News
Thank you so much for sticking with us through SeaGL 2020! We’ll be announcing more with videos and other content from last year soon, but the big announcement here is that we are gearing up for year NINE of SeaGL! SeaGL 2021 will be Friday, November 5 and Saturday, November 6, 2021!
We are very close to decided on doing another fully virtual conference, which genuinely exceeded the highest of any of our expectations, but depending on how vaccinations go, there may be some kind of hybrid option. This is undecided, but we are working on setting a date to decide by, not later than by summer 2021.
Please reach out if you’d like to help with a well-defined, well-supported volunteer role as we ramp up to this year’s conference, at participate@seagl.org. Many of the volunteers have been helping with the conference for many years, so you’ll be joining an established team of people who care about free software and community in equal measure!
Thank you & stay tuned!
Today is our second and FINAL day of SeaGL 2020! Here is the full SeaGL 2020 program, and please read on for today’s schedule, for Friday, November 13, 2020. As a reminder, SeaGL 2020 is completely virtual. SeaGL is also completely free as in tea with no registration required, so everyone is welcome to attend.
You can attend if you go to attend.seagl.org. Live streams are also available at seagl.org/watch.
Normal talk blocks are 30m - 20m for the talk, 10m for optional Q&A as led by the Room Moderator. The Moderator will read questions from the text chat audience for the speaker to answer. There are 15 minute spaces between talks, which means that the talk blocks are listed as 45 minutes long. There is no Q&A during Keynotes.
Please note that as of 6:30pm PST Friday Nov 13, a few of these have changed. Last minute schedule changes - it’s a wild world out there this year, but we can accommodate :)
All times are listed in Pacific Standard Time, which is UTC -08:00
- 9:20am Opening announcements by Wm Salt Hale, Nathan Handler, and Rachel Kelly
- 9:35am Keynote by Kathy Giori
10:00am-10:45am block
- Cameron Bielstein - Building Free CI/CD with GitHub Actions
- Elizabeth K. Joseph - Open Source on the Mainframe in 1960, 1999, and Today
- Aeva Black - Crossing the Gender Divide
10:45am-11:30am block
- Molly deBlanc - Introduction to Ethics from an Ethicist-in-Training
- Justin W. Flory and Bhagyashree (Bee) - Time for Action: How to Build D&I in your Project
- Bri Hatch - 10 Vim Tricks
11:30am-12:15pm block
- Ask Me Anything (AMA) about Kubernetes with Elana Hashman!
- Kara Sowles - Alcohol and Inclusivity in Tech
12:15pm-1:15pm block - go eat some lunch, come back at 1:15pm PST :)
1:15pm-2:00pm block
- Deb Nicholson - Move Slow and Try Not to Break Each Other
- Ian Kelling - When does a Service Take Away your Freedom?
- Wm Salt Hale - Contacts to Connections: CRM Funneling for Projects and People
2:00pm-2:45pm block
- Amanda Sopkin - The United States’ History with Free Software and what we can do to improve the Future
- Aaron Wolf - Software Freedom through Collective Action
- Lisha Sterling - Building Alternative Networks for Fun and Resistance
2:45pm-3:30pm is TeaGL! Bring the tea your TeaGL buddy sent you, and come enjoy the company of tea lovers even if you didn’t sign up for the Tea Swap!
3:30pm-4:15pm block
- Paris Buttfield-Addison and Tim Nugent - First Steps with Swift for TensorFlow
- Ben Cotton - Scheduling your Open Source Project
- Nočnica Fee - Data Liberation: Open Source Observability
4:30pm Closing Keynote by VM Brasseur
6:00pm Closing Virtual Party!
If you have any questions about any of these, please pop into attend.seagl.org and we’ll get you set right up!
Today is the day! Day 1 of SeaGL begins today! Here is the full SeaGL 2020 program, and please read on for today’s schedule, for Friday, November 13, 2020. As a reminder, SeaGL 2020 is completely virtual. SeaGL is also completely free as in tea with no registration required, so everyone is welcome to attend.
