Presentations

This session will review the basic jobs, terminology, and technical details for DBA tasks in Postgres. 

This session will review essential query performance tuning and for Postgres, an essential skill for developers working with Postgres daily.

This session will review essential troubleshooting for Postgres, reviewing how to monitor and log Postgres, using Postgres’ internal catalogs, and common problems and fixes. 

PostgreSQL, maintained as an open source project, is an ideal database for teaching relational theory and demonstrating database internals. However, so far, few academic institutions have adopted PostgreSQL for their educational needs.

One of the goals of Prairie Postgres NFP, a Midwest non-profit, is to bridge the gap between Industry and Academia with the help of PostgreSQL. We advocate for using PostgreSQL in data management courses and invite students and faculty to participate in PostgreSQL conferences and meetups.

In this talk, we will share our successes in this journey and highlight the problems we are still trying to solve.

Various PostgreSQL community members attend SCaLE and are willing to meet with attendees and answer any questions. Many aspects of the community are covered: User groups, conference organization, core development, exhibitions, advocates and more! Please come and ask any questions!

Join us to hear about using Postgres for the very first time. 

A full PostgreSQL training day adjacent to the SCaLE LA event. 6 hours total, running for a full day as a single track (with 90 minute lunch break). Attendees can attend some or all of the event. Aimed both at new Postgres users and those migrating from other db systems. 

Power imbalances are everywhere, including in our OSS projects. Corporations hold power over projects that result in relicensing, forks, and other disruptions. This talk will cover these power dynamics and suggest steps that we can take to make better decisions about which OSS projects to embrace.

California's two largest public university systems—the University of California (UC) and California State University (CSU) —collectively serve over 750,000 students across 32 campuses. These universities also have a proven track record of building transformative open source projects and related technologies. If these two systems were to increase collaboration in open source and combine efforts, this could create a powerful engine for California's economic development and public good. This presentation will look at the potential of UC and CSU collaboration and how these efforts could create tangible benefits to the state and local communities, as well as provide pathways for greater industry-academic collaboration on new technologies

If you've ever had an application that needed hundreds (or thousands) (or tens of thousands) of connections to postgres, then you've probably needed a connection pooler. And if you've ever used PgBouncer as your connection pooler, you may have run into some challenges, or problems, or confusing behaviors, or all of the above.

In this talk, we will cover what can go wrong, how to fix problems, and how to monitor to keep your database, clients, and DBAs happy.

What if I told you there's a way to spot memory leaks, CPU bottlenecks & performance regressions—before your users feel them?

And if I told you it works across every runtime, in production, with zero instrumentation & near-zero overhead?

And if I told you almost no one is doing it?

Profiling has finally joined metrics, logs & traces as the 4th core signal in OTel. But while the spec is ready, most stacks—and teams—aren’t. Enter eBPF: the missing piece that makes continuous, runtime-agnostic profiling not just possible, but practical.

Can Prometheus help take care of your pet? In this talk, we’ll explore how to use simple IoT devices and open source tools Prometheus and Grafana to monitor your pet’s activities in real-time.

This session will demonstrate how observability can go beyond servers and improve the lives of our four-legged friends.

We’ll cover using off-the-shelf components that can send data to Prometheus and react to alerts, visualizing water consumption and door use trends in Grafana, and alerting when something looks unusual.  We’ll review the architecture and see a live demonstration of this stack (hardware and software) in action!

Break down the mystery of NAT traversal and secure remote access.

The far edge is quickly becoming more than a home for IoT sensors and small devices. It's where local processing, automation, and AI inference increasingly need to run. As more intelligence moves closer to where data is created, teams face challenges around footprint, scale, and reliable operations across distributed and often unstable environments.

This talk looks at practical ways to run Kubernetes at the far edge to support both IoT and AI workloads. It covers several deployment patterns, describing how a single‑node edge cluster can serve tightly constrained locations, how an edge‑only cluster with both the control plane and workers running locally provides full independence, and how an externally hosted control plane—whether in the cloud or a datacenter—can manage remote edge workers to keep operations lightweight at scale.

As an example use case, we examine these cluster topologies by bridging together the worlds of IoT and AI while running entirely at the edge. Using lightweight Kubernetes distributions like k0s and device‑orchestration tools such as Akri, we’ll show how open source tooling can surface sensors, cameras, and other devices as native resources and provide practical ways to push applications—including AI inference—to the edge.

Attendees will leave with a clear understanding of practical architectural choices and tooling for running IoT and AI workloads at the edge, along with strategies to build systems that remain manageable and reliable even in challenging environments.

Embedded Linux has quietly moved from desktops and servers into devices that were never meant to run an operating system, let alone a full Linux stack. If you're curious how to put Linux “where it doesn’t belong” (yet), this talk will guide you through the practical first steps. We’ll break down the fundamentals of board bring-up, bootloaders, kernels, and root filesystems in a way that’s friendly to newcomers. You’ll learn how Linux fits into embedded hardware, what tools you actually need, and how to avoid the early pitfalls that derail many first projects. Whether you’re building your first custom device or just wondering how that smart toaster works, you’ll leave with the knowledge and confidence to start putting Linux on your own hardware.

