Presentations

Kara Sowles
Audience: Everyone
Topic: General

User groups are an essential and flourishing part of the tech community, but it's common for them to encounter obstacles to meeting regularly. This talk will be filled with practical tips to keep your user group growing and active. I'll suggest various ways for user groups to attract a steady supply of speakers, find a venue, obtain food and drink for meetings, source topics, become more visible, and attract new members.  These tips are based on finding creative workarounds to obstacles encountered by over 50 user groups while remotely running Puppet Labs' User Group program.

Daniel Valadez, Rich Unite, Yolanda Kol, Koda Kol
Audience: Everyone
Topic: Youth

The Finch is an advanced robot for computer science education that operates on a drag and drop interface called Snap! Students will execute commands in Snap! to navigate the Finch through an obstacle course while demonstrating the features and functions of speed, steering, LED lights, and more! Be sure to tune in to this session to learn about the Finch and how its role in computer science education can be applied to everyday life. 

Nathan Willis
Audience: Everyone

Learn how to get up and running with open source automotive software without breaking the bank. We will look at a variety of low-cost hardware modules to bring your car online, but that don't require big investments or permanent installation. We will also explore several levels of open-source automotive software: for Android, for Python developers, and for traditional desktop Linux distributions.

Rae Yip
Audience: Intermediate
Topic: SysAdmin

In our brave new world, the reliability of the web services and cloud infrastructure that do the grunt work of making your gadgets seem "smart" and "mobile" is paramount. Consequently, "Service Reliability Engineer" is a job role that is growing in demand at tech companies everywhere.

However, there is still much confusion about this role, and how it differs from a traditional "SysAdmin". I'll try to outline the distinguishing characteristics and what expertise might be valued when interviewing for SRE, or building an SRE team.

Steven Doran
Audience: Developer

This presentation describes how to transform the Raspberry Pi into a low-cost real-time processor using the open-source RTEMS (Real-Time Executive for Multiprocessor Systems) and adding a real-time clock. This presentation provides a brief description of the RTEMS operating system and describes how to transform the Raspberry Pi into a low-cost real-time processor using the open-source RTEMS (Real-Time Executive for Multiprocessor Systems) and adding a real-time clock. These modifications allow the Raspberry Pi to support embedded applications with the most stringent real-time requirements.

Gina Likins
Audience: Everyone
Topic: Mentoring

Conversational tone plays a large role in community success, but is a hard concept to model and understand. Using a humorous approach, I’ll demonstrate behaviors that create a hostile community (and by contrast, ones that create a welcoming community). We’ll look at the “Defcon Insult Scale for Conversations” (DIScon), from mildly insulting to abusive, and key signifiers of each level. Then, after talking about ways to “up the insult ante,” we’ll discuss why high DIScon level communities are unpleasant and how individuals can change the tone of conversation in communities.

E. Dunham
Audience: Everyone
Topic: General

Are you trying to herd cats as a project leader, or simply wondering how to evaluate a project's culture from the outside before getting involved? This talk explains some basic models of human motivation and behavior and include examples of applying them in the world of open­source software. As engineers, we use simple heuristics and algorithms for solving computer problems every day, although we rarely use those models to understand human interaction.

Ski Kacoroski
Audience: Everyone
Topic: DevOpsDay LA

How to apply the Incident Command System (ICS) to System Administrators. In this talk I will cover a brief history of ICS, its core concepts, terminology, organizational processes, and essential principles of ICS and show how they can be applied in the Technology arena. We will cover the following: * The difference between an Incident and an Event * The key concepts of ICS * ICS command structure * Responsibilities for each command area * Run through an example of applying it for a Technology incidents This can be a talk or a 4 hour tutorial

Ralf Quint
Audience: Everyone
Topic: Embedded

For a year now, Intel is trying to get a foothold in the growing market doubt the "Internet of Things", first with the Intel Galileo, an x86 based "Arduino compatible" board, now in a 2nd Generation version as well as recently with the Intel Edison, an SD card sized embedded board, all based on the Pentium x86 compatible Quark X1000 CPU.

Andrew Kirch
Audience: Everyone
Topic: General

Open Source IT monitoring software that offers visibility over the entire IT stack, from network devices to applications.