You can attend if you go to attend.seagl.org. Live streams are also available at seagl.org/watch.
Normal talk blocks are 30m - 20m for the talk, 10m for optional Q&A as led by the Room Moderator. The Moderator will read questions from the text chat audience for the speaker to answer. There are 15 minute spaces between talks, which means that the talk blocks are listed as 45 minutes long. There is no Q&A during Keynotes.
All times are listed in Pacific Standard Time, which is UTC -08:00
- 9:00am Opening announcements by Wm Salt Hale
- 9:10am Keynote by Máirín Duffy
- 9:35am Keynote by Daniel Takamori
10:00am-10:45am block
- Mariatta Wijaya - Oops! I Became an Open Source Maintainer!
- Mariah Villarreal - Rise Up for Free Software in Schools!
- Neil McGovern - Patently Obvious
10:45am-11:30am block
- Ruth Ikegah - A Beginner-Inclusive Approach to Open Source
- Stephen Wilson - The Open Digital Photography Workflow
- Nočnica Fee - Data Liberation: Open Source Observability
11:30am-12:15pm block
- der.hans - FLOSS and you
- Suraj Kumar Mahto - Introducing FOSS Culture at Universities
- Gareth Greenaway - Open Source Secrets Management
12:15pm-1:15pm block - go eat some lunch, come back at 1:15pm PST :)
1:15pm-2:00pm block
- Megan Guiney - Democratizing Documentation
- Josh Boykin - Gaming for Good: Using Passions and Technology for Social Change
- Mike Hamrick - Features of a Modern Terminal Emulator
2:00pm-2:45pm block
- Jill Rouleau - Demystifying Contributor Culture: IRC, Mailing Lists, and Netiquette for the 21st Century
- Elijah C. Voigt - Let’s Make Games with Rust
2:45pm-3:30pm is TeaGL! Bring the tea your TeaGL buddy sent you, and come enjoy the company of tea lovers even if you didn’t sign up for the Tea Swap!
3:30pm-4:15pm block
- Sumana Harihareswara - Stand-up comedy about FLOSS
- Kaylea Champion - How to build a zombie detector: Identifying software quality problems
- Rowin Andruscavage - Overclocking for your Mind and Body
4:30pm and on - Cocktails and Mocktails Evening Social, as presented by Benjamin Mako Hill
If you have any questions about any of these, please pop into attend.seagl.org and we’ll get you set right up!
We are SO excited for the conference which begins TOMORROW! Since we’re fully online this year, let’s talk about actually HOW to get online to watch talks and have a super social experience in your conference-going.
The tl;dr here is that you can go to attend.seagl.org and enter your name. You will be added to the broader SeaGL hallway chat and be sent instructions for how to join specific chat rooms. To view a talk, enter one of the three track channels and click on the watch button to open an embedded live stream.
Description of how talks will be delivered
The speaker will be delivering their talk in a private video conference. They will be alone in the “room” aside from the volunteer moderator. Our tech team will direct that feed to a publicly facing URL when the talk begins. Attendees can chat with each other and watch the video at attend.seagl.org. At the conclusion of the talk, if the speaker wants a Question and Answer period, the room moderator will read questions from the audience in that track’s attend.seagl.org chat room, which the speaker will be able to answer. There will also be a volunteer chat moderator for each talk to monitor the space for potential problems. Our Code of Conduct applies in all of these virtual conference spaces, throughout the duration of the conference, and in all of our IRC channels before and after the conference. You can read more details about our tech stack in the blog post: The SeaGL Experience, Virtually Speaking!
How to view a talk
First, go to attend.seagl.org. Enter a name and/or handle that you are comfortable with. No registration is required, because we believe that people should not have to opt-out to anything resembling tracking to attend SeaGL. If the name you select is not available, another name will be automatically assigned. For users who already have their own IRC setups, you can log onto #seagl on irc.freenode.net, however, you do not need to be familiar with IRC in the least to attend SeaGL!
