Program for Seattle GNU/Linux Conference 2018

presented by Paul Berg

Technology projects do not happen in isolation and often interface with, include or have dependencies on a plethora of other projects which may be licensed under a variety of Open Source, Libre or even proprietary licenses, and possibly include even patent and trademark concerns. Ensuring that a project is compliant with the requirements of all of these licenses can seem like a daunting proposi...

presented by garrett honeycutt

Sensu is an open source monitoring solution built for today's environments. Sensu allows you to get complete visibility of your infrastructure and software. Besides monitoring, it also does alerts and metrics routing and ties into tools you might already use. You will leave understanding how Sensu works and how to quickly get started using it.

presented by Walter Mankowski

COBOL is the Rodney Dangerfield of programming languages — it doesn't get any respect. COBOL is routinely denigrated for its verbosity and dismissed as archaic, and for good reason: COBOL bears little to no resemblance to modern programming languages. Yet COBOL is far from a dead language. It processes an estimated 85% of all business transactions, and 5 billion lines of new COBOL code are wri...

presented by Jaime Lopez

Does your team deal with bugs that could have been caught earlier in the development cycle? Wish you could get the benefits of Test-driven development (TDD) but are worried that your dev team might revolt or that stakeholders will think that you're being unproductive? In this talk, we'll discuss an approach I've taken to balance the concerns of developers and stakeholders while simultaneously i...

presented by Megan Guiney

Unpopular opinion: remote work may be one of the best "perks" to ever be popularized by the tech industry, but it is also one of the worst.

On one hand, it allows employers access to a more diverse pool of employees, and employees greater schedule flexibility and the ability to customize their working conditions to better fit their needs. On the other, it presents a complex and often frustr...

presented by edunham

Many FLOSS enthusiasts exact perfect control of every bit and byte in their digital lives, but feel helpless at the mercy of clothing manufacturers to mass-produce garments for them. Sewing is an under-appreciated technology which allows you to modify, resize, and even duplicate your proprietary garments, or design your own!

This talk will take a quick spin through the underlying principles ...

presented by John Harris

Description: Linux containers have exploded in popularity and usage over the last 5 years and Kubernetes is the leading container orchestration platform. It was originally created at Google but is open-source and home to thousands of contributors, yet is often cited as being overly complex or unfriendly to understand, install and operate.

This talk assumes only that the audience know wh...

presented by labbott

Many people are interested in kernel development but struggle to get involved. After making a single contribution many people don't know what to do next. Some contributors don't know how to hone their skills, others can't figure out a good project. The focus of this talk is to discuss some of the issues facing new contributors to the Linux kernel who want to take a 'next step' after a first pat...

presented by Brian Raiter

Most people associate reverse engineering with software exploits and malware. But reverse engineering encompasses a broad range of tools and techniques that have application anywhere you need to understand a program without being able to read the original source. Reverse engineering is a lot like applying the scientific method: make observations, formulate a hypothesis, test, refine ... and rep...

presented by Kevron Rees

What does it take to grow food all year round in the Pacific North West when you are a lazy software engineer? This talk walks through the journey of one who has taken up the challenge of growing food with as much technology and as little effort as possible. The end-result of this journey is one of the most advanced greenhouses in the PNW. Topics include supplemental greenhouse lighting control...

presented by Nathan Handler

Many companies continue to manually create and manage their cloud infrastructure via web consoles. Documenting these procedures is challenging, especially since the interfaces are always evolving. Reviewing the changes is also difficult and often involves having a coworker watching over your shoulder. Rolling back a bad change requires deleting your current work and attempting to manually recre...

presented by Nell Shamrell

So you’ve released an open source project to the world, people are using it …the hard part is done, right? No, far from it. Open sourcing a project is only a fraction of the effort that will go into it over time. Come to this talk to learn about the hard parts of Open Source Governance and lessons learned from using, contributing, and governing dozens of Open Source projects. Learn how to triag...

presented by Rachel Kelly

This is a story of the journey taken to have effective, safe backups in customer environments. Part history, part prescriptivism, part actual technical solutions, let's talk about the thousand solutions we tried, and what is really and truly working for the company and for me (and you!), the operations engineer. This is a talk in three parts - the why, the what, and the future of our backups....

presented by Christina Zhu

The history of programming is filled with examples of how even the most regular developers discovered how to use their skills to transform the world. With big data, machine learning, and thousands of tutorials at every developer’s fingertips, it is easier than ever to go help causes that we care about. We’ll journey through some incredible projects that were actually very simple ideas that impa...

presented by Omar Ravenhurst

If you have a lot of servers, then you have a lot of logfiles. If you have a lot of logfiles, then you probably want one place to look at all of them.

