Wow. I now realise the last two days were just a warmup. The Conference really came into it’s own today. With talks going about twice as long as the previous two days, we really got some in-depth information from some top notch speakers.
This is a continuation of this post here about my first Linux.conf.au, here.
It started off with the lightning talks in lieu of a keynote speaker. I was a bit disappointed that there weren’t more of them (they finished well before scheduled) but the ones that were there were very well spoken about things ranging from Raising Geek Girls to Password Storage best-practices.
Next up I attended the Python 3: Making the Leap! by Tim Leslie tutorial. This was a great tutorial where Tim went through the nuances of the differences between the two versions of python and how the -3 flag and the 2to3.py tool can be used to convert a 2.xx script to python 3. I found this particularly helpful as someone who recent started having a go at python with my (disclaimer: linking to horrible, horrible code) blackboard scraper I recently wrote. For some reason despite all my dependencies working with python 3 I wrote it in 2.7. Learning to write pretty much depreciated code was probably not the most intelligent thing to do, but at least now I have a good explanation on what is different when writing code for 3 in the future.
Next up was Building Effective Alliances around the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement by Sky Croeser [ Video ]. The great thing about this talk is that it went beyond saying why the TPPA is bad, which is all we ever seem to hear from tech news sites, and actually delved into strategies of how to effectively combat. The strategies were diverse with no possibility left unturned, from writing letters to politicians to 1999 Seattle WTO Protest tactics – fun for the whole family! I thought the way she approached the topic was terrific, as a person who is not in the slightest bit interested in radical activism, but a strong interest in political issues such as this, it was nice to be acknowledged as somebody who can still contribute. If you’re at all worried about TPPA, I would strongly recommend watching the talk when it’s uploaded on Monday.
Bringing MoreWomen to Free and Open Source Software by Karen Sandler [ Video ] was a really eye opening talk on the strategies used at the GNOME Foundation the bring their amount of female contributors up to par with the rest of the Computing sector (3% compared to 18%, still a woefully small number). The lack of women in computing is quite a serious problem which I think is overlooked (and sometimes even perpetuated) by many computer scientists and programmers, and perhaps society in general. I’m fairly certain (and very hopeful) this is a changing statistic I’ve met many people who are committed to the issue.
Opening up government data by Pia Waugh [ Video ] continued from Monday’s open government miniconf about making government datasets available freely to the public. As I mentioned on Monday, Pia Waugh is definitely someone who is “on our side” in the government sector relating to open data and is in charge of the great data.gov.au website where you can request and vote for certain datasets to be release. She talked about certain issues related to open government data including ways to automate data collection and uploading (which would always provide up-to-date-data) and issues with the format in which data is provided. I love playing to datasets so this talk was very interesting to me, I would recommend giving it a watch when it’s online.
Reverse engineering vendor firmware drivers for little fun and no profit by Matthew Garrett [ Video ]* would have to be the best talk of the day (and possibly the week). In this talk we follow the protagonist Garrett as he embarks on a journey to reverse engineer a vendor tool for modifying servers which doesn’t quite go as expected. I won’t go any further because you have to watch it to really appreciate. The thing I really like about Garrett’s talk is not only the sprinkles of humor paced throughout, but the fact that whenever he says anything that isn’t basic computer/Linux knowledge, he stops and gives a short explanation of what that is. One mistake I feel like many speakers have is that they assume every attendee is as knowledgeable as they are in the domain they are speaking about when in reality there are people of all different types of skillsets. By not stopping to explain things you run the risk of having half your audience feel stupid and switch off. As a student these kinds of explanations are much appreciated and help me achieve my goal of learning more about the kernel.
*for those with a keen eye, you might notice that two Garrett and the Open Data talk overlapped. I watched one on video after the end of today’s conference.
That was all for today, looking very forward to tomorrow with a keynote by Matthew Garrett who will hopefully be beating his own record of “Best Talk so Far”. If you can’t make it but want to watch, tune in at http://timvideos.us/octagon at 9AM tomorrow.
My linux.conf.au adventure is continued here.