News
Alex Jordan answers some questions from SeaGL staff:
Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your
background?
My name’s Alex Jordan, but I generally introduce myself to people as
“AJ”. I’m a senior in high school. My first experience with free
software was when I installed Ubuntu when I was 10, but I only started
getting seriously involved in the free software community about three
years ago. I like Emacs, Arch Linux, and zsh, and I’m almost entirely
self-hosted.
Q: Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an
idea of what we might expect?
So here’s the idea: when you’re working with free software, you can open
up a terminal and type “python3” (for example) and get a working Python
3 environment. We all take that for granted, but in the proprietary
world, there’s no equivalent. In my talk, I address the reason for this
and the ramifications for the future of our community. Think about it:
people teach programming with our stuff. So why are so many developers
drawn to proprietary platforms?
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 visit to SeaGL. My visit last year was nothing
short of wonderful. SeaGL has such a strong focus on the freedom of free
software (as opposed to “open source”) which makes it a really unique
environment to be in.
SeaGL speaker Paige Peterson talks privacy, security, and
freedom:
Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your
background?
Paige is an advocate for open standards, user privacy and decentralized
technologies. After receiving a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art
practicing experimental tech art with a strong focus on complexity in
nature, her interests were drawn towards decentralization as a concept
that would bring reliability and sustainability into existing
human-designed systems. Her job with mesh networking startup, Open
Garden and becoming an organiser of the San Francisco bitcoin meetup put
her at the center of the newest technologies with decentralization at
their core. In early 2014, Paige met Scotland-based company MaidSafe,
who are building a peer-to-peer Internet using the very principles of
natural systems which she became attracted to many years prior, and she
has been working on various communication efforts for them since.
Q: Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an
idea of what we might expect?
For almost a decade, a small but growing team based in Scotland has been
researching and developing what it would take to build an Internet with
privacy, security and freedom for all its users. It was observed that
servers were the primary points of vulnerability in the existing
Internet and that while there is no one central point of control, they
not only allow but incentivize major points of centralization and
dependency. By drawing inspiration from the resiliency of systems found
in nature, MaidSafe has built an open source peer-to-peer network and
developer framework with inherent properties of privacy, security and
freedom for users and their data. I’ll be talking about how this system
works and what to expect as a user, developer and node operator.
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?
I have not been but am very much looking forward to experiencing the
free/libre culture from this part of the world. I attended LibrePlanet
earlier this year and had a great time bonding with folks who value
freedom in software.
SeaGL asks Jeremy Lindblom a few questions:
Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your
background?
Hi, I’m Jeremy, or @jeremeamia on Twitter and GitHub. I’m a software engineer
and have been doing PHP/LAMP and web development for about 10 years. I
recently started working at McGraw-Hill Education, but I was working for
Amazon Web Services prior to that, which is what brought my family and me up to
the Seattle area. I’m a big fan of open source and have contributed to a
number of projects in the PHP community. I’m passionate about the PHP
community and have been running the Seattle PHP User Group for a few years and
also the Pacific Northwest PHP conference, which debuted last month. I am also
a frequent speaker at PHP conferences around the country.
Q: Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an
idea of what we might expect?
My presentation is called “20 Years if PHP”, and I want to talk about PHP and
how it has evolved over time. This year is PHP’s 20th birthday, and the PHP
community is stronger than ever. In the latter part of last decade, PHP
dwindled, but there were some very important events that led to a renewal of
PHP, both in the language and community. I want to talk about all of that and
showcase the cool features, tools, and practices that are a part of modern
PHP.
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 first time at SeaGL. I’ve been trying to get involved in more
events outside of just PHP-themed ones. This event sounds awesome, and I’m
excited to attend.
Q: How can people get involved in the PHP community in the Seattle area?
A: The Seattle PHP User Group meets monthly to socialize and host technical
presentations about PHP topics and related technology and tools. Come hang out
with us. You can find us on Meetup.com (https://www.meetup.com/seaphp/) and on
Twitter (@seaphp).
Benjamin Mako Hill shares some thoughts with SeaGL:
Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your
background?
I’m an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication
at the University of Washington and a faculty affiliate at the Berkman
Center for Internet and Society and an affiliate at the Institute for
Quantitative Social Science — both at Harvard.
By night, I’ve been a hacker and contributor to a bunch of different
free software communities over more than a decade. Most visibly, I’ve
contributed to the Debian and Ubuntu projects. I’ve written several
best-selling technical books, I’m a member of the Free Software
Foundation board of directors, and I’m an advisor to the Wikimedia
Foundation.
Q: Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an
idea of what we might expect?
The free software movement has twin goals: promoting access to
software through users’ freedom to share, and empowering users by
giving them control over their technology. For all our movement’s
success, we have been much more successful at the former. I will use
data from free software and from several related movements to explain
why promoting empowerment is systematically more difficult than
promoting access and I will explore how our movement might address the
second challenge in the future.