You’ll begin in a chat room called #seagl-hallway, a space where you can read announcements about upcoming talks and interact with other attendees. You will see a number of other channels which you can join, such as #seagl-track-1, 2, and 3, #seagl-helpdesk, and others. It will look something like this!
In the Track rooms, e.g. #seagl-track-1, #seagl-track-2, and #seagl-track-3, there will be a feed available throughout both days, playing a live stream of the talks. You can pull up the embedded video by hitting the yellow “watch” button at the top right. You will not be joining the video conference room itself, but your interaction and participation encouraged in the track chat room.
At the end of the talk, if the speaker chooses to take questions (some will not, and that is ok!), please add your question to the queue in chat. The moderator will relay questions on the video feed to the speaker. Please remember to form your question in such a way that it requires a question mark at the end - in other words, we want genuine questions asked in good faith, and are hoping to avoid “story time”-style announcements from the audience. Stories and anecdotes are for the talks, and questions are for answering by the speaker! The moderators have been trained to facilitate this, and will be very excited to pass on your real questions!
Each talk is 20 minutes. The speaker optionally has an additional 10 minutes for Q&A. That makes 30 minutes total, and adding fifteen minutes between talks, each slot lasts 45 minutes. After 30 minutes, the talk is entirely over and we will be depending on our amazing tech team to move the feeds around to the next speaker - each speaker has their own “room.” Please be aware that this means that after the time is up, it is truly up, unlike a physical space where a little dallying is part of the talks!
We know this is a lot of information! Remember, you can go to attend.seagl.org, enter your name, and get started - we’ll help you when you arrive! We cannot WAIT to see you. And remember, you can view the whole schedule here: SeaGL 2020 Schedule
This year, our theme is “OSI Layer 8: freeing the people” and we intend to provide an open and free space, despite being online. To that end, we’ve been working diligently to bring the strong social aspect our attendees expect to SeaGL in 2020.
As previously mentioned, our tech team has put together a website that features streaming video from the talks alongside Kiwi IRC, providing a web interface to our numerous text chat channels. They’ve also created a bot which helps orchestrate all of the potential social interactions we hope you help start.
A key feature we’ve tried to emulate is the “hallway track”. By asking the bot to create a channel, you can make visible spaces for like-minded folk to join you. Whatsmore, these rooms have a one-click on-demand video/voice option fully integrated utilizing Jitsi. Please feel encouraged to hop around, find your friends, and make some new connections.
Speaking of the hallway track, SeaGL depends on our sponsors to put on the conference. Make sure to drop by their “tables” and say thanks, especially to our platinum sponsors: Indeed, Amazon, and the Free Software Foundation.
Finally, below are a few of our scheduled social events. Please attend them, remembering that SeaGL’s primary focus and drive is on facilitating community interactions. We look forward to hearing whether our platform has taken a positive step in the direction of facilitating those interactions remotely!
Afternoon TeaGL Time
Friday & Saturday @ 14:45-15:15 PT (22:45-23:15 UTC)
While we don’t have an exhibitor hall to wander, there will still be afternoon #TeaGL! This year, as with everything else, we took our tea swap virtual. Missed the sign-up? Not to worry! Everyone will still be flocking together during the afternoon break. Bring along some miniature treats and a beverage to warm your beak before returning to the final talk block of the day of this Free as in Tea conference. (and psst, the bot may have a special surprise for sharing virtual tea…)
New to this year’s tea time: #TeaGLtoasts. Record a video beginning with your mug to the camera; pull back, take a sip, and cheers software freedom, then bring your mug back to the camera. We will be stitching all of the videos together and overlaying a variety of freely licensed tunes to send around the socials!
Friday, November 13th @ 16:30-18:00 PT (00:30-02:00 UTC)
One of last year’s keynotes, Benjamin Mako Hill will be re-mixing up a series of GNU/Linux themed cocktails. “The good news is that the source for the cocktails is available! The bad news is that you’ll have to compile these drinks yourself.”
