News
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.
SeaGL speaker and staff member edunham answers a few questions about the
upcoming conference:
Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your
background?
A: Hi, I’m edunham. I’m a “DevOps” engineer for Mozilla Research and alum of
the OSU Open Source Lab. I enjoy working on and with free and open source
software, and find that public speaking is a natural extension of that
instinct to share information.
Q: Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an idea of
what we might expect?
A: My talk is called “You Should Speak”, and it’s all about offering technical
solutions to the obstacles which keep others from taking advantage of the
excellent personal and professional opportunities that result from presenting
at tech conferences. Halfway through my education at Oregon State University,
I accidentally founded a sysadmin training program called DevOps Bootcamp, and
found myself teaching a bunch of newbies about topics that I wasn’t yet super
confident at myself. I’ve gone on to speak at over a dozen different tech
conferences in the past few years. This SeaGL will be my 19th talk since 2013,
and the 3rd or 4th conference I’ve helped organize, so the suggestions in my
talk are drawn from a reasonable amount of experience (though I haven’t been
doing this long enough to forget what it’s like to be new).
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 spoke at SeaGL last year, and found it to be a really pleasant, welcoming
event. I think its size is in the sweet spot for Northwest tech conferences:
Large enough to offer a wide variety of talks and cater to diverse experience
levels, yet small enough to mitigate problems with getting lost in the crowd.
It also fits in a downtown venue surrounded by restaurants, which you’ll
appreciate if you’ve ever been to a gathering at a convention center in a
“food desert”! Socially, I felt like SeaGL was less “cliquey” than some larger
conferences, as well – attendees seemed happy to talk to strangers, and
always had something interesting to say!
We’re looking for volunteers to help out on the days of the conference. We need helpers to assist speakers setting up in the presentation rooms, direct attendees towards rooms, and to complete other tasks.
If you’re interested in volunteering, please contact us here.
Our schedule is up! Take a look! The first day is visible first, but if you change the tab at the top, you’ll see the second day.
The schedule doesn’t include our very exciting keynotes yet. Shauna Gordon-McKeon will speak on Saturday morning from 9:30 - 10:30am about her work with brand new contributors to free software. At the end of the day on Saturday, Richard M. Stallman will speak at 2:30pm about Free Software and Your Freedom. Expect news about the expo floor, post-conference party and our community partners soon!
If you are just marking your calendar now, we’ll be at Seattle Central College again and the conference will be held on Friday October 23rd and Saturday October 24th,
- Booth space is definitely filling up, so now’s the time to drop us a line by emailing sponsor@seagl.org about your company or group. Our sponsor prospectus is right here. We’d love to hear from you!
Check back here or subscribe to our mailing
list for updates!
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.
Due to the response from potential speakers we’re extending our Call for
Participation deadline to Friday, July 31, 11:59:59 p.m. PDT.
Submit your proposal here.
This year we’re hosting live help sessions for potential speakers on our IRC
channel on Freenode. If you’d like to know of your idea is a good fit
for our conference, or just want help finessing a few sentences in your
proposal, please join our channel on the dates below:
Thursday, July 16, 1 p.m. - 3 p.m. PDT
Sunday, July 26th, 1 p.m. - 3 p.m. PDT
Freenode channel:
#seagl
Of course, if you can’t make our live help sessions, we’re always available by
email at participate@seagl.org and many of the conference
organizers can be found at random times hanging out in the IRC channel.