Bazzite: The Modern Model for the Linux Desktop
Over the last three years, Bazzite has established itself as one of the best entry points for Windows gamers in their journey to Linux. An OS that is foolproof, ready to game out of the box, and features the latest drivers built-in. It provides a premier gaming experience for all PC form factors: Desktop, Laptop, and Handheld. Bazzite is redefining the potential of the Linux desktop by harnessing the full power of Cloud Native patterns. By embracing an image based approach, Bazzite transforms the operating system from a complex assembly of packages into a seamless, versioned, and universally deployable container image that is exceedingly difficult for an end user to break.
In this session, we will show you how to incorporate our model into your projects and demonstrate how the model is fundamentally setting the standard for the future of personal computing. We'll also chat about how you can help the entire Linux gaming ecosystem by contributing to the Open Gaming Collective (OGC).
Beyond Static Analysis: Applying Symbolic Execution to Embedded Linux
Static analysis tools are fast, scalable, and widely used in modern software workflows, but they struggle to reason about runtime behaviors in complex embedded systems. This talk focuses on how symbolic execution can be used as a complementary technique to explore deeper execution paths and uncover subtle bugs that traditional static analysis often misses. We will explain the core concepts, key challenges like path explosion, practical mitigation strategies, and real-world case studies involving embedded Linux applications.
Beyond Vibe Coding: How to Scale AI-Assisted Development Without Architectural Chaos
AI coding assistants have made engineers 10x faster, but when entire teams use them, a new problem emerges: architectural chaos. Each developer gets working code from their AI, but without shared architectural context, you end up with conflicting patterns, duplicate services, and unmaintainable systems. This talk introduces SpecMind, an open-source tool that enables spec-driven vibe coding by automatically analyzing your codebase, generating architecture documentation, and keeping design decisions aligned across your team. Learn how to maintain architectural consistency while moving fast with AI, and see a live demo of the analyze, design, and implement workflow that keeps teams building together instead of in isolation.
BoF: Old Farts
Were some of your first programs written on paper tape? Or perhaps programmed through a plugboard with wires? Do you remember when lights and switches on the front of the console were actually useful for debugging? When you liked the device drivers into your program instead of the operating system, because there WAS NO OPERATING SYSTEM?
Then you are an OLD FART, and this BoF is for you! Come and relate the days when computer graphics was line-printer ASCII art of Snoopy on his doghouse, computer security was locking the door to the computer room at night, and networking was carrying a box of cards down the hall to your friend.
If you are a young WHIPPASNAPPA you might want to drop past to hear about when the CPUs* were so large you could walk inside of them.
You are welcome to sit in the front of the room )or the back, whichever you prefer) because you are an OLD FART and no one tells you what to do!
*CPUs means JUST the central processing unit. The TUBE memory was separate cabinets!
BoF: SCALE 5K Run/Walk
Join us for an easy, relaxed walk or run thru Old Town Pasadena & expand the radius of your conference visit. PLEASE NOTE THAT THE CONVENTION CENTER IS CLOSED, MEET IN THE ENTRANCE OF THE CONVENTION CENTER FACING THE BALLROOM.
BoF: Solarpunk Developers Group
An interdisciplinary community-building "birds of a feather" session for makers, designers, and homesteaders to share and discuss open source hardware (OSHW) projects with a focus on regenerative ecology. Such OSHW projects may include, but not limited to, food production, rainwater harvest & filtration systems, energy harvesting & storage systems, as well as development methodologies. Attendees are encouraged to discuss current projects or brainstorm future projects that enable a more regenerative, sustainable, post-scarcity future.
BoF: Tech Glamping as a Service: How do we help busy non-techies de-google?
Many people are open to switching to FLOSS tools. More and more are highly motivated to do so. But sometimes venturing off the beaten path means giving up features or usability. Even switching to a BETTER tool can disrupt real-life routines or involve a learning curve. This discussion will be a brainstorming session on how to make migration feasible for people who don't have much experience exploring outside the confines of Big Tech. The discussion will start from three observations of Seattle's Resist Tech Monopolies members as we have experimented with helping a wide range of folks de-google and "de-monopoly" more generally (switch away from MS, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and so on). First observation: Switching away from Big Tech products is a process that can't be completed in a day. In fact, it can take months. Second: Most people do not share our enthusiasm with the finer points of installation, troubleshooting, and reading the docs. Third: Having a techie to help one-on-one within a social setting greatly decreases the barriers to completing a migration. So. . . come help brainstorm how to extend the installfest model to a regular recurring fun social event augmented with friendly tech support. We might call it "tech glamping as a service."