Take a peak at the program listing and pick up the recommended ingredients to shake alongside. Non-alcoholic? No problem! An EtOH-free option is available. Either way, join in the Friday fun with your fellow feathered folk!
Saturday, November 14th @ 18:00-22:00 PT (02:00-06:00 UTC)
After the talks have ended, and we’ve all taken a bit of a break from the screen glow, an evening of fun is ahead. Our IRC Bot will be helping along the mixing and mingling. Start up a special interest “table” to talk around, utilizing the embedded on-demand Jitsi rooms. Join in on a scavenger hunt, kicking yourself for all of the quarantine cleaning that means not having that perfect find. Then, at 8pm PT, we will be splitting into randomly assigned teams for trivia hosted by none other than Bri Hatch, an every-year SeaGL supporter.
Grab your favorite beverages and finger foods, sign-in to attend.seagl.org, and join the #seagl-party!
Planning volunteer run conferences such as SeaGL always takes a lot of ongoing work from a dedicated core. It also takes a lot of people to volunteer during the conference itself.
For SeaGL, our focus remains on our community, especially our attendees and speakers. They’re why we put on the conference. That is you, you are why we make SeaGL every year. You are our focus as the programming team selects talks and builds the schedule, also as SeaGL decides what features we’re going to offer.
Two years ago that focus led us to add no cost day care ( also thanks to a generous sponsor to pay for it ).
We decided in April go virtual this year as it was the responsible thing. We want a great experience for our community and that doesn’t happen if you can’t attend or if you have to risk your health to do so.
We wanted to make sure speakers and attendees had time to plan for remote attendance rather than making it a surprise. This is why we spent the last 7 months working on remote conference experience.
Our theme was also decided fairly early on, one to highlight our focus on you, our community.
As we approach the conference starting in less than a week, it is time to unveil that theme.
*drum roll*
Don’t peek :)
The SeaGL 2020 theme is …
“OSI Layer 8: freeing the people”
Going virtual this year added a new layer for us and a new dependency on networking (the OSI model) to make our talks available. The top of that model is the presentation layer. But, for us, our presentations aren’t our focus. You, our community, are.
We love our presenters and we’re so happy to have a wonderfully diverse, dedicated group of people helping us provide some fantastic content. We’re also happy to have new speakers who’ve never spoken for us and perhaps never at a conference before. New voice bring new perspectives and new experience.
Through all the changes we’ve for SeaGL this year, through all the new features we needed for delivering the content, we wanted to keep our focus on helping you, the people.
A number of posts will be released in the coming days about our tech stack for delivering the conference experience. We will cover the work we put in to use FLOSS for most things attendees interact with. We will celebrate how easy some tasks were due to amazing FLOSS tools.
This year we continued our tea swapping tradition by adding a virtual tea exchange for TeaGL, using a Nextcloud form for the signup. As part of our commitment to privacy we included an anonymi-tea option. We also used Kdenlive to create our TeaGL toasts. Please post one if you’d like to participate. We continue to use FLOSS for our conference planning system (OSEM).
We’re using another Nextcloud form for the volunteer signup. See our call for volunteers if you’d like to hlpe. We have two training sessions left.
We look forward to seeing all of you on Friday and Saturday, November 13th and 14th, to celebrate you, our esteemed guests, at SeaGL 2020.
Like other conferences, the shift from an in-person to virtual format forced us to think about the virtual SeaGL experience.
Conferences are about more than just the great talks that the speakers deliver; they’re about the personal connections.
When thinking about what it meant to move SeaGL online, we had to consider how we could preserve that authentic SeaGL feel.
The experience itself isn’t the only thing we value.
As you might be able to guess from our name, the Seattle GNU/Linux Conference values the principles of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS).
While there are some proprietary offerings that would have provided a glossy user experience, in the end we decided to stick to our core principles.
Thus this grass-roots, community-built Free Software conference will run on a grass-roots, community-built Free Software platform.
