We are excited about our lineup of speakers for the 2022 OLF Conference! Read on to learn more about what they have to say.
Amber Graner
Amber’s personal open source journey started in 2009 when she started blogging about Ubuntu. Since then she’s written for Ubuntu User Magazine, co-authored The Official Ubuntu Book (6th & 7th editions) and served as a technical reviewer for Jono Bacon’s Art of Community. She was the first Community Manager for Linaro (Linux on ARM) and went on to help architect and manage the Open Compute Project (OCP) Foundation Community where she later became the Operations Director from there she went to Corelight to become the Director of Community for the Zeek Project. Currently, she is the VP of Community and Marketing at Arrikto Inc.
Amber actively mentors new leaders in open source on how to build their community or project of interest and encourages everyone around her to participate, support, and learn about Kubeflow and Open Source software and hardware. With a smile and a sense of humor, Amber reminds people that there is a place for everyone in an open source community – regardless of technical skill level (or lack thereof). She is constantly looking for people, places, and events within open source communities that help inspire others to communicate, collaborate and contribute to those communities.
Keynote – Every NTEU is Someone’s Guru
In this talk, Amber discusses how you can harness the energy, enthusiasm, and expertise of those in your technical organization who consider themselves as non-technical end-users (NTEUs). Many people want to be involved in developer-centric communities, but they don’t write code and believe there isn’t a place for them to contribute. NTEUs often wonder, “I am not a developer, so what could I possibly do?” or “I haven’t been using [pick the open source software/tool of your choice] long enough, how could I have anything useful to contribute?” Neither of these statements are true. NTEUs or non-technical end-users have a lot to offer. Let’s talk about how to encourage NTEUs at every level. Amber wants you to leave this talk with this mantra: “I may not write code but I am technical AF!” Whether you self-identify as an NTEU or you want to know how to encourage those who do, let’s start the conversation!
Jon “maddog” Hall
Jon “maddog” Hall is the Chairman of the Board of the Linux Professional Institute. Since 1969, he has been a programmer, systems designer, systems administrator, product manager, technical marketing manager, author and educator, and is currently working as an independent consultant.
Jon “maddog” Hall has concentrated on Unix systems since 1980 and Linux systems since 1994, when he first met Linus Torvalds and correctly recognized the commercial importance of Linux and Free and Open Source Software. He has been a tremendous friend to the Ohio LinuxFest, offering his support and appearing on our stage starting in 2004. He travels the world speaking on the benefits of Free and Open Source Software.
Keynote – United We Stand
Today the words we hear to describe are “divided” and “divisive.” Social media allows people to create divisions and we all lose.
Perhaps there is a better way, that of recognizing the contributions made by people regardless of their sex, sexuality, nationality and status in life.
This keynote will illustrate some of these contributions and open a discussion of how to move forward.
Keynote – Distribution Review
We are collecting representatives from various distributions to talk about their project and what makes it great. Confirmed so far are benny Vasquez of AlmaLinux, Shaun McCance for CentOS, Ben Cotton for Fedora, and Robert Siracha for SUSE, and Rich Alloway for Rocky Linux.
The session will be moderated by Kara Pritchard of the Linux Foundation and Beth Lynn Eicher of OLF.
Ben Cotton
Ben Cotton is a Principal Program Manager at Red Hat, focused on the Fedora Project. In this role he works with Red Hat and community contributors – including developers, writers, designers, marketing, and many more roles – to produce a community-driven Linux distribution. Ben is the author of Program Management for Open Source Projects (Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2022).
Your Bug Tracker and You
Your project uses a bug tracker to track bugs, but are you learning from it? This talk covers how to configure your bug tracker to capture the right information. Attendees will learn how to triage and prioritize bugs. They will learn about processes for closing bugs, and how different closure types require different processes. The talk wraps up with a discussion of bug analysis – how to filter data, what questions to ask, and what questions to not ask, using analysis of Fedora Linux bugs as an example.