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?
I attended last year’s conference and I had a fantastic time. I love
that it’s a real community driven conference. Back when I first
started playing in the free software world in the nineties, GNU/Linux
conferences (like the Atlanta Linux Showcase) were places for excited
newcomers to get together with other likeminded folks. Between then
and now, most have become big corporate affairs. SeaGL reminds me of
why I loved going to conferences in the first place.
Andrew Kane will speak about contributing to projects:
Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your
background?
I’m not very interesting in my own right. My personal background is both
boring and depressing.
I became interested in computing early on, and had a Commodore 64 when I
was a small. I heard about Linux in 1994 from a person I worked with, but
didn’t have and couldn’t afford a computer at that time. After
hitchhiking to Washington in 1995 and living in the woods for a year, I
moved to Seattle because there were no computers where I was. Also I
wanted to participate in this Internet thing I’d heard so much about
(later I realized I’d already been on it via GOPHER, but that’s another
story).
I first installed Slackware in 1996 and have run GNU/Linux on all my
computers since. About this time I learned about the GNU Project and the
idea of Free Software and I wanted to be part of this new way of doing
things.
More recently I worked with and helped to destroy Free Geek Seattle, and
am working on another project to help make such an organization live
again. I decided that another layer of abstraction was needed. During
this time I switched to using Debian for all my computers, and am trying to
help that project.
Q: Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an
idea of what we might expect?
The talk is about how newcomers can contribute to Libre projects. Since
the talk is itself Free Software and I’m a Debian booster, the talk will
use itself and Debian as example projects. There will be some discussion
of technical topics (how to submit patches, etc.) and some discussion of
interpersonal topics (since ‘politics’ is a dirty word) including but
not limited to the thickness of skins as a hidden requirement for
participation in some projects.
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?
I have attended the previous two SeaGL events as a table anchor for Free
Geek Seattle (and incidentally for GSLUG also). I’m very impressed with
the growth of the event and the quality of the information presented
there. I’ve also enjoyed interacting with the organizers. Good times all
round thus far.
Q: This is an optional question. If you have a question you’d like to ask
yourself to answer, put it here and then answer it:
The question: “Does it matter who you are?”
The answer: For the purposes of this presentation, not at all. If this
talk is only accessible to people like me, then it will be a complete
failure. If it cannot be successfully repeated by someone who is not me
nor similar to me, then it will be mostly a failure.
Free Software cannot work without radical inclusion. It must be open
to all or it isn’t really open at all.
Free Software projects are collaborative projects. Without collaboration
there is no reason to publish your code. When people work together they
must be able to communicate honestly and openly. This means that
barriers to communication must be addressed and overcome.
Garrett Honeycutt talks with SeaGL about Test Driven Development:
Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your
background?
I’ve been hacking *nix based systems and spreading the word about free
software for over fifteen years. Previously I’ve worked on such things
as building core internet infrastructure at Speakeasy, creating mobile
media distribution platforms and as a professional services engineer
with Puppet Labs. At my company, LearnPuppet.com,
I consult and teach people around the world about automation with Puppet and
DevOps processes. At Transforia, I am co-founder
and CTO where we lease fully managed, secure, GNU/Linux based laptops
and desktops. Besides submitting patches, I give back to the community
by speaking at user groups, conferences and co-organizing
FOSSETCON in Orlando.
Q: Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an
idea of what we might expect?
Developers have long been using Test Driven Development (TDD) for
building applications. Now that SysAdmins are treating their
infrastructure as software, we must look to best practices in
development. This talk will explain how to implement TDD and gain
confidence through testing for system administrators.
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?
I had the good fortune to speak last year with the talk “Intro to Puppet
and Why Configuration Management is Important”. I enjoy the atmosphere
of the conference taking place inside a school and the exceptionally
high quality of the other speakers.
Speaker Lance Albertson answers a few questions from SeaGL:
Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your
background?
I am a native of Northeast Kansas and lived most of my life in the wonderful
sunflower state. I grew up on a corn/soybeans farm near Hiawatha, KS where my
family farms around 1800 acres. I attended Kansas State University and got a
degree in Agriculture Technology Management. I also received minors in
Agronomy and Computer Science at K-State.
In June of 2007, I took a huge leap of faith and moved to Oregon. I left my
whole family and most of my friends behind to take on a dream job at Oregon
State University. Currently I’m the Director at the OSU Open Source Lab and
help make sure important open source projects keep their servers running!
I’ve also been involved with the Ganeti project off and on over the years.
Q: Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an
idea of what we might expect?
