Presentations

You enter the call (or conference room) where you are greeted by some higher level executives and members of your Infrastructure team. They have been tasked with bootstrapping the company's IT Infrastructure and start building new resources with IaC. Luckily for you (or not), you have experience with this and are eager to prove your worth and show that DBAs can do more than yell at your poorly configured query or that you are using ORMs. While this situation happens to many of us, I rarely hear about the struggles folks have trying to implement a stateful resources (databases) in a stateless in environment consisting of stateless resources. 

For your pleasure and amusement, I plan to walk you through my experience implementing this exact task and align the different phases of the implementation with Dr. Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grieving. Sit back and enjoy a few laughs, memes, and positive outlook on how we continue to create more gray area in daily work.

Learn what changed in FreePBX 17 and see what's in store for FreePBX 18 as we continue to enhance the code base for the premier, most widely deployed open source telephone system in the world. Highlights include more robust deployment methods, new configuration visualization tools, and several AI enhancements to make technical PBX administration tasks easier—freeing you up to focus on big picture problem solving within your organization.

Behind every uptime badge is a tired sysadmin. Eric opens up about the realities of burnout in IT and offers simple, practical ways to protect your time, energy, and love for the work you do.

The most dangerous phrase in the English language is ‘We’ve always done it that way.‘” Grace Hopper spent 60 years fighting this mentality. Today’s developers sneering at “AI slop” and rolling their eyes at “vibe coding” are repeating history—the same engineers who said COBOL would never catch on. You’re about to find out why Amazing Grace wouldn’t hire them—and why you shouldn’t either.

In fact, every time you prompt Claude to write code, you’re witnessing the future Grace Hopper predicted in 1955 and throughout her career. Admiral Hopper carried 11.8-inch wires to make nanoseconds tangible. Today, she’d carry LEGO bricks to explain how AI transforms thoughts into code at light speed.

The progression is clear:

• Punch cards → Assembly → COBOL → Modern frameworks → Natural language

We’ve reached Hopper’s vision: human language as the primary computer interface.

For years, DevOps improved delivery speed, automation, and feedback loops, which were effective until they began to fail. As the stacks expanded into microservices and multi-cloud environments, the alert stream evolved into a firehose. While additional dashboards and stricter thresholds enabled teams to respond more quickly, they did not stop recurring problems or decrease the overall noise. The solution was not “more tools.” It was a playbook update. That update starts with the basics of clean data, consistent tagging, reliable telemetry, clear ownership, and real SLOs. Once the foundation is in place, apply AIOps where it excels.

PostgreSQL is widely recognized for its extensibility, but can we really build a NoSQL engine on top of it? In this session, we’ll explore how DocumentDB repurposes PostgreSQL’s storage engine, query planner, and extension system to support MongoDB wire protocol, dynamic schemas, and document-based operations.

PostgreSQL has had integrated full-text search since version 8.3 (and before that using the tsearch2 extension)… that's over 17 years of searching. New technologies have emerged since then to make searching a large corpus of text even more efficient, accurate, and useful.

This talk dives into new extensions and methods of doing full-text search: New algorithms like BM25, new approaches like pgvector, and how to combine them to create hybrid search methods.

GenAI for the GenX guy is a talk about how being a member of the forgotten apathetic generation has led to a healthy distrust of GenAI. 

From basics to advanced, this course will get you comfortable with SQL functions in Postgres.

It all started with a hacker. Years ago, a legendary build engineer wrote a collection of scripts so ingenious - and hilarious - that they lit a fire in my soul and changed my entire career trajectory.

In this talk we’ll explore how automation is a life hack that can transform daily drudgery into opportunities to learn, play, and make our lives more efficient. By using scripts to automate repetitive tasks we free our minds and to-do lists to tackle the complex challenges that attracted us to programming as both craft and career. I’ll share some of my favorite scripts, including a daily digest tool that integrates with AWS and Datadog, and imhungy.sh, a command-line tool that uses data, APIs, and a dash of whimsy to answer the age-old question: what do you feel like for lunch?

Attendees will leave inspired to turn their own most tiresome tasks into projects that spark joy. Whether you’re a sysadmin, developer, or hobbyist, you’ll walk away with fresh ideas and a new appreciation for the humble yet mighty Bash script.
 

Multi-tenant Kubernetes with GPU sharing can unlock serious efficiency for AI workloads—but only if you design it with security and performance in mind. In this session, we’ll walk through how to give multiple teams their own “cluster-like” experience while safely sharing GPU resources underneath. We’ll cover open source tools like KAI Scheduler and vCluster, plus how to plug in external systems for secrets and dynamic access control to keep the environment both scalable and secure.

Organizations have invested in GPU resources that can do all kinds of cool new things. And they learned from the last 10 years of security practice, right? Right!?! Oh, no.

This talk will cover the new threat landscape, real-world attack vectors, and practical approaches to securing GPU infrastructure before your expensive compute cluster becomes someone else's cryptomining operation. And this is why security professionals will have a job for the next 10 years.

Kubernetes governance tools are powerful, but they often operate too late in the software delivery lifecycle—usually in CI/CD or at admission control. By the time a misconfiguration is caught, developers have already pushed code, reviewers must intervene, and pipelines waste costly compute.

In this talk, I introduce Guardon, a lightweight, local-first browser extension that brings Kubernetes guardrails directly to developers while they edit YAMLs in GitHub or GitLab. Guardon performs instant, offline validation of multi-document YAML files, imports Kyverno policies, and surfaces real-time guidance—all before a pull request is even created.

