a contributor to the Dreadnought Project, and
have long had an interest in maritime history, and especially in World War One
era naval technology. The Dreadnought Project aims to provide open access to
scholarly naval research.
Q: Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an idea of what we might expect?
A: The talk will cover the problem of hitting a tiny, moving target on the horizon
from a platform that itself is moving in three dimensions using the technology
available 100 years ago.
Q: Is this your first visit to SeaGL? If so, what are your expectations? If not, can you give us your impressions of the event?
A: This will be my first SEAGL. I expect it to be an interesting conference judging from what I know of the organizers.
Q: Why do you make historical research freely available?
A: I believe that our history should be available, not just gratis, but easily and freely accessible.
VM Brasseur gives her talk titled, “Cutting Some Slack: Decoding IRC” on Friday morning.
Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your background?
A: I’ve been in tech for about 20 years now, more if you count the dabbling I did in uni. Like many in tech, my studies have nothing to do with computing. My first degree was interdisciplinary humanities (philosophy, English, history, math cognate) and my second is Classical Philology (Ancient Greek & Latin). My path to the industry led straight through the library to working at an ILS (integrated library system) vendor during the dotcom boom in the 90s. I’ve long since moved on to other things, but my love of libraries and their endless free access to knowledge has never waned.
Q: Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an idea of what we might expect?
A: I don’t mind if my hand is tipped. It’s a talk about IRC and there aren’t many surprises there after its 29 years of existence (so far). ;-) Well, maybe there are. If you think that learning IRC is unnecessary in this age of Slack, think again. There are over 50,000 IRC channels on the Freenode network alone, and a huge percentage of those are dedicated to free and open source software projects and communities. Knowledge of how to operate on IRC is essential to participating in FOSS.
Q: Is this your first visit to SeaGL? If so, what are your expectations? If not, can you give us your impressions of the event?
A: Yup, it’s my first SeaGL! I’m just a little gull egg. :) Free and open source software conferences are nothing new to me, though. I attend a couple dozen a year right now (no, you have a problem; I can quit any time, honest), so I’m pretty familiar with the general nature of community-driven and -organized free software events. I expect this one to be similar to most but with a very welcome Seattle flair. Also, I really like that the first day is more for students and those newer to free software and I’m looking forward to helping people get started.
Q: What else can you tell us about yourself?
A: I don’t have a favorite color. I like both cats and dogs. I have no food allergies. And, yes, that shirt really does look great on you. Honest.
Bri gives his alliteratively titled talk, “Serving Secrets Securely” on Saturday.
Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your background?
A: I’m Bri Hatch, a long time Linux/Open Source enthusiast, security guy, author, and vim user astonished at Apple’s removal of my beloved escape key. (Could it be an Emacs conspiracy?) I’ve been in the security and unix industry for decades, and currently am the Director of IT at ExtraHop Networks. I’ve had various levels of facial hair over the year, but am hopefully not yet a neckbeard.
Q: Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an idea of what we might expect?
A: Software often needs access to passwords, authentication tokens, or other secrets. The question is how do you allow access to this sensitive information to non-interactive daemons in a secure manner? When you think about the attack surface you need to balance complete security with the ability for your services to run themselves so you’re not just a pager restart monkey.
Q: Is this your first visit to SeaGL? If so, what are your expectations? If not, can you give us your impressions of the event?
A: I’ve been attending and talking at SeaGL every year since it started, and it gets better every year! The talks and speakers are excellent, and I am always conflicted about which to attend given the across-the-board quality. There are tracks for every level of expertise, and a range from tried-and-true to bleeding edge technologies, so there is something for everyone. And don’t forget to visit the sponsor booths!
Q: How would we identify you in a crowd?
A: Look for the guy in shorts with purple-painted toenails and no shoes - that should narrow it down.
Q: How ‘bout dem Cubs?
A: I’m originally a Chicago Southsider so it took a while to allow the Cubs into my White Sox heart, but I’m there - defeat Cleveland!
Lucy gives her talk titled, “Linux Jargon: From AFK to Zero Day” on Friday morning.
Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your background?
A: My name is Lucy Wyman, and I’m a Quality Assurance Engineer for Puppet where I automate tests and develop testing infrastructure for puppet orchestrator, PCP, and PE core. I graduated from Oregon State University with a BS in Computer Science in June 2016, where I worked as a Front-End Engineer for the OSU Open Source Lab and helped run the OSU Linux Users Group. In my free time I enjoy hanging out with friends, hiking, experiencing new things, and enjoying a wide variety of podcasts, tv shows, blogs, books, and other media.
You can see more of my work here and here and conference presentations I’ve given here or read my thoughts here.
Q: Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an idea of what we might expect?
A: There’s a lot of jargon in the tech industry which can be intimidating, ambiguous, or just down-right confusing. My talk covers general technical jargon, from command line tools to cultural touchstones, so that you can be in the know about what bikeshedding, PGP, GEB, and “hunter2” are.
Q: Is this your first visit to SeaGL? If so, what are your expectations? If not, can you give us your impressions of the event?
A: I think this is my second or third SeaGL. I think of SeaGL as a community of folks passionate about open source (not companies looking to advertise to the open source crowd), sharing ideas, tools, new technologies, and other useful information. Mostly there are a lot of people I look forward to seeing each year.
Q: How did you get involved in the Open Source community?
A: During the first few weeks at Oregon State University, I stumbled upon the Linux Users Group at one of the find-a-club events. I wanted to be as knowledgeable and clever as the people I met there, so I installed Mint and stuck around, eventually becoming the club’s vice president. Since then open source has been a big part of my identity as a software engineer and I advocate for openness and collaboration in each project I join.
