Presentations

It all started with a website and a refusal to spend a dollar as a grad student. This talk traces the evolution from a student portfolio to a full self-hosted ecosystem with Media to personal AI tools and periodic social media backups all running with stubbornness on second-hand hardware without a static IP. Explore the journey: one-day wins with dynamic DNS, multi-year setups with backups, monitoring, and home automation. My network and security failures and how you should avoid them on your server. Whether you’re curious or deep in self-hosting, discover what outages teach, how communities support, and open source empowers. No budget for all this? No problem.

From raw earth to homestead living - house and farm. This is what's possible with the Open Source eco system developed by Marcin Jakubowski; refined and built by him and his Open Source community. 

Build a home from raw materials using only Open Source hardware!

In spite of Linux running on the platform for 25 years, the mainframe community is notoriously proprietary. Fortunately, in the past several years we’ve built a thriving open source community that subverts the status quo. Learn how we did it, and how you can too.

This talk will give the Who, What, When, Where and Why of using Open Source Software, Open Hardware and Open Data in the learning and teaching of "computers".

The speaker will use his and other people's paths of learning about computers, from the days of "data processing" with plugboards and punched cards to wire wrapping of electrical components to perforated boards to modern-day Raspberry Pi and Arduinos.   From "computer black magic" to "computer science".

However this talk will not just be about the past, but the future.

It is not enough to teach students how to use software to solve their problems, but also how the software solves those problems and how to make that software solve those problems even better.   Something that can only be done with Open Source, Open Hardware and using Open Data.

The speaker will outline several programs that are Open and Free for collaboration to produce teaching materials for all, even for self teaching.

As we all know, the best way to learn something is to teach it to other people.

OpenSearch has become a cornerstone of open source search and observability, empowering developers and organizations to derive meaningful insights from unstructured data at scale. With OpenSearch officially joining The Linux Foundation in 2024, backed by tech giants such as IBM, SAP, Uber and AWS, it further cemented its position in the open source ecosystem.

In this session we’ll introduce OpenSearch, from indexing and analyzing unstructured logs to full observability capabilities across tracing, monitoring and security. We’ll share latest improvements in query performance and scalability, and real-time analytics, as well as its expanding ecosystem with new plugins and SDKs in multiple programming languages, and its compatibility with cloud-native environments. You’ll even find vector search and natural language processing capabilities for your AI/ML development.

Join us to hear it right from OpenSearch Ambassador and lead of the Observability TAG (technical advisory group) and discover how OpenSearch can fit into your observability architecture.

OpenSearch, aside from being a search, analytics, and observability solution, often gets overlooked as a fully functioning open source vector database. I’d very much like the opportunity to showcase the progress we’ve made here at the OpenSearch project implementing vector database operations and making them accessible to developers of all skill levels.

Let’s learn how to create and query vector embeddings, implement semantic search, and prepare yourself for RAG. You’ll get introduced to all of what is available in this “OpenSearch Vector Operations for Dummies” presentation. Hopefully it will bring a user-friendly path on a battle tested, fully open source platform.

When we designed the OpenWrt One, the OpenWrt build system allowed us to easily create a self-contained source tarball that included everything needed for GPL and other compliance purposes. We'll briefly explore a bit of build system history and how it got us the OpenWrt One sources before opening up discussion on how these features vary across build systems, and how we can achieve similar "ease of compliance" with GPL, FCC, CRA, and other agreements or regulations that are most efficiently handled early in the device development process, and are largely in the build system's purview.

ClickHouse operates Postgres logical replication for CDC at massive scale, replicating 200+ TB monthly across 300+ customers. This talk shares how we scaled logical decoding to production, including key optimizations, operational lessons, and how we run replication reliably with Kubernetes and deep observability.

This session aims to cut through the acronyms and introduce beginning developers to the concepts of object relational mappers (ORMs) and entity relationship diagrams (ERDs).  ORMs are programming tools that aim to bridge the gap between objects in programming languages and how relational databases store data in a normalized table format.  ERDs aim to visualize the structure of databases and can also create SQL code from a visual format.  Seeing these tools together helps make both click and can help developers leverage each for different use cases.

“OS of Life” explores what it means to build an operating system not for machines, but for human bodies and lives. Jowan Österlund, co‑founder and president of MYRA, will share how his team is developing a self‑powered subcutaneous biosensor that continuously tracks key biomarkers inside the body—turning each person into the sovereign owner of a rich, real‑time health data stream.
 

AI (i.e. ML with better compute) is here to stay - there’s no denying that. But AI's capacity to provide genuine contributions is debatable - especially for open source projects. Projects are seeing a flood of AI-generated issues and pull requests, yet they lack the crucial human elements of context, intent, and accountability that open source thrives on. This isn't just a minor annoyance; it poses a direct threat to the sustainability of beloved projects and the maintainers who tirelessly support them.

