I had the pleasure of speaking at the Kansas City DevOps Meetup in downtown Kansas City! It was kind of like a coming home party. KC DevOps Days is where I got my start at GitLab and set me on a path towards a career I never imagined possible. This event, in the vault of the downtown library was my chance to share GitLab’s story to my local meetup. It was well received and even led to an impromptu demo of the GitLab product!

In the IT Industry, many incidents have been misunderstood or blown out of proportion due to poor handling of communications during and right after a crisis arises. The how, when, and how much communication can be the difference between a media frenzy and an outage that people work through and forget about. Ever since a database outage in January of 2017, companies and contributors have received timely and effective communication from Gitlab.

I gave my Busting Open Source Security Myths talk at DevSecOps Days Denver to a packed out auditorium. If was so well received, I decided to bring it back for Day 2 of SELF 2019!

Developers are constantly being asked to make more and more powerful applications. The more feature-rich the application, though, the more prone to risk it becomes. Many have thought the solution is to keep the code base locked up tight, that open source is undesirable. The truth, however, is quite the opposite! More eyes on code has proven to increase the quality and security of the modern application.

This talk defined the voice of the IT Guy for me. This was the moment when the Sudo Show got its wings, when I realized that I was on the right track towards re-inventing my career. I had people in the room I respected a great deal nodding along in agreement. This was where it REALLY started for me.

So, you are interested in technology, you want to contribute to something bigger than yourself, you can’t wait to join a global community…but where do you start? Is coding the only way in? Let’s take a practical look at how to go from consumer to contributor!

South East Linux Fest 2019 was an amazing test of the IT Guy…not as a brand but as the person I wanted to be in my career. I gave 3 talks in 3 days and spent a lot of time chatting with different folks, sharing stories, answering questions. It challenged my introverted nature and my public speaking skills.

The entire conference was an amazing experience that I will always cherish!

Now more than ever, developers have more