This talk will cover:

• How to set up a centralized syslog server
• How to point your other servers' syslog daemons to the centralized server
• Security implications of centralizing syslog
• Security advantages of centralizing syslog
• ...

presented by Shea Newton

One of the strengths of property testing is its potential to automate testing scenarios for what might otherwise be infeasible or even impossible to write for a project one by one. Writing property tests however, isn't always intuitive. It can be difficult to work out what a project or a function's properties are (not to mention how to arbitrarily explore them). This talk will tackle strategies...

presented by Carla Schroder

_Dear Abby, I have always wanted to get into tech, but I'm afraid I am too old to start now. There is a training program I want to enroll in that looks really good and interesting, but it takes a year, and I know I will need continual training to develop meaningful skills. I'm already 50, so spending five or ten years learning a new career may not make sense. What should I do? Signed, Feeling D...

presented by Ruben Rodriguez

Websites and the technologies they are built on continue to evolve from the static text documents of old (with the occasional image, tiled background and blinking marquee) to very elaborate pieces of interactive software, with both local and remote code execution that brings all kinds of overlooked privacy and user freedom concerns. Fueled by practicality and monetization incentives, web develo...

presented by Benno Rice

Everyone generally agrees that passwords have problems. Many of the solutions tend to involve multi-factor authentication of some kind but that's always been a pain to implement in the browser, requiring custom backends or other tricky things.

Until now!

The WebAuthn standard, now at Candidate Review stage at W3C, allows for great ease of accessing extra authentication factors, Yubikeys, ...

presented by der.hans

etckeeper tracks changes in /etc/ with version control. It ties into package management systems for automagic checkins after updates. It also records important metadata such as permissions and ownership that version control systems (VCS) usually do not track.

Use the VCS you know and let etckeeper help you with some of the oddities found in /etc/.

An imporatant feature is detecting inadve...

presented by Susan Harris

Being a teacher for 30 years, Lesson Plans are a basic necessity before entering the classroom. I'll explain why and how we create them. I recently started training as a Pilates instructor for my personal growth. When creating lesson plans, my trainer was effusive about how I had devised them. This comes from many years of teaching - it's almost second nature for me. In this talk, I'll exp...

presented by Lucy Wyman

During a talk at DevOps Days Seattle the speaker stated "Automate as much as you can". While this seems like an obvious statement at first blush, on further inspection there are a number of exceptions to this rule, begging the question: What shouldn't I automate? This talk will give you a framework for deciding whether something is worth automating. We'll discuss:

• The return on investm...

presented by Tiberius Hefflin

It’s easy to see what being secure means in an enterprise setting, but what about personal security? In a world where technology and the goal posts for security are constantly changing, understanding what threats you face and what risk they pose is the first step. In this talk, I will discuss what a threat model is, and walk you through the process of making a threat model relevant to your pers...

presented by Jose Antonio Rey

You might be working on an open source project, and it seems that you will require people to sign up to use for your service. Seems easy enough, right? But, what happens when you start collecting user information? What are the implications? How do you keep the information secure? How do regulations like GDPR impact the service that you will be providing?

The top concern of many open source u...

presented by Johannes Ernst

Most Internet-of-Things devices you can buy today tend to be completely proprietary, inflexible, and tied into some would-be data overlord's cloud. But it can be different: in this talk I will to a show-and-tell on my project to automate my swimming pool's pumps using a Raspberry Pi and some open-source software. I now can schedule and monitor what's happening with my pool from the living room ...

presented by Michael Krotscheck

While in general it's a bad idea to add passwords and other secrets to your version control system, it's a reasonably common practice in the world of "Infrastructure as Code". This talk will provide a brief introduction to Gnu Privacy Guard (gpg), and how it can be used to safely encrypt secrets only shared with a select audience.

Whether you choose to commit those secrets to your version co...

presented by Emmanuel Morales

All operating systems, both free and non-free, are vulnerable to attacks from bad people. Just a simple action – opening random PDFs or Word/LibreOffice docs, running bash one-liners from Reddit, plugging in a cute USB stick shaped like a penguin you found on the sidewalk – and it could spell game over for your computer. Even if an attacker doesn’t gain root access to your computer, your files ...

presented by zebular13

An intro to computer science for pyromaniacs.

My goal was to create a propane fire poofer to impress my friends. I ended up building a control system with buttons, solenoids, and LEDs, and levelling up my arduino skills along the way.