The time to address AI in your CONTRIBUTING.md file is now. But what does that look like? How do we establish clear ground rules for AI-driven contributions (because not all are bad)? How do we define what a “meaningful contribution” is in today’s landscape, and how do we enforce the guidelines? This talk will put forward some thoughts and ideas for what a playbook might look like for your specific project, and some guidelines which can help ensure we embrace these new tools, while still keeping the spirit of open source intact.

Planograms translate market research and category rules into shelf-ready product-placement diagrams—but generating them usually requires tedious manual work and more caffeine than should be legal. This talk walks through a proof-of-concept system that uses AWS services, open-source components, and agentic LLM workflows to automatically convert merchandising knowledge into structured planogram descriptions suitable for a marketing professional's final touches. We’ll explore the architecture, the prompt engineer, the agent design that make the outputs reliable, and how open formats keep the workflow portable and extensible. Attendees will leave with practical patterns for building real-world, AI-driven automation with AWS services and open source.

I’ve spent years trying to bring open-source software into my community college classes, and it’s been a mixture of successes, failures, and challenges. I’ll share some of the early attempts, such as trying to run courses using Linux and scaring a few administrators in the process. How I was often told to teach a “real” language instead of PHP or Python, and how MySQL quietly became the workhorse of several of my courses. And now the MySQL class is one of the required classes for our new Bachelors of Data Analytics and Programming degree.

“Owners, not Renters: Mozilla’s Open Source AI Strategy” digs into what it would actually take to move from renting AI from a few platforms to owning intelligence on our own terms. Raffi Krikorian, CTO of Mozilla, will unpack Mozilla’s 2026 roadmap for an open AI stack, explaining why they believe the current trajectory—closed models, opaque data pipelines, and centralized compute—locks users and developers into “AI landlord” relationships.
 

In this closing conversation, Daniela Barbosa, General Manager of Decentralized Technologies at the Linux Foundation and Executive Director of LF Decentralized Trust, puts a series of uncomfortable questions to an all‑star—mostly male—lineup of AI visionaries. She will press them on where ownership really sits in their visions of AGI, open‑source AI, decentralized trust, and user‑set terms: with platforms, with protocols, or with people.

Easy-to-deploy, open source PostgreSQL function that provides a prioritized list of actions to improve database stability and performance. Inspired by Brent Ozar's FirstResponderKit for SQL Server, pgFirstAid is designed for everyone to use—not just DBAs! Get actionable health insights from your PostgreSQL database in seconds.

https://github.com/randoneering/pgFirstAid

Day 2 of PlanetNix talk sessions. Exact schedule will be posted soon. For now see the agenda:

https://planetnix.com/agenda

Day 1 of PlanetNix talk sessions. Exact schedule will be posted soon. For now see the agenda:

https://planetnix.com/agenda

Day 2 of PlanetNix workshop sessions. Exact schedule will be posted soon. For now see the agenda:

https://planetnix.com/agenda

Day 1 of PlanetNix workshop sessions. Exact schedule will be posted soon. For now see the agenda:

https://planetnix.com/agenda

This presentation offers an in-depth analysis of Flatcar Linux, a container-optimized operating system, within the context of cloud-native environments. It begins with an overview of cloud-native Linux distributions, highlighting the evolution and importance of container-focused operating systems. The session introduces Flatcar Linux, discussing its origins, acceptance into the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as an incubating project, and its core features such as immutability, atomic updates, and container-native design.
After covering Flatcar, I explore Kairos, as immutable option at the edge, and I show a comparison of alternatives like Fedora CoreOS, Talos, Suse elementary.
Also, this session argues that managing the node OS immutably is key to platform reliability. We compare traditional distros vs. container-specific immutable OSes. We describe examples like AWS Bottlerocket, Flatcar Container Linux, and Talos Linux.
Such OSes mount a read-only root filesystem, disable SSH, and update by swapping entire node images (dual-disk atomic updates with rollback).
In the demo, I upgrade a cluster’s OS by applying a new immutable image spec and watching nodes reboot harmlessly. I highlight how this approach eliminates config drift and patches servers in one shot, aligning with best practices that a minimal, read-only host has a “much smaller attack surface”.

AI models are rarely built from scratch. Through model reuse and transfer learning, organizations inherit risks they may never see. This session explores how backdoors, poisoning attacks, and evasion techniques survive across generations of models, exposing downstream systems to compromise.

Air-gapped networks promise protection, but real-world needs of updates, monitoring, & human access quietly reintroduce risk. This talk shows how air gaps fail in practice and presents an “air-gap++” approach to achieve stronger security while enabling business development.

As AI systems become more complex, developers are discovering that the database, not the model, is the real foundation of reliable AI. In this talk, I'll explore how Postgres can function as a full AI application server by combining Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) with the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

We’ll walk through a real implementation: ingest pipelines, vector search, metadata ranking, caching, provenance tracking, and LLM tool-calling, all powered by Postgres. Then we’ll expose those capabilities over MCP so LLMs can safely query, transform, and orchestrate data.

The result: an end-to-end AI system where your RAG, your tools, your transforms, your logs, and your automation all live in Postgres.

This session will review essential performance tuning and configurations for Postgres.