Speaker Gareth J. Greenaway talks SaltStack and ChatOps:

Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your background?

Absolutely! I’m Gareth J. Greenaway, I’m a semi-native Southern Californian. Semi-native because while I’ve lived in SoCal most of my life I was born in Auckland, New Zealand. I’ve been a member of the free & open source community for just over 20 years. The two major contributions I’ve been able to bring to the FOSS community are being one of the co-founders and organizers of the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) and the 2+ years I’ve been actively contributing to the SaltStack project.

Q: Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an idea of what we might expect?

I’m going to be talking about SaltStack and how it can fit into the ChatOps movement. Chatops, like DevOps, is a very subject term and means something different to everyone. I’m a fan and a believer of the definition that originally came out of Github, putting the tools in the middle of the conversation. Because of the way SaltStack was designed, it’s extremely flexible and extendable. It lends itself to fit nicely into this paradigm. The talk will, hopefully, illustrate a lot of these concepts to the attendees.

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?

This will be my second year attending and speaking at SeaGL. As an event organizer it’s always a unique experience attending events that you’re not responsible for. It’s definitely a good experience being able to watch the organizers run around like crazy making sure everything goes off how it show, especially knowing what it takes to do so. Knowing all this, I was impressed with SeaGL as a show ad the organizers. It made my nostalgic for the past SCALE events and I’m excited to see how SeaGL continues to grow in the coming years.