Carl George
Carl George is a Principal Software Engineer on the Community Platform Engineering team at Red Hat. He is active in the EPEL, Fedora, and CentOS communities. He has worked in the IT field for 19 years, including 8 years in the U.S. Army.
The Road to EPEL 9
EPEL is a yum repository of community maintained packages for use on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and related distributions. For most of its history, each version of EPEL was made available after the corresponding major version of RHEL. This slowed down package availability, which then slowed down adoption of RHEL major versions. We recently flipped that model around, launching EPEL 9 before RHEL 9. For the first time ever, a new major version of RHEL has launched with a large set of EPEL packages already available. This talk will tell the story of our journey to EPEL 9. We’ll examine how EPEL Next and CentOS Stream enabled this outcome. You will leave this talk with a better understanding of how EPEL fits into the Red Hat ecosystem.
David Both
David Both is an Open Source Software and GNU/Linux advocate, trainer, writer, and speaker. He has been working with Linux and Open Source Software for more than 25 years and has been working with computers for over 50 years. He is a strong proponent of and evangelist for the “Linux Philosophy for System Administrators.”
While working as a Course Development Representative for IBM in Boca Raton, FL, in 1981, David wrote the training course for the first IBM PC. He has taught RHCE classes for Red Hat and has worked at MCI Worldcom, Cisco, and the State of North Carolina. He has taught classes on Linux ranging from Lunch’n’Learns to full five day courses. Helping others learn about Linux and open source software is one of his great pleasures.
He has written articles for magazines including, Linux Magazine, Linux Journal, and OS/2 Magazine back when there was such a thing. David currently writes prolifically for Opensource.com. He particularly enjoys learning new things while researching his articles.
David has published five books with Apress, The Linux Philosophy for SysAdmins, August 2018, a three volume self-study training course, Using and Administering Linux — From Zero to SysAdmin, released in December 2019, and Linux for the Small Business, released in August 2022.
He has found some interesting and unusual ways of problem solving, including sitting on one computer on which he was working.
BASH Configuration and Usage
The Bash shell is the default shell for almost every Linux distribution. As the Lazy SysAdmin, understanding and using the available tools to configure the Bash shell can enhance and simplify our command line experience.
In this session, which is largely based on Chapter 17 of my book, Using and Administering Linux: Volume 1 – Zero to SysAdmin: Getting Started, you will explore the several Bash configuration files for both global configuration and for users’ local configuration. You will perform simple experiments to determine the sequence in which the Bash configuration files are executed when the shell is launched. You will explore environment variables and shell variables such as $PATH, $?, $EDITOR, and more and how they contribute to the behavior of the shell itself and the programs that run in a shell.
In this session you will learn:
- The difference between a login shell and a non-login shell. In the interest of clearing up any confusion we will also learn about the nologin shell.
- How the Bash shell is configured
- How to modify the configuration of the Bash shell
- Which Bash configuration scripts are run when it is launched as a login shell and as a non-login shell
- The names and locations of the files used to configure Linux shells at both global and user levels
- Which shell configuration files should not be changed
- How to set shell options
- How to set environment variables from the command line
- How to set environment variables using shell configuration files
- The function of aliases and how to set them
- How to have some fun on the Bash command line
Dave McAllister
Currently providing open source technical evangelism for NGINX, Dave works with DevOps, developers and architects to understand the advantages of modern architectures and orchestration to solve large-scale distributed systems challenges, using open source and its innovation. Dave has been a champion for open systems and open source from the early days of Linux to today’s world of OpenTelemetry and observability.
Dave was named as one of the top ten pioneers in open source by Computer Business Review, having cut his teeth on Linux and compilers before the phrase “open source” was coined. Well-versed in trivia, he won a Golden Penguin in 2002. When he’s not talking, you can find him hiking with his trusty camera, trying to keep up with his wife.
Data Rules for Observability
There are immutable laws and rules for many things, from nature to physics to karma. Observability, with its innate complexity, also has its own immutable rules, which transform elastic and ephemeral rote reactions to a clear and concise approach and understanding of your environment.