BoF: Time Stuff: War stories, Q/A, NTP, PTP, Khronos, and more
Bring your ears and/or your questions! We can discuss all things time-related, such as what's new in NTF's open source timing projects (NTP, LinuxPTP, libptpmgmt, Khronos), a chance to exchange network time war stories, and general discussions about network time.
BoF: When Did You Realize You Were Building the Wrong Thing?
Even with solid process, the right solution can still slip away. Come share experiences with competing stakeholders, customers who can't articulate what they really need, and the gap between what gets requested and what actually solves the problem. What early signals did you miss? What works beyond the standard playbook?
bpfilter: an eBPF-based firewall for fast packets filtering!
iptables and nftables are the standard for Linux packet filtering: well-documented and widely understood. But at high bandwidth, BPF is the fast alternative, although it means writing C and fighting the BPF verifier.
bpfilter bridges the gap: an iptables-like DSL that compiles to BPF bytecode.
This hands-on talk covers Linux filtering tradeoffs, introduces bpfilter, and demos real-world usage from writing rules to debugging.
bpftrace: learning to be a language
bpftrace provides a quick and easy way for people to write observability-based eBPF programs, especially those unfamiliar with the complexities of eBPF. We always claimed bpftrace was a "high-level tracing language" for Linux even though it was missing the basic features of a language: composability, primitives to avoid code duplication, and even proper loops. It was also trailing behind the larger, upstream BPF feature set. This talk is about how we're working to transform bpftrace from a box of tools (one-liners) to a language for making new tools.
https://bpftrace.org/
Brand Building in Open Source: Why It Matters
Building a powerful open source brand isn’t about marketing hype. It’s about principles. This session unpacks how transparent values, genuine community engagement, and a user-first mindset create lasting trust and loyalty. Drawing on DBeaver’s evolution from a 2010 hobby project to a tool with over 10 million users, discover how prioritizing help over hype, collaborating openly with users, and fostering a likable, responsible voice transforms contributors into ambassadors and positions open source projects for sustainable commercial success... without sacrificing community goodwill.
Breaking Governance Capture: How Sortition Can Transform Organizations
Technical societies increasingly struggle with governance capture by large corporations and entrenched interests, especially in news deserts where transparency is low. This talk presents an actionable, open-governance alternative: sortition, or democratic lotteries, paired with publicly governed digital infrastructure for collective self-rule. Drawing from real-world examples (including the lottery-selected board of Democracy Without Elections and open-source governance work from Metagov), we explore how engineering and professional organizations can use stratified random selection and participatory technology to build representative, trustworthy, transparent, and capture-resistant leadership structures. Participants will learn concrete steps to implement sortition-based boards or committees supported by legitimate, publicly governed tools.
Build a Better Loop: A Guide to Platform Engineering
From scrappy sysadmins and early SRE teams to DevOps and today’s platform engineering wave, this talk traces how operations have evolved—and why the next frontier is treating your platform as a real internal product for developers. This talk will unpack what a modern platform actually is (and isn’t), show how ideas like Team Topologies, golden paths, and “glue as a service” fit together, and share concrete strategies for success: adopting a product mindset, obsessing over developer experience, measuring with DevEx/DORA-style signals, and ruthlessly stripping away incidental complexity so autonomous teams can move faster with less coordination. You’ll leave with a practical mental model and a set of patterns you can apply immediately to build a better loop between developers, platform, and the business.
Building a Postgres DBaaS with open source
PlanetScale for Postgres is a database as a service, launched in September of 2025, composed largely of open source materials. In this talk, we'll discuss how we approached this project, what factors informed our technology choices, some of the nuances and sharp edges we've encountered because of those choices, and some interesting ways that we've stitched these components together into a cohesive system.
Building a Softphone for scale
Modern softphones have gone beyond user interfaces and SIP endpoints, becoming distributed, fault-tolerant communication systems designed for global scale. As organizations adopt hybrid Asterisk environments, there's a need for scalable softphone architectures connecting WebRTC, SIP, mobile, and AI platforms.
This session will use SIPERB as a case study to explore the challenges and patterns of building a large-scale softphone platform. We’ll examine the backend ecosystem, including SIP proxies and media relays, and explain why scalability and interoperability are crucial from the start.
You'll learn to build a reliable softphone for browsers and mobile devices, using modern WebRTC architectures to keep your Asterisk core lightweight and secure. We'll also demonstrate how a standards-based, event-driven architecture allows integration with platforms like WhatsApp and OpenAI for AI analysis and cross-platform communication.
Building a Unified Cloud Inventory for Reliability: Lessons from Using CloudQuery
Modern SRE work depends on knowing what resources exist across clouds and services, how they are configured, and how they change, but that data is often scattered across tools and systems. This talk shares how we built a unified, continuously updated cloud inventory using CloudQuery to normalize cloud and SaaS data into relational tables. We will explain how we integrated the framework into our infrastructure, extended it with custom plugins, and applied the resulting visibility to incident response, investigations, capacity reviews, and broader reliability practices. Attendees will learn practical approaches for building an internal asset inventory, scaling it in production, and using shared data to improve reliability and collaboration across SRE, Product, and GRC teams.
