Presentations

I got tired of babysitting my AI coding assistant. Every five minutes: "Should I continue?" So I built the "Ralph Wiggum Loop," named after a Simpsons character. It's a loop that feeds a PROMPT.md file to Claude Code until everything works as defined. Failure becomes feedback. Each crash teaches the next iteration.

Using this technique, I built a complete serverless URL shortener on AWS by letting AI iterate against Pulumi's pass/fail deployment criteria. 

I'll share how this autonomous loops work and how you can use it too.

By the time I started learning cloud-native technologies, tools like containers and orchestration were already considered “basic knowledge”, yet no one seemed to agree on how beginners were actually supposed to learn them. This talk reflects on my journey into cloud-native computing as part of a generation that grew up alongside the technology but was never really taught how it works.

AI can now listen to your keyboard and guess what you're typing. This session shows how deep learning models can reconstruct text from keystroke sounds, then breaks down how these attacks work and how to defend against them. It's a live, hands-on look at the thin line between innovation and exploitation in modern AI security. Bring your curiosity and maybe a little paranoia.

Linux has evolved a lot over the past 30 years. Distributions were created as opinionated starting points for general usage, but the advent of containers changed what was required and expected. CoreOS pushed the limits of what a server distribution should be, and those limits continue to be refined with more special purpose options.

While many of these next generation distros have similar characteristics they're not all the same. Justin will provide an overview of the current landscape of immutable distributions and what sets each one apart, and what they have in common.

A deep dive into the Iceberg open table format, examining the rationale for its creation, internal mechanics, and advanced capabilities. Drawing from years of production experience, this talk offers both theoretical foundations and practical insights for engineers considering adopting Iceberg.

We will discuss ACE’s (Analytics Center of Excellence) framework for government transparency, detailing how they use tools like Python for shared analysis, GitHub for collaborative code and methodology sharing, and the Justice Hub for public data dissemination. This commitment to open-source not only fosters trust but also directly enables reproducible, high-impact policy analyses, offering a replicable model for other large-scale government data initiatives. The Analytics Center of Excellence (ACE) within the Los Angeles County CEO’s office maintains partnerships with local criminal justice agencies, making information and methodology publicly accessible. This model is underpinned by an open-source mindset. 

The Postgres write-ahead log, or WAL, is basically a change-log for the database.  It enables several important Postgres features:  crash recovery, point-in-time recovery, and binary and logical replication.  This talk explains what is stored in the WAL, how binary and logical replication work, and how replication slots track replication progress.
 

Running infrastructure for the Python community means monitoring millions of requests. See how we leverage self-hosted infrastructure to minimize cost while obtaining real benefit into our applications.

Fun adventures with machine learning on edge compute running NixOS.

We hire technical talent for depth, focus, and problem-solving—and then quietly reward something else: visibility, narrative, and social signaling. When expectations shift without being named, smart people don’t fail loudly; they overwork, self-doubt, and eventually burn out.

Using the metaphor of trying to teach a goldfish to bark, this talk reframes performance struggles as system design failures rather than personal shortcomings. Drawing from Industrial-Organizational Psychology and real-world tech environments, the session explores how impressions really form, why inner critics are often internalized system errors, and how to navigate “barking” systems without losing the ability to swim.

Calculators are intuitive, right? Punch in some numbers on the number pad, choose an operation, and the answer appears. But it wasn't always this way. One hundred years ago, an antique mechanical calculator's UI was completely different depending on what company made it. Calculators directly exposed the mechanical mechanisms underneath, with few abstractions and little regard to ease-of-use. If you sat in front of one today and I asked you to perform basic arithmetic, you'd probably couldn't do it without a manual, and that knowledge probably wouldn't transfer to a different calculator.

If you've ever introduced someone to Linux for the first time, this might sound familiar. Fragmented, inconsistent UI, and applications that only barely hide their underlying code structure behind their interfaces mean a steep learning curve for new users. In this talk I will dive into the rich history of mechanical calculator UI, and draw parallels with modern Linux applications. The past, present, and future of calculator UI provides a roadmap FOSS would be wise to follow.

The NixOS Integration Test Driver is evolving. This talk dives into recent architectural changes that separate the test frontend from the virtualization backend. We will demonstrate how this enables running tests in lightweight containers, unlocking GPU/CUDA testing inside the sandbox, and drastically reducing CI overhead. Learn how the new architecture works, how to utilize the VSOCK-based interactive mode, and what the future holds for NixOS testing.