I'll take you on my journey as I go from simple Arduino sketch to fully optimized control system. I’ll share what I learned about helpful libraries for de...

presented by Carla Schroder

Everyone is a newbie at 99% of everything, so teaching is the most important and noble task of all. Creating and maintaining documentation is not easy, but it is necessary. Documentation is recording your accumulated experiences and creating your institutional memory. Documentation is building a library of knowledge, and adding to the total store of recorded human knowledge. Documentation is a ...

presented by Adam Harvey

In 2015, the PHP project released version 7.0 of the PHP language. Doing so was the culmination of several years of discussion and hard work to resolve what a new major version would look like, what would be included, and most importantly, what would be broken for existing users.

In the end, PHP 7 was released with almost no backward compatibility breaks for well written, modern PHP 5 co...

presented by Megan Slater

There's a lot of hype about the potentials of WebAssembly in the browser right now. It elicits hopes about everything from importing new functionalities into browser based applications, to the potential (and in some circles hoped for) death of JavaScript. This talk is for folks who are curious about the real world applications and limitations of WebAssembly as it exists today. Or perhaps for in...

presented by John SJ Anderson

For most people, the idea of .NET development brings to mind a Visual Studio window, laden with toolbars and wizards, driven by a programmer who makes just as much use of her mouse as her keyboard. The idea of learning C# is more daunting than other languages, because in addition to the language itself, it seems like you also have to learn the correct way to make use of the massive Visual Studi...

presented by Adam Michael Wood

Free and Open Source projects are notorious for incomplete and poorly written documentation.

GitHub's 2017 Open Source Survey found that "documentation is highly valued, but often overlooked" with 93% of respondents agreeing that "incomplete or outdated documentation is a pervasive problem."

In attempt to solve that problem, many FOSS projects try to ...

presented by Amanda Sopkin

Successful monitoring and alerting systems can detect all known points of failure and include alerts that will quickly escalate these problems to the appropriate parties.

The meat of this talk will focus on addressing the problems in a system that have not been thought of specifically. What about the monsters lurking in the dark to strike when your team is out? How do you find those unknown...

presented by Daniel Ramsayer

There are currently over 4 billion internet users world wide. With roughly 19% of the world population experiencing some kind of accessibility limitation, the need for developers who are aware of their limitations and trained in best practices for how to limit the impact those limitations have on users is more important than ever.

In this presentation I am going to give a brief overview of ...

presented by Laurie Barth

It is often said that the hardest problem to solve is when two people are talking about different things but believe they are talking about the same thing. As you grow in your engineering career being able communicate about problems effectively is perhaps your single most important skill. This talk exists to distill the breadth of engineering verticals into a quick hit of common vocabulary.

...

presented by Jeff Silverman

TCP guarantees that bytes that go in one end of a network connection emerge at the other end in the same order. This guarantee holds true even if the network is "lossy" or has jitter. To do that, TCP has to be able to detect packets that arrive out of sequence or are lost.

In this presentation, I describe:

1. How to create a testbed to do network experiments using virtual machines.
2. ...

presented by Andy Schwartzmeyer

Slides!

This talk is aimed at those with a beginner to intermediate level of experience using technology, and falls under the category of (personal) "Information Security."

In today's world, users have lost control over their personal data. A massive industry has been created by companies such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, a...

presented by Benno Rice

systemd is, to put it mildly, controversial. As a FreeBSD developer I decided I wanted to know why.

I delved into the history of bootstrap systems, and even the history of UNIX and other contemporary operating systems, to try and work out why something like systemd was seem as necessary, if not desirable. I also tried to work out why so many people found it so upsetting, annoying, or otherwi...

presented by Lyndsey Padget

Git. It can be intimidating if you're accustomed to other kinds of source control management. Even if you're already using it and comfortable with the basics, situations can arise where you wish you understood it better. Developers often just want to write code and tell everyone else to take a hike, but the reality is that most of us work on teams where the feature-based code we write must be i...

presented by James Cooper

If your application handles images you've probably written something to crop and resize them. It's simple enough to execute ImageMagick with the appropriate flags, but is that sufficient?

In this talk we will:

• Explore common pitfalls of naive image resizing implementations
  • Native binary versioning differences (which version of ImageMagick am I using?)
  • Uncapped RAM usage ...

presented by Jim Hall

Is your program easy to use? Generally, a program has good usability if it is easy for new users to learn, easy for them to use, and easy for them to remember when they use the program again. Usability is not the same as user experience (UX) but they are related. You may think that usability is difficult, but it only takes a little time and effort to make your program easier to use. In this tal...