The Experience™
Talks will be streamed to a variety of services, including the SeaGL website.
As always, the conference is free to attend and registration is not required.
You also don’t have to interact, but we hope you do.
There’s something nice about seeing each other’s faces and hearing each other’s voices during a time when we’re all stuck in place.
To that end, we’ve developed a web-based interface that combines the video streams and the chat channels.
Each talk track will have a separate channel/room, alongside a number of additional channels for general chat, announcements, etc.
In order to recreate the “hallway track” feel, we have a bot that can create visible breakout rooms on demand.
For instance, if you have a spicy take on software licenses, maybe you want to create a room where you can debate the finer points of your favorite license.
Or if you want to get into a deep discussion about documentation best practices, you can start a room for word nerds.
The idea is to start with an easy, consolidated place for everyone participating in SeaGL.
From there, it’s easy to find the conversations that match your interests or stake out a spot for folks to match yours.
If you want to use your IRC client of choice, you’ll be able to do that—all of the text communication will take place on the freenode IRC network.
Furthermore, we’ll be spending some time after the event to polish up and document the system for anyone who wants to replicate the experience for their own conference.
In the spirit of free software, we’re standing on the shoulders of giants and making contributions to the future.
And, of course, SeaGL’s Code of Conduct still applies.
The Tech
Our technical decisions were driven by a few guiding principles:
- Single chat infrastructure everywhere
- No login/registration required to participate
- Integrate as much as possible in a single frontend
- As much of a full-stack FLOSS solution as possible
- Maximize ease for new speakers
Given the demands on our team of volunteers (and the Free Software ethos), we wanted to reuse wherever we could instead of writing new functionality from scratch.
Not-invented-here is a feature in FOSS.
For the chat functionality, we’ve embedded a Kiwi IRC instance into the SeaGL portal which connects to the freenode IRC network.
Presenters will connect to a BigBlueButton instance graciously provided to us by the Free Software Foundation.
Their video will be broadcast to a variety of third party streaming sites, as well as being sent to Azure for live transcription for display within our embedded chat.
Additionally, to further mirror the “hallway track”, attendees will be able to open up embedded Jitsi video conferencing rooms on-the-fly inside any of the breakout rooms.
Of course, we couldn’t get away with not creating anything.
The orchestration between all of these components is helped along by seagl-bot.
seagl-bot is an IRC bot designed to help ease the IRC experience and make it feel more like a conference.
It allows users to create breakout rooms.
It also supports broadcasting announcements from the organizers.
We’re working on adding some other neat features, too, so be sure to check out the documentation when it’s published.
Thanks
As with any great undertaking, there are so many great people involved!
In particular, we’d like to extend our thanks to Andrew, Don, Keith, Salt, and Tree for their work on putting this all together as well as the rest of the organizing committee who helped with testing and making the final decision go with the in-house design.
And, of course, we have to thank all of the projects we built this solution on.
We’re excited about the SeaGL Experience, and we’re looking forward to sharing it with you November 13th and 14th.
Please invite your friends from near and far to hang out with us!
SeaGL is excited to announce a new feature for 2020.
We will have a Career Expo Thursday afternoon, the day before our conference kicks off in full.
For the career expo, we will provide resume reviews and career guidance via private consultation.
Counselors will be available for 30 minute jitsi sessions ( video optional ) from 13:00 to 17:00 Pacific time Thursday afternoon.
In UTC, that’s from Thursday at 19:00 to Friday at 01:00.
SeaGL exists to support the FLOSS community.
We’re starting the career expo to help people find and nurture careers working in and with FLOSS.
Like other aspects of SeaGL, the career expo is dedicated to providing a harassment-free, inclusive experience that follows our Code of Conduct.
##Career Expo Enrollment
Please sign up using our Nextcloud form if you would like to book a session.
There is no charge for participating in the career expo.
##Resume Review
It is beneficial if our counselors can review resumes ahead of the expo.
We ask resumes be made available as soon as practical to allow our counselors to determine their own review schedule.