Building AI Platforms Without Losing Your Engineering Principles
As organizations adopt generative AI, platform teams must support multi-node inference, GPU-based model serving, and growing API sprawl while keeping the developer experience simple. This session explores Kubernetes-native approaches like kserve, high-throughput frameworks like vLLM, and gateways like LiteLLM for standardized model access. Attendees will learn concrete patterns for supporting AI at scale while preserving the principles that made their platforms successful.
Building an Open-Source AI Factory with Upstream Projects - A Primer
This session presents a practical blueprint for building a SageMaker-like AI Factory using only upstream open source projects.
We walk through a complete architecture that combines Kubernetes, Kubeflow, MLflow, KServe, vLLM, and a modern Cloudscape-based console, secured with Keycloak and FreeIPA for enterprise-grade IAM and SSO.
On the data side, we leverage Ceph, Apache Iceberg/Hudi, Kafka, Spark/Flink, and Feast to create a robust lakehouse and feature platform. We then show how to orchestrate the full ML lifecycle—from data ingestion and feature engineering to training, model registry, deployment, monitoring, and cost visibility—using GitOps, Prometheus/Grafana, OpenCost, and policy-as-code.
Attendees will leave with a clear, vendor-neutral reference architecture and a concrete checklist of upstream components to assemble their own open, portable, and sovereign AI Factory across on-prem, cloud, and edge environments.
Building Interoperable Agentic AI with the Open Floor Protocol
The Open Floor Protocol (OFP) is an open standard (Linux Foundation AI & Data) enabling heterogeneous conversational agents to interoperate via universal JSON message formats—Conversation Envelopes. This talk introduces OFP's core components: Envelopes, Dialog Events, and Assistant Manifests. I'll demonstrate advanced use cases (delegation, mediation, orchestration, discovery) and Beaconforge—an open-source Python framework for building OFP-compliant agents—with practical multi-agent collaboration examples.
Building Voice Services with ARI
With the recent improvements to Asterisk's ARI and the introduction of chan\_websocket, it's easier than ever to build your voice services with Asterisk. You can now build a complete solution, including control and audio, using only websockets. This talk covers how these new features are designed to work together to make Asterisk the go-to platform for your IP telephony services.
builtins.wasm: Nix Meets WebAssembly
Nix users often need to do non-trivial computations at evaluation time like parsing YAML, but the Nix language lacks the performance and conveniences of general purpose languages. In this talk, we propose adding a function `builtins.wasm` that lets users execute WebAssembly code during evaluation. These functions are pure, can be written in many languages, and are fast. We'll also discuss other WASM uses in Nix, like platform-independent derivations.
Can Teachers Help Teachers with AI?
As much as we need to and should support students with adopting new technologies such as AI, educators are being thrown into the deep end and expected to swim with very little instruction or support. From working with educators while at GitHub and as part of Internet-in-a-Box (IIAB), it is clear that we ask much of our teachers. They are expected to learn not only basic computing and software development, but also version control, collaborative software development, and now, how to teach about and with AI. This is daunting anywhere and even more daunting in the developing world where experienced mentors and resources can be scarce.
Wikipedia, GitHub, and arXiv show us that free and open access can be transformative and lower barriers of access to entry to new skills and careers. We will share educational experiences with GitHub, Internet-in-a-Box, and AI and our work to provide online and offline tooling and content to remote regions worldwide. A model of federated ecosystems can empower educators, learners, and community organizers everywhere, turning passive learners into active creators in the AI era.
Check Your Own Boxes: How I Used My Blog To Land My First Job In Tech
Whether you're a fresh graduate or a career transitioner, breaking into tech can feel like getting stuck in an infinite loop:
while need_job:
if not have_experience:
need_job = True
In this talk, I’ll share how I demonstrated my value to potential employers - and got noticed - by transforming my personal blog into a living portfolio that showcased more than just my burgeoning technical skills.
Attendees will learn how to check their own boxes by showing off transferable skills, creating visible proof of competence, and highlighting how their learning process can be a strength rather than a limitation. I’ll discuss the practical steps I used to craft my blog to meet my needs as a career transitioner and how I positioned my seemingly-unrelated skills - like copywriting and photography - as useful and relevant to my development as a programmer. My blog got me noticed at networking events, served as a talking point in interviews, and bolstered my confidence. I’ll give attendees the tools to develop their own strategy to break the cycle and land their first job in tech.