However, like most things with amazing amounts of data, there are things that can impact what you can learn. All data is not created equally, especially in modern, cloud-native environments. Join us to learn the rules you should understand with your approach to observability, including:
- The impact of open and flexible data ingest and instrumentation
- The impact of data retention and aggregation on blind spot analysis
- The impact of data accuracy and precision on observability
- How elasticity and ephemeral behavior can color your analysis
- How skew and drift impact data alignment
Don Vosburg
Don Vosburg has been in the IT industry for over 30 years in a wide variety of roles. Don’s experiences as a system administrator, architect, and consultant are augmented by industry certifications from SUSE, Red Hat, Cisco, and others.
For the last 18-plus years he has been at SUSE, where his passion is open source software. Don’s real-world Linux experience spans a broad set of platforms, hypervisors, and clouds. Currently he is Product Manager for SUSE Manager. He is a key member of the roadmap planning and use-case testing teams for SUSE’s open source management portfolio.
He has been tapped for presentations at SUSE Expert Days, Saltconf, Flourish, LinuxWorld, SUSECon, VM Workshop, OhioLinuxfest, and numerous other venues.
He has been married to his wife Diane for more than 35 years, and enjoys telling stories about his four sons. He lives in Anderson, Indiana, where he works from home.
Journey to Containerized Applications: Uyuni Experiences
The world is spinning up containers and Kubernetes clusters rapidly these days. But where does that leave you if your application is a traditional one requiring VMs? With Uyuni, SUSE has started a journey to containerization. We started with our proxy server, breaking it down into reasonable components and building a set of containers to deliver. In this session we will share what we did there, and how we are progressing on the journey. You’ll also get a live demo of our newly containerized application!
Eostre Emily Danne
I’ve various certifications, an above-average amount of experience with old tech (particularly for someone of my age!), and an arguably unhealthy obsession with old computers. By day, I’m an ecology student, but by night, I turn into an abnormally tired sysadmin for my small fleet of servers. My spouse tells me I have a beige-box hoarding problem.
Punched Cards, Portable Computers, and Linux ISOs: A 50,000:1 Scale History of Human-Computer Interaction
A history of how humans interact with computers, from the dark ages of punched cards to the modern smartphone, and beyond. Particular attention is given to the question of who can access computation, and how? Moreover, attention is given to how people have shifted from using computers as tools for doing work, to a means of consumption.
Presentation will include two very short clips from Network (1976), and multiple pretty pictures of cats, chickens, and computers. Slides are published at https://e9d.org/work/t2t.odp and https://e9d.org/work/t2t.pdf and licensed CC BY-NC-SA.
John Aron
First exposed to Linux in 1995 with a variety of experiences and extensive knowledge of Unix flavors at home or at an Ohio healthcare company in 1998. I chose infosec dormancy in 2007 and stayed happily away from infosec communities until my emergence in 2013 and inclusion back into infosec communities in 2019.
From issues in security and how to manage data in the 90s, to experiences years later in offensive and defensive security with at least three different adversarial incidents in my home network or on my laptop. I built technology and a company that solves unknown intrusion events, differentiating normal versus abnormal computer behavior.
How Aronetics Ensured Control of Security Controls
In 2020+, kernel modules can be a dark art. Our technology is a Red Hat certified kernel module that when added to the kernel stack provides data ownership and tamper-proofs your data. This is a talk about the security landscape, how I see a root solution, how I built it and included our modular code to the Linux kernel stack. Aspects of this talk are found around the nation at Security BSides, Don’t Lose Control of your Security Controls.
Jonathan Bowman
Jonathan has been a teacher, software developer, IT director, and data wrangler, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Always a hobbyist developer, he started using Python in the early 2000s, and hasn’t been able to quit since, frequently finding that a little automation makes life and work sweeter.