We’ll explore how this browser-native approach shifts compliance further left than existing tools, reduces friction for developers, and enables DevOps and platform teams to enforce organizational best practices without slowing teams down. This session includes a live demo, architectural breakdown, and insights into the future of developer-first Kubernetes security.

This class will teach attendees what they need to know to pass the Technician class amateur radio license exam and get started in amateur radio. It includes six hours of instruction, with the exam administered immediately after the workshop. Participants will increase their chances of passing the test if they download the study guide from www.kb6nu.com/study-guides/ and familiarize themselves with the material before coming to the workshop. The text for this workshop is Dan’s No Nonsense Technician Class License Study Guide. The PDF version of the study guide is available for free at the above page. EPUB and print versions are also available for a small charge.

This class will teach attendees what they need to know to pass the Technician class amateur radio license exam and get started in amateur radio. It includes six hours of instruction, with the exam administered immediately after the workshop. Participants will increase their chances of passing the test if they download the study guide from www.kb6nu.com/study-guides/ and familiarize themselves with the material before coming to the workshop. The text for this workshop is Dan’s No Nonsense Technician Class License Study Guide. The PDF version of the study guide is available for free at the above page. EPUB and print versions are also available for a small charge.

A client came to us with a problem we’re seeing more and more, their large language model (LLM) was deployed, but inference was painfully slow, GPU usage was unpredictable, and costs were spiraling out of control. Kubernetes alone wasn’t enough, they needed a production-ready, efficient, and scalable stack.

In this talk, we’ll walk through how we diagnosed and solved the issue using open-source CNCF tools, turning a chaotic deployment into a well-oiled inference machine.

You’ll learn how to:
1. Use KServe and Kubeflow to serve LLMs reliably.
2. Benchmark and auto-scale workloads using Volcano and KEDA while optimizing resource usage and latency.
3. Track model performance and drift with Prometheus, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry.

We’ll share benchmarks, architectures, and lessons from the field, all based on open-source tooling you can try today. Whether you’re running LLMs at scale or just exploring GenAI, this talk is packed with real-world solutions to help you do more with less.

When the PostgreSQL query planner selects a suboptimal plan, the culprit is often missing information. This session examines the mathematics of cardinality estimation, demonstrating how Extended Statistics provide the cross-column correlations needed to improve the estimates. We will dissect the underlying probability formulas and preview a proof-of-concept regarding statistics for joins.

The innovation cycle is compressing dramatically. At Hydrolix, a real-time analytics platform company, we're witnessing this transformation firsthand within our product development team. What once took months now takes days.

AI enables rapid experimentation, faster customer feedback loops, and dramatically shortened time-to-market for proofs of concept. However, this speed doesn't eliminate the need for human expertise—it transforms it. 

In this session, Director of Field Engineering Tom Howe will explore how AI is reshaping the innovation timeline, the competitive advantages this speed creates, and why human judgment and oversight have become more critical than ever—just in fundamentally different ways.

Imagine you are in the middle of editing a Hollywood film and realize you have the actor in the wrong jacket in post. Instead of trying to do a re-shoot, which may cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, can we use AI to fix in post?

This talk demonstrates a practical workflow for production-quality video editing using open-source AI models for video editing. The workflow combines masked region editing, pose guidance, and LoRA fine-tuning to achieve Hollywood-grade results.

The talk is about the process of creating an operating system from scratch, what I learned, the issues I ran into, and the design choices I made. The talk will be about some of the early x86 initialization for an operating system, filesystems and the file system abstraction layer, the scheduler, device management, and creating a window manager.

Over 30 years of experience succeeding in Open Source, we will discuss the pitfalls many technical people run into when trying to climb the ladder.

In the observability space, many assume that OpenTelemetry Collector performance scales linearly—until it doesn't. This talk reveals the critical performance limits that practitioners encounter in real-world deployments, especially at scale, and highlights the blind spots that traditional telemetry metrics often miss.

We demonstrate how to diagnose and prevent high-throughput pipeline failures using latency histogram analysis, external HAProxy sidecars, and advanced profiling. These insights benefit both collector developers and platform engineers who manage telemetry pipelines across organizations.

App reviews are an incredible way to help your user community and get valuable feedback for developers. They’re also time-consuming to answer, and time isn’t often something FOSS developers have. Communications staff or volunteers can help tackle this work, but not have the deep knowledge to easily provide answers. Ignoring reviews isn’t an option; what is a project to do?

In this talk, I share insights from how the Thunderbird projects handles reviews for our Android app through collaboration between developers, comms staff, and our support community. We’ll discuss how comms can collaborate with and learn from community support experts to troubleshoot and answer reviews, even in tricky edge cases. Additionally, we’ll go over how to embed comms into your development team in an unobtrusive yet effective way. We’ll even cover what we’ve learned for turning reviews into developer feedback.

Wouldn't it be great if we could provision entire systems, VMs, and edge devices as easily as we build and deploy application containers to Kubernetes?  This would make it possible to make lightweight single-purpose systems, while using our favorite CI/CD tools and even IDEs.  Well, we can do that  now, thanks to bootc.  In this talk, the speaker will walk you through creating a bootc container image for a full system, testing it, and then provisioning that image to a portable computing device. 

Generic fitness apps give generic advice. I wanted a running coach that actually knew my training: my long runs, my recovery patterns, even my bad habits. So I built one: a Slack bot that pulls data from Strava, Coros, Peloton, and my own chat logs, feeds it into an open weight LLM running on Groq, and gives me personalized guidance for pocket change.

The bigger idea is simple: this isn’t really about running. It’s about building personal software that understands your life in a way generic apps never will.