When building productive language‑model applications, the right context and organization‑specific data prevent unwanted outputs. But building full RAG pipelines—vector stores, embeddings, indexing—from scratch can be time‑consuming and complex. KAITO, a CNCF sandbox project, streamlines this process by exposing a RAGEngine Custom Resource Definition that hides infrastructure details behind declarative YAML. Developers can focus on application logic while KAITO handles the heavy lifting of data retrieval, embedding, and indexing. Join us to see how KAITO accelerates AI development, reduces boilerplate code, and makes building robust RAG pipelines accessible to all developers.

Recent enhancements to ARI with bidirectional communication over WebSocket have greatly simplified integration with external components, such as real-time billing engines. These components can now function almost like internal modules of Asterisk.
In this talk, we’ll explore the seamless integration between the CGRateS Billing Framework and Asterisk using the new bidirectional ARI, showing you how to build your own real-time billing system for your Asterisk setup.

As organizations rapidly integrate Large Language Models (LLMs), traditional WAFs and static analysis tools fail to catch probabilistic threats like prompt injection and jailbreaking. This session moves past theory into practical defense for engineers using LLMs. We will dissect the "AI Attack Surface" and demonstrate how to use open-source tools like Garak and PyRIT to automate Red Teaming. Attendees will learn architectural patterns for "Guardrails," methods to prevent "confused deputy" attacks, and techniques to verify model supply chain integrity. Leave with a blueprint for securing your AI workloads today.

Picture this: you're managing dependencies across 1,300+ repositories, security vulnerabilities pile up faster than dishes in a university dorm, and developers spend more time updating package.json than building features. That was us at Grafana Labs. 

What started as "let's try this [Renovate](https://github.com/renovatebot/renovate) thing" became a full automation and o11y adventure. 

If you're wondering whether large-scale dependency automation is worth it, this talk provides the roadmap we wish we'd had.

Ready to spice up your Node.js applications with some RESTful flavor? Join us for a lively session where we’ll demystify the process of creating endpoints for a MySQL REST service and using JavaScript to access your data, without writing a single line of SQL. We’ll guide you through the essentials of building robust REST APIs, integrating seamlessly with MySQL databases, and performing CRUD operations without direct SQL queries. Whether you’re a seasoned developer or just getting started, this talk promises to equip you with the tools and confidence to serve up your own RESTful services.

Akash network is an open source project which lets users run their containers across a global set of compute providers.  It's the middle layer inbetween people who need compute resources (buyers) and people willing to sell access to their compute resources (suppliers).  Anyone can participate on either side, with a net result of less waste of idle compute resources on the supplier side, and lower costs on the buyer side.

The "unit of compute" is a buyer-provided container, and the length of time that container needs to be used to complete its task.  Buyers include enthusiasts who just want to run a minecraft server all the way up to professional compute jobs such as training an LLM.

The supplier can be a professionally-supported server in a datacenter with dedicated GPUs, all the way down to a spare home computer running in a home environment.

Akash network is the coordinator inbetween, and it utilizes a blockchain for compute commitments, checksums, and payments between suppliers and buyers of compute.

Sagebrush Standards is an open-source computable contract format designed to improve access to justice by making legal services more efficient and accessible. Developed in collaboration with Neon Law Foundation and UNLV Law School, this project demonstrates the power of starting simple with YAML and Markdown, then incrementally adding structured rules to create deterministic legal workflows. In this talk, we'll explore how our approach—building from plain text formats familiar to any developer—has evolved into a comprehensive system featuring client questionnaires, automated document generation, and AI-compatible legal templates. You'll learn how open source principles applied to legal technology can dramatically reduce service delivery time while expanding access to justice, and see real-world examples of how structured data formats can transform traditionally manual processes into scalable, automated solutions that serve more people more effectively.

Switched Careers? Unlock Your Hidden Coding Superpowers!
Ever taken a detour on your path to becoming a developer? Maybe you started out in teaching, marketing, design, retail, or, like me, as a paramedic. Surprise: those experiences are your secret weapons!

In this energizing session, I’ll share how my journey from the fast-paced world of emergency medicine to the dynamic landscape of software development revealed a treasure trove of transferable skills such as problem-solving under pressure, rapid decision-making, teamwork, and clear communication. We’ll explore how the unique talents you picked up in your previous careers can make you a more creative, effective, and resilient developer.

Whether you came from the ambulance, the classroom, or the boardroom, you already have a toolkit full of valuable experience, and now it’s time to put it to work. Join me and discover how to uncover, embrace, and maximize your non-traditional background to supercharge your developer journey.

Scaling a telephony platform to handle tens of thousands of concurrent calls is a complex challenge for any deployment. This session shares real-world experiences from ASTPP, an open source billing and routing platform, highlighting strategies for high concurrency, load balancing, monitoring, and maintaining resilience under heavy traffic. Attendees will walk away with practical, transferable insights that can be applied to Asterisk, FreePBX, or other open source telephony platforms.

You may well have heard of Second Life at some point, the virtual world that launched to the public in mid-2003, but you might be surprised to learn that it's still around, more than two decades later. As a longtime SL Resident, I think that its staying power can be attributed at least partially to the open sourcing of its viewer code (the client software) back in early 2007.

In this presentation, I'll take you through a concise history of Second Life and how it evolved, from its beginnings to the open-sourcing of the viewer and finally to more recent efforts to simplify contributions, with a look at the role of the "third-party viewers" as well (one of these, Firestorm, is vastly more popular these days than the company's official viewer). We'll also examine some of the lessons that Second Life's development might have for other virtual world platforms, starting with related projects like OpenSimulator (and LibreMetaverse) and expanding outward to include the so-called metaverse more broadly.