As counselors might wish to make notes, please provide resumes in a writeable free and open format such as LibreOffice ODT or plain text.
We can also make notes on an annotatable format such as PDF.
##Day of Participation
We will open an IRC channel for participants the day of the career expo.
Counselors will contact participants via IRC or email to schedule sessions.
The counselling sessions will be conducted via jitsi rooms.
Jitsi provides in browser conferencing with a video option.
No account is required to sign up for counselling sessions or to use jitsi.
##Background
Hans started the Free Software Stammtisch career nights as a means of helping his students enter the field or further their careers.
Thanks to generous volunteering from other counselors, the career nights have helped many people over the years.
The job nights led to working with the job board and career guidance events at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE).
We found career guidance events such as “Ask a recruiter”, “What a hiring manager looks for” and “Resume reviews” to garner significant interest.
Our first resume review event was scheduled for one hour, filled the room and ran for 3 hours.
At SeaGL we added a job board, but found it wasn’t sufficient for what we wanted to offer.
This year SCaLE added an Open Source Career Day thanks to RaiseMe.
Then, the pandemic hit and everything went virtual.
As it turns out, the pandemic actually provided opportunity.
Going virtual gives us access to assistance from counselors who don’t usually make it to Seattle.
Also, luckily for us, Lori B had aRaiseMe event at ShellCon 2020 a couple weeks ago.
That provided an excellent example for running a virtual career guidance event.
We hope that our inaugural career expo will provide value to our community.
##Thank Yous
SeaGL wants to thank the career counselors who are volunteering their time for the career expo.
We also want to thank our volunteers and sponsors who make SeaGL possible.
Thanks especially to Lori B and her RaiseMe program at ShellCon 2020 for providing a virtual event model for us to learn from.
Thanks also to her for volunteering to help with counseling for our first Career Expo!
##Contact the SeaGL Career Expo
If you have questions or would like to help with career guidance, please contact us at CareerExpo (at) SeaGL.org.
We are pleased to announce that the SeaGL 2020 program is now live!
The schedule is filled with lots of great talks from very talented speakers and spans November 13-14.
Take some time to browse through the list of talks and start deciding which ones you will be attending.
As a reminder, SeaGL 2020 is completely virtual.
SeaGL is also completely free as in tea with no registration required, so everyone is welcome to attend.
All Speakers And Talks (in non-preferential order):
- 10 Vim Tricks - Bri Hatch
- A Beginner-Inclusive Approach to Open Source - Ruth Ikegah
- Alcohol & Inclusivity in Tech - Kara Sowles
- Building Alternative Networks for Fun and Resistance - Lisha Sterling
- Building Free CI/CD with GitHub Actions - Cameron Bielstein
- Contacts to Connections: CRM funneling for projects and people - Wm Salt Hale
- Crossing the Gender Divide: How I Learned to See My Own Bias - Aeva Black
- Data Liberation: Open Source Observability - Nočnica Fee
- Democratizing Documentation - Megan Guiney
- Demystifying Contributor Culture: IRC, Mailing Lists, and Netiquette for the 21st Century - Jill Rouleau
- Environments - Christopher Neugebauer
- Features of a Modern Terminal Emulator - Mike Hamrick
- First Steps with Swift for TensorFlow - Paris Buttfield-Addison
- FLOSS and You - der.hans
- Gaming for Good: Using Passions and Technology for Social Change - Josh Boykin
- How to Build a Zombie Detector: Identifying Software Quality Problems - Kaylea Champion
- Introducing FOSS Culture at Universities - Suraj Kumar Mahto
- Let’s Make Games with Rust - Elijah C. Voigt
- Move Slow and Try Not to Break Each Other - Deb Nicholson
- Oops! I Became an Open Source Maintainer - Mariatta Wijaya
- Open Source on the Mainframe in 1960, 1999, and Today - Elizabeth K. Joseph
- Overclocking for your Mind and Body - Rowin Andruscavage
- Patently Obvious - Neal McGovern
- Porting GW-BASIC back to Z80 - Leandro Pereira
- Rise Up for Free Software in Schools - Mariah Villarreal
- Scheduling your Open Source Project - Ben Cotton
- Self-Hosting with Traefik and Docker - Matt McGraw
- Software Freedom through Collective Action - Aaron Wolf
- Stand-Up Comedy about FLOSS - Sumana Harihareswara
- The Open Digital Photography Workflow - Stephen Wilson
- The United States’ History with Free Software and What We Can Do to Improve the Future - Amanda Sopkin
- Time for Action: How to build D&I in your project - Justin W. Flory and Bhagyashree (Bee)
- When does a service take away your software freedom? - Ian Kelling
- Keynote - VM Brasseur
- Keynote - Kathy Giori
- Keynote - Daniel Pono
- Keynote - Máirín Duffy
SeaGL is right around the corner (November 13-14). We’ve previously announced that VM (Vicky) Brasseur and Máirín Duffy will be keynoting. We are now happy to announce Kathy Giori will be part of our keynote lineup this year! We’ve asked Kathy a few questions to allow SeaGL attendees to get to know her ahead of her talk.