Python: the Multi-tool for System Management
With Python, you may already have all you need to configure and manage a variety of systems, with speed, precision, and very little excess baggage. In this talk, we consider when and how to use Python for shell scripting and configuration management, whether the target is an entire datacenter or just your personal laptop. We will explore command execution, file system manipulation, data wrangling, and downloading data from web APIs.
Joshua Preston
Originally a man from Florida, Joshua Preston lives in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and two children. After doing a lot of identity management and Java development work for Sun Microsystems, Joshua utilized Ansible to orchestrate Puppet and automate patching across several large Linux and Solaris system fleets. In 2015, Kubernetes was introduced to the world, as Joshua joined Red Hat as a Solution Architect focusing on OpenShift and Kubernetes, becoming a Red Hat Certified Architect (RHCA) Level II in the process. Currently, he is an Automation Executive at Red Hat that helps teams and organizations build the necessary metrics, capabilities, and integrations that bring data-driven automation to the enterprise.
Ansible: the Evolution, Ecosystem, Execution Environments, Event-Driven, and Kubernetes
Learn how Ansible started from humble beginnings to become a near de facto standard in IT automation from home labs, data centers to clouds, and more recently to the edge: from automobiles to retail point of sale systems and security cameras, to factory floors, oil fields, electric generation facilities, and everything in between.
We’ll discuss major milestones, open source communities, partner ecosystems, and a quick look at the future of event driven Ansible: where automations can be triggered from event streams (nb4, yes, like Kafka).
Finally, look at the hype and excitement surrounding containers and Kubernetes regarding pets and cattle. Discover how Ansible is even more vital now, as the container platform itself becomes an operationally challenging pet, with its potential as Kubernetes fleet automation orchestrator: because a cluster of 1 is a considered a fleet.
Kyle Jenkins
Kyle Jenkins is a full stack developer, avid video gamer, and senior consultant with Improving, a software development consulting and training company in Columbus, Ohio. He assists with organizing the DevOpsDays Columbus conference. While working directly with clients to accomplish projects, he always strives to improve the quality of code and life for the team.
Case Study: Incremental Migration from WebSphere to Open Source
When the time comes to replace that 20-year-old architecture and migrate into a more capable system for rapid changes, it’s important to keep all the end goals in mind, and not just the technologies. The ability to do an incremental migration and the creation of team autonomy became the focus points of many discussions across one of Abercrombie and Fitch’s biggest projects to overhaul the website, enabling the teams to improve focus and integrate changes more rapidly moving forward, all while continuing to deliver important functionality for the here and now. This session will review the project layout at a high level and go deep into the decisions behind the architecture and technologies chosen for the task at hand, primarily React, Apollo GraphQL, and Redis. We will go over the successes and many lessons learned throughout code, communication, planning, and teamwork.
Liang Yan
Liang Yan is a senior software engineer from Digitalocean. He has been working on the areas of virtualization and the cloud for over ten years. A few years ago, he stepped into GPU virtualization work with SUSE/Nvidia and started work on machine learning stuff since then. He has given related presentations at several conferences, such as OLF 2021, Nividia GTC 2021, and SELF 2022.
Kubeflow: Bring your ML project into Production
Machine Learning (ML) is quite popular today in the academic/research world. However, it is quite difficult to put into a product, especially a product with a huge customer base. This session will give Kubeflow, the open source ML toolkit on top of Kubernetes, a deep look from the MLOps perspective. Furthermore, we will have a brief look at Distributed MLSys and how Kubeflow copes with scalability. Last, a demo of the Kubeflow stack setup and ML project pipeline deployment will be demonstrated in the cloud.
Matt Eland
After several decades as a software engineer and engineering manager, Matt now serves as a software engineering instructor at Tech Elevator where he gets to raise up future developers and unleash them upon the world to build awesome things.
Matt is an Azure AI Engineer and Data Scientist Associate, a current organizer for the Central Ohio .NET Developer Group, runs a data science blog and YouTube channel, and is halfway into a master’s degree in data analytics.
In his copious amounts of spare time, Matt continues to build nerdy things and looks for ways to share them with the community.