This will be a combination of a historical overview of FOSS hosting over
the past 10-15 years, how hosting has changed at the OSL and where I think
things are going as far as hosting for FOSS projects. It will largely be
focused on how this impacts the future of FOSS hosting at the OSL and where we
are thinking about going.
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?
Yes! The only expectation or impression I have is that it will be a high-impact,
but low-key event with key people from the FOSS ecosystem.
SeaGL speaker Aaron Wolf talks about making music with free/libre/open tools:
Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your
background?
I’m a musician and music teacher. I used to use Apple computers and was
introduced to software freedom as a user of GPL software such as
Musescore and Audacity. As more of my students started using iThings, I
initially hoped to see such tools there. Instead, I learned that Apple
made terms that censored out GPL software, and instead iThings were left
with a proprietary walled-garden where even a simple guitar tuner app gets
injected with obnoxious advertisements.
I switched to GNU/Linux in January 2012, and that brought me tons of new
perspectives and led to co-founding an ambitious new project that has
taken over my life: Snowdrift.coop is a free-software, free-culture
fundraising platform that aims to better coordinate the global community
to fund deserving projects that respect our freedoms. The core idea is a
network-matching pledge in which a patron of a project can say “I will
donate more each month for each additional patron who will support this
project with me.” The details are a talk in itself, but interested folks
can visit the site at Snowdrift.coop.
I continue using GNU/Linux while making a modest living teaching private
music lessons. Where feasible, I promote the issues of software freedom
to my students and encourage them to move to GNU/Linux.
Q: Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an
idea of what we might expect?
My talk will simply be a tour through the basics of music production on
GNU/Linux. We’ll cover basics about hardware setup, latency, JACK, ALSA,
and such. I’ll mention repos and community websites. Then, we’ll explore
some simple introductions to the most user-friendly music software:
Audacity, Ardour, Musescore, Guitarix, Hydrogen, the Cadence Suite, and
more. We’ll be making some new music on the fly to demonstrate these tools.
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 is my first visit to SeaGL. I expect it will be something like
LinuxFest Northwest with a little more emphasis on GNU. I know many of
the people involved.
I hope that it will attract diverse attendees both in terms of things
like gender and cultural background and in terms of interests and
occupations. However, I won’t be surprised if there’s the common
unfortunate heavy white male programmer / sysadmin dominance — after
all, it’s a GNU/Linux conference. I also hope that the emphasis on
software freedom and GNU bring out clear political messages about the
importance of building a free society rather than the typical tech
conference focus on just the technology itself.
Besides my talk, I look forward to continue recruiting more folks to
help with Snowdrift.coop, and I’m sure I’ll see a mix of familiar faces
and also meet new supportive people.
SeaGL speaker Lee Fisher shares information about his upcoming UEFI
presentation:
Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your
background?
I’ve been working on computers for many years, mostly at the OS level,
more recently at the firmware level. I started with a Commodore 64,
started working on AT&T UNIX and DEC VAX/VMS systems. These days I use
Debian, and other FOSS OSes, and focus on *nix-based firmware, Open
Hardware, open source firmware, and FOSS.
Q: Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an
idea of what we might expect?
Learning some of the threats that UEFI exposes, and some of the
existing open source tools you can use to test your firmware for signs
of attacks. I’ll be focusing on tools like CHIPSEC, FirmWare Test
Suite (FWTS), BIOS Interface Test Suite (BITS), UEFItool, UEFI
Firmware Parser, and some other tools, as well as the Yocto-based LUV
(Linux UEFI Validation) distro, and it’s LUV-live release.
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?
I’ve been to all of the SeaGLs, exhibiting at community booths, Free
Geek Seattle, TA3M Seattle booths. It was rather small at first, but
has had some nice presentations. It has been getting bigger each year,
I’m hoping for 200 people, at least.
SeaGL speaker Noah Swartz answers a few questions from SeaGL staff:
Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your
background?
A: Noah is a Staff Technologist on the Tech Projects team. He works on the
various software the EFF produces and maintains, including but not limited to
Privacy Badger.
Before joining EFF Noah was a researcher at the MIT Media Lab as well as a
technomancer and free software/culture advocate.
Q: Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an idea of
what we might expect?
A: This talk will go over the state of tracking on the web, how advertisers
cause this, how browsers allow this, how EFF’s Privacy Badger aims to stop
this, and what you can do to help.
Q: How can attendees help the EFF with their efforts to end web tracking?
A: EFF maintains a tracker blocker called Privacy Badger. Due to the size of
the EFF it’s hard for us to develop and maintain large software projects at
the same speed as commercial alternatives. We’d love to see more outside
contributions from the wider Free Software community. I’ll be available
throughout the conference to help people get acquainted with EFF’s software
projects, and help new contributors make their first contributions.
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 attended SeaGL last year, it was a lot of fun. Many great Free Software
advocates all giving really enlightening talks.