Asterisk is a powerful and flexible communications engine—but how well does it perform under pressure? In this session, we’ll take a deep dive into the performance characteristics of Asterisk from a deep technical perspective, exploring how it handles real-world workloads, what bottlenecks can arise, and how to identify and resolve them. You’ll learn about key metrics to monitor, implementation suggestions, and configuration strategies that can help when you hit a wall and want to try to improve performance.

Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) will go to trial this year in the most significant trial in copyleft enforcement history. In Orange County, California, USA, SFC sued Vizio — a manufacturer of ARM-based televisions — for long-standing violations of the GPLv2 and LGPLv2.1. 

This talk will explain what's going on with the case, why it is significant to every Linux user and every consumer who buys electronic devices, and what is next for copyleft.

Unlocking the full potential of AI starts with your data, but real-world documents come in countless formats and levels of complexity. This session introduces Docling, an open-source Python library designed to convert complex documents into AI-ready formats. Learn how Docling simplifies document processing, enabling you to efficiently harness all your data for downstream AI and analytics applications.

UpSCALE is a set of lightening talks held at SCALE, in the style of Ignite presentations. Speakers will get 5 minutes to enlighten the audience. Slides will auto-advance while chosen speakers deliver their message, a brief story of open source deliciousness. The format makes for a fast paced, fun event for participants and audience.  Please join us as members of the Free and Open Source community do their best to beat the clock and get their ideas out!  

Robert will demonstrate how they used the Claude API to create a natural language interface for simple FreePBX configuration requests as proof of concept (POC). He will also discuss plans to expand this functionality for the Tekmetric Phones service, with the goal of reducing the workload on support staff.

Follow along as we deep dive into a real-world transaction wraparound incident, discuss recent Postgres innovations, and explore features like index de-duplication and autovacuum enhancements designed to help eliminate the problems. We'll talk about how to optimize your Postgres environment and make a strong case why upgrading might just eliminate your XID wraparound risks.

A vCon (virtualized conversations) is a standardized, machine-readable container for data from any type of human conversation, such as a phone call, video conference, or chat. Developed by the IETF, it standardizes how conversational data, including audio, video, text, metadata, and attachments, is collected, stored, and shared across different systems. Attend this session to get an overview of this area, the possibilities and security implications. We'll also look at a couple of ways to have Asterisk create vCons for you.

When I first started learning Vitess, I quickly realized how much it could do beyond just scaling MySQL — from built-in high availability and transparent query routing to online schema changes and resharding. In this session, I’ll share what I’ve discovered as a newcomer exploring Vitess, how easy it is to get started, and why it’s becoming a go-to open-source solution for running MySQL at scale.

What do looms, Linux, and open-source communities have in common? More than you might think. This talk uncovers the surprising computational depth of textiles where patterns function like algorithms, fabrics behave like data structures, and some of the earliest programmable machines were built.

Attendees will leave with a new understanding of how deeply computation is rooted in craft and why the cultural values of repairability, transparency, and user modification link weavers and open-source developers across centuries. If you’ve ever wanted to see computation from a completely different angle, this talk will change how you think about both craft and code.

Tired of sky-high logging costs and vendor lock-in, ZipRecruiter migrated from Logz.io to Grafana Loki. This talk shares the real challenges, unexpected pitfalls, and hard-won victories from our journey. Learn what worked, what didn't, and what we wish we'd known before starting. From sizing clusters and dealing with cardinality explosions to convincing skeptical engineers, we cover the messy reality behind the marketing slides. You'll leave with practical insights and battle-tested strategies for running Loki at scale.

Ever been curious how those weather forecasts you get on your phone and on the news are created? Welcome to the wonderful world of chemical transport models (CTMs), the largely open source software behind modern weather and air-quality prediction. Modeling agencies and numerous state and local environmental offices rely on systems like the Weather Research and Forecasting model with Chemistry (WRF-Chem) and the Unified Forecast System (UFS) to simulate how gases, particles, and meteorological conditions evolve in the atmosphere. Together, these models allow weather agencies, and now you, to translate complex atmospheric science into the clear, timely information that allows us to anticipate rain, model winds, or predict pollution events using our trusty Linux machines. Come learn how WRF-Chem works: how to customize it to run over your area, the kinds of openly available inputs it uses to establish initial and boundary conditions, and examples of how the generated predictions compare to real-world outcomes.

Welcome and introduction to the Kwaai Summit from Ted Cohen followed by a brief introduction to Kwaai and the Personal AI Community by Reza Rassool.

Welcome and opening with the SunSecCon team.