Gareth gives his talk titled, “Leaving an Open Source Project” on Saturday afternoon.
Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your background?
A: My name is Gareth Greenaway, I’m currently the lead DevOps Engineer at a company called Croscon Engineer. We’re a New York based software engineering company. I’m also an occasional co-host of the podcast FLOSS Weekly, co-founder & former leader of the Southern California Linux Expo and an active contributor to the SaltStack project. I’ve been an avid user of free & open source software and active in the FOSS community for over 20 years.
Q: Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an idea of what we might expect?
A: My talk is about Leaving An Open Source project. Earlier this year I decided to end a 14 year run of being one of the organizers for the Southern California Linux Expo, also known as SCALE. I had been involved in organizing the event longer than my last 4 jobs combined and it definitely was a big part of my life. After I decided to leave, there was a lot of confusion particularly for what it means for the event itself. I had always thought of the act & process of running SCALE as very similar to how most FOSS projects are run. My departure got me thinking about what it meant to leave a FOSS project, how it was similar to but completely different than leaving a job. My talk is based on my experiences and those of others that I talked to. It includes a few lessons learned as well as a few ideas on how the process can be improved & why it should be improved.
Q: Is this your first visit to SeaGL? If so, what are your expectations? If not, can you give us your impressions of the event?
A: This will be my third time attending SeaGL and I’m really looking forward to it. It’s a great community event and I always enjoy attending. When you attend an event that is run completely on a volunteer basis it definitely has a different feel to it. The people organizing it are doing it because it’s their passion and that definitely shines through each year at SeaGl. Plus Seattle is a great location, coming from Southern California it’s always a novelty for me to go somewhere that has a high chance of rain! :)
Q: Is it true that your hair has it’s own twitter account and it has more followers than you?
A: Unfortunately yes. A lesson learned, one should never joke about one’s hair having it’s own persona. The Internet will take something like that and run with it, doing crazy things, like creating a twitter account.
(Author’s note: We couldn’t find the hair account mentioned in this interview.)
José speaks on Saturday. His talk is titled, “Juju: No more staying awake overnight, your cloud in just a couple taps (or clicks!): Learn how to deploy your own cloud in minutes
More details on his talk are here!
Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your
background?
A: I’m José Antonio Rey, a student from Peru. I started contributing to Open Source around 5 and a half years ago, with Ubuntu. Currently studying audiovisual production at University of Lima. I learnt all I know about FOSS online and through friends.
Q: Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an idea of what we might expect?
A: I know several of you, as sysadmins (or maybe just for fun!), have to deal with deploying software in servers. I’ve gone through the painful process of installing a piece of software I don’t know, and spent hours and even days trying to get something to work. And then you get to the config files… what a mess. So much time lost, and so much stress on your plate! Want to move from spending hours to spending just a couple minutes? Deploying, let’s say, big data software in the time it takes for you to brew a cup of coffee? Then you don’t want to miss out ;)
Q: Is this your first visit to SeaGL? If so, what are your expectations?
If not, can you give us your impressions of the event?
A: It is my first visit! I’ve always heard Seattle has a lot of rain, which I’m looking forward to. We don’t have a lot of rain in Lima and I love it when I go somewhere that does. I hope SeaGL will be a great place for learning about new stuff and meeting new people in the Open Source world. I love community-ran conferences since they have a greater outreach to different communities, not only in the area, but all around the world, and bring people from all over together to celebrate Open Source. I can’t wait to get there!
Q: Do you have a pet llama in my backyard?
A: No, I don’t even have a backyard!
SeaGL 2016 is just over a month away and we are looking for helpful people to volunteer!
This year’s list of volunteer roles:
- coffee/lunch team
- expo hall monitors
- floaters
- party monitors
- registration/check-in
- room monitors
- sign-wranglers
If you are interested, we are using a new tool which has more details on each role and available shifts.
Here’s how it works:
- Click this link to go to our invitation page on SignUp.com: https://signup.com/go/7S3K6M
- Enter your email address: (You will NOT need to register an account on SignUp.com, though be wary of small checkboxes.)
- Sign up! Choose your spots - SignUp.com will send you an automated confirmation and reminders.
We will be hosting two orientations. Both will be remotely accessible; one is also in-person. The first will be held Thursday, November 3 at 12pm via conference call. The second will be held Wednesday, November 9 at 7pm at SCC and via conference call.
Feel free to contact us if you have any questions, either by emailing participate@seagl.org or visiting us on IRC on Freenode in #seagl.
SeaGL 2016 will run on the 11th and 12th of November at Seattle Central College. It’s a great location very close to transportation links.
The address is: 1701 Broadway Seattle, WA 98122
Parking
Street parking is available on many streets near the college at 2.50 an hour with a two hour max limit.
There is a parking garage on Harvard and Pine, accessed via Harvard avenue.
You can check up to date availability and further information via their Parkme.com website.
Directions
From Seattle Westlake Center - In addition to driving, travel by walking, bus and tram are available.
From Everett, Washington - In addition to driving, travel by plane, train and bus are available.
From Portland, Oregon - In addition to driving, travel by plane, train and bus are available.
From Vancouver, BC - In addition to driving, travel by plane, train and bus are available.
Accommodation
There are several hotels within walking distance of the college such as Hilton and Silver Cloud Hotel as well as a multitude of Airbnb listings.
Weather
November is one of the wettest months of the year for Seattle, with a temperature generally between 41F/5C and 52F/11C. While wet, it doesn’t generally snow. A little light wind or a rain storm is pretty common for this time of year. Warm, weather proof clothing are reasonable items to pack, as is an umbrella.
Attractions
There is a lot to see and do in Seattle. The most visited sites include the Space Needle, Pike Place Market and the Experience Music Project Museum.