AI for Everyone?
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been promising to revolutionize the world since before the personal computer even existed. And yet, the past few years we’ve seen a number of “sea change” events in terms of artificial intelligence and machine learning. From self-driving cars to GPT-3 transformers, DALL-E, and GitHub Copilot, AI is starting to cause real and sudden changes in the world around us.
But is this AI future we find ourselves in really for everyone? Is it possible for us to innovate new technologies and not leave entire groups of people in the dust? Bias and fairness around racial, gender, and age groups are a very real concern in machine learning systems. Additionally, we’re starting to see the beginnings of AI negatively impacting established industries. Beyond that, there are some very real concerns about privacy and data ownership.
And what of the learning curve for getting into AI? Can artificial intelligence and machine learning truly be for everyone and truly serve everyone?
Matt Williams
Matt Williams always wanted to be a Renaissance Person. Maybe one day he will be. In the meantime, he designs tabletop games, reads, cooks, weaves, hacks, and spends time with his wife and daughter in Columbus, OH.
10 Things DevOps Is; 10 Things DevOps Isn’t
DevOps has grown in visibility and popularity over the past decade. It comes in many flavors – DevOps, SRE, DevSecOps, DevKitchenSinkOps, and more! While DevOps is many things, there are also many things which it is not. This talk introduces DevOps, what it is, and, perhaps more importantly, what it isn’t.
Mike Kwiatkowski
Hello! My name is Mike Kwiatkowski, and I am an instructor for Northwest State Community College near Archbold, OH where I’ve spent nearly ten years teaching their electrical engineering technology program. Before my adventures as a full-time instructor I spent twenty years designing and maintaining data networks for school districts throughout northwest Ohio.
Through a generous NSF grant I have had the opportunity to work on the Cybersecurity for Advanced Manufacturing Organizations (CAMO) project. This project is meant to provide free training to any individual with an interest in cybersecurity, but with a focus on advanced manufacturing. For more information come to one of my talks!
A Demonstration of Free Cybersecurity Training
Through a generous grant from the National Science Foundation we have been able to write a collection of freely available training scenarios for cybersecurity with a focus on the specialized needs of advanced manufacturing. We have used a collection of open source tools to develop the training scenarios to minimize cost and maximize portability.
In this talk we will discuss the common design of each scenario and focus on demonstrating the Wireshark training scenario.
Patrick Tudor
Patrick Tudor is a systems engineer at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers in an operational role supporting ICANN’s websites, a broad portfolio including IANA.org and ICANN.org. Patrick lives in Los Angeles with his German Shepherd dog Verena.
Better Websites with the Apache HTTP Server
New features in httpd 2.4 make configuring policies to improve the performance of your websites and protect the applications behind it easier. Focusing on an exploration of features like expressions and overlooked modules, we will build toward a look at TLS termination and load balancing. This talk will begin with a brief review of the conversation between the web browser and the web server before quickly moving to an overview of specific configurations. The recipes presented will spark ideas you can take home to improve your websites.
Rafeeq Rehman
Rafeeq Rehman is an author, entrepreneur, and Cybersecurity Strategy Advisor. His recent book Cybersecurity Arm Wrestling: Winning the perpetual fight against crime by building a modern Security Operations Center (SOC) was published in 2021. He is also the creator of the CISO MindMap elaborating on responsibilities of Cybersecurity professionals. He can be reached at his blog rafeeqrehman.com and via Twitter @rafeeq_rehman.
Maturing Information Security Programs with Risk Register and Risk Scoring
Effective risk management is an elusive task for many reasons. Availability of reliable data, different silos of IT operations, and variety of tools are part of the reasons. Even when risk is identified and evaluated, many organizations struggle with providing a centralized view of all information security risk. A centralized Risk Register that enables documenting, evaluating and reporting of risk is crucial for attaining maturity of information security operations.
This presentation includes descriptions of challenges and proposals to build a centralized risk register and perform basic level of risk scoring using available data.