What does equity of access mean to you, and what challenges and strengths have you experienced in making FOSS projects accessible to newcomers?
The MicroBlocks project goal behind “equity of access” means that we want to create a learning tool for physical computing, and a community of support around it, that has a chance of eventually reaching EVERY child. That means MicroBlocks must be free and open source software, translatable to any language. It has to support affordable and readily available hardware. We want all students to have a chance to explore physical computing, not just wealthier school districts, or extracurricular clubs, or only english-speaking youth.
What inspired you to get into hardware hacking? What was your favorite early project in that vein?
I got really lucky and while being presented with a high school scholarship from a local company, was offered a summer job in “test engineering”. I accepted and got to test digital control panels, learning how to read schematics so I could debug problems. When I found a problem, I was able to fix it by soldering, or wire-wrapping, or whatever. Eventually I was programming EEPROMS using assembly language to created automated test programs. That first summer job, before even starting college, led me to major in EE. I think my first “hobby” hack was trying to debug my alarm-clock-radio when it had stopped working correctly. One of its transistors had burned/worn out. Back then, the schematics for the hardware came with the product. That openly available schematic and my knowledge of being able to test voltages here and there and across the transistor allowed me to fix my own radio.
Similarly, how and when did you get involved in FOSS? What attracted you?
I had been using computers and programming since an early age and never thought about or learned the value/meaning of FOSS, until I ran a startup with friends in 1999. We were focused on using and producing FOSS solutions. I learned to install and run Linux on a Sony laptop. We ran Linux servers, wrote cgi perl scripts to build web pages, and used VNC to let our users gain access to a “Linux desktop on the net” (through a browser or VNC client or Palm VII). Since then I’ve been at companies big and small, but always pushed for open source approaches. When open source is embraced by and used in industry, along with the community, it becomes a win-win for innovation.
What FOSS thing are you currently involved with that you think is great, but that people might not be aware of?
MicroBlocks
and
WebThings – it’s a project that I worked on while at Mozilla. Unfortunately they no longer have the resources to fund it, so it is being spun out so it can continue in the community. I’m investigating some mission-aligned fiscal sponsorship. I will provide the latest updates during my talk.
What is something interesting about you that most people might not be aware of?
Getting struck by lightning. Fortunately I wasn’t hurt because I was inside a hardened Learjet (it got struck, and conducted the energy from wing to tail). The Learjet was instrumented with many sensors including electric field mills, the data from which I was in charge of analyzing. We were intentionally flying in and around storms in the vicinity of Cape Canaveral, to study the electrification of cumulonimbus (thunderstorm) clouds to determine if we could come up with criteria related to cloud height or radar parameters or anything else that could help determine go/nogo criteria for rocket launches.
Is there anything else you want to share?
Just words of thanks for this opportunity. :)