Seattle GNU/Linux Conference 2018
This year is the second time I have been lucky enough to get to attend SeaGL. This conference takes place at Seattle Central College and is six years old. I want to make this an exciting read but I fearthat by the time I edit it over and over again to make this goal I'll have forgotten what i wanted to say. To that end this post is probably going to be more list like than I would typically prefer.
I'm flipping back and forth from feeling comfortable to being super anxious and like i'm doing something wrong. This probably has colored my feelings here.
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Keynote one was Open Source Today: Individuals need not apply. We explored how 20 years ago we had lots of individuals contributing and now it's lots of full time paid people contributing to open source. The take away that I got was that anyone can still make meaningful contributions, but to do so you need to dedicate time to it and make it a priority. People who are not as active anymore aren't that way because of the project but because of some other personal roadblock.
Keynote two was Love and Mental Health in our digital lives. This talk was so touching and meaningful. Mental health is an important issue and mental illness seems like one of those things that many people in free software have to battle with often. The take away and quote I liked the besst from this talk was that Everything is a technology issue. I had a range of emotions during this talk. I wish I had better notes. I have a cast on my right wrist so it limits my ability to type on my phone and I cannot write on paper. Oh well. This talk ruled, youll have to go to
http://seagl.org and search up the keynote.
At this point I did a Scrooge McDuck style dive into some fun content in a talk called Basic Licensing Considerations and Compliance. The gist of the talk is that it is much better to list external dependencies than to embed other people's code into your project. When you embed code you are adding co-authors and taking on some additional liabilities. This was brought up multiple times. Source code is a liability not an asset. Then if you are using modules just put all your dependencies in one place and be consistent. It will make your life so much easier if you ever have any licensing / legal issues come up.
Lunch was free! Thanks Twillio. I had chicken, green beans, mashed potatoes, and a lemon square. It was fantastic. Supremly awesome
At one I didn't realize that the talk was only 20 minutes long. Because of this I had a really negative impression when the talk abruptly ended until I saw the schedule and realized the issue. The 1pm talk I listened to was about writing tests. Actually it was about not writing tests. It was about only writing tests for the major time wasting parts of your project. What a test is, how to run a test, what that actually means in any meaningful way was not discussed. Ultimately the time slot is much too short to have anything very substantive on the topic I think.
One thirty rolls around and I was lucky to get in on the So you want to be a kernel developer. This was such a welcoming and encouraging talk. I really would love to be able to help contribute one day and after this talk I feel like I might one day.
There was a break, and I have to say that at this point I felt very empowered and super full. I was about 60% social battery level.
The three pm talk was A Long Days Journey into backups. This talk was about the presenters journey into hacking together a backup solution. It was neat to learn that no one really uses these big enterprise solutions. It was really scary that everyone uses s3 though or other amazon services. I really distrust this consolidation of so much of the world's data into a privately held company.
Next up was Run More Effective meetings. This was another 30 minute talk and it was actually dense enough to be worth attending and light enough that it was fun. Memes and examples abounded. Minimal crowd interruption. Super great.
The end of the day for talks was Hans talking about etckeeper. This is a neat tool that allows you to version and track your /etc folder. This is useful because git doesn't track permissions or ownership. This was probably the most directly relevant bit of detail for my day to day job. I'll probably implement this.
After the talks there was a social hour at Six Arms a few blocks down. It was supposed to be hosted by the FSF, but I didn't really see anyone from the FSF until the end of the night. It was super crowded and I had a good amount of freaking out. I don't think many or anyone noticed thankfully. I got to have some fun conversation with some fancy Open Source people too. I'm proud of myself for being so open and outwardly social. I hope I can make friends with them at future conferences.
Ok that's it for day one. I'll try and do this for day two too.
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