Steven Pritchard
Steven Pritchard is the Vice President, Infrastructure and Security at Sicura. For the last several years he has focused on compliance automation and all things DevOps, including container-based GitLab CI workflows.
Containers Made Easy with GitLab
Containers are great, but if you’re not just consuming third-party containers on public registries, they can be a lot of work. GitLab (and GitLab CI) to the rescue! In this presentation, we’ll demonstrate how GitLab makes it easy to build and deploy containers.
Terry Howald
Terry has a long history in software development, dating back to the early 1990s. He is currently working as a software test engineer. When he’s not chasing down software development issues, he pursues his interests in physics education, energy storage technologies, and cryptocurrencies.
My First Look at Rust
Recently I’ve seen “Rust in the Linux Kernel” headlines that have sparked my interest. What is Rust? Once I learned Rust is a relatively new systems programming language, I asked myself additional questions. Should I pay attention to Rust? Is Rust right for me? What does it take to become a Rust developer? Come hear about my experiences as I take a first look at Rust.
Tim Quinlan
Tim Quinlan is a Technical Account Manager at F5 who focuses on NGINX usage in Financial Services Enterprises.
NGINX 102
Have you installed NGINX and started serving up content? Great! Did you know that NGINX is much more than a webserver? Awesome! Let’s talk about some of the advanced features for NGINX and NGINX Plus that will help you take your installation to the next level. Attendees will learn how to use NGINX for load balancing, proxying, clustering, health checks and even extending functionality with scripting. All demos will run in Docker and all demo material will be available so attendees can start practicing their new skills right away.
Tony Bemus
I have worked in IT for 20 years doing desktop support to Enterprise Networking to Cloud DDoS mitigation. I am a Linux enthusiast and hosted the Sunday Morning Linux Review for 10 years.
Secure Your IOT by Taking It Out of the Cloud
Commercial home Internet of Things (IOT) devices are not secure out of the box but I will show you how to take control of them yourself. I will demonstrate what protocol and firmware you can use to keep your IOT grounded and out of the clouds. I will discuss how to use commercial and home built IOT devices using Zigbee, Zwave, ESPHome, Tasmota with HomeAssistant.
Yvette Menase
Yvette Menase is a Senior Product Manager at Libsyn, the leading podcast hosting and distribution company, which hosts more than 75,000 unique shows and is responsible for over 6 billion downloads per year. She drives podcast creation and host-agnostic monetization via Libsyn Studio and Glow.fm, as well as publication and hosting through Libsyn. Prior to joining Libsyn, she had 15 years of experience in product management, people management, software engineering, and accounting at various companies. She is also the Director of Surveys at Code & Supply Co., which is a tech community of over 8,000 people worldwide. Her volunteer work includes the execution and analysis of microsurveys and the organization’s flagship Compensation Survey, that provides salary and lifestyle data to advocate for and empower job seekers and businesses. Yvette also leads and participates in various mentorship and coaching programs for professional and personal development.
Market Rate: Is It Just for Seafood?
You might have have googled “market rate for x job” during your application process. You probably have received a ~1% raise with the HR justification of, “It’s market rate.” You most likely applied to a job that gave a range, paid you the minimum, and denied your negotiation as “It’s market rate for the area.”
Some career activists advise against negotiating based off market rate, but that phrase and practice isn’t going anywhere, so let’s go over how to find accurate data for your job title. Hint: it’s not only a quick google search.
I was mid-career by the time I mustered the courage (or frustration at my current pay) to negotiate — starting earlier could have only benefited myself and my peers. As a tech employee by day, and a career coach & salary negotiation expert by night, I’ll teach you:
- how to answer the tough salary questions
- when and how to negotiate
- what’s “reasonable” to ask for and how to determine it
- navigate the curveballs of the negotiation process
- be comfortable talking about salary with friends or co-workers, where it’s legal
I’ll provide data including examples from a compensation survey I work on, my experience and case studies of helping others land jobs, and ROAM the risks of negotiation when you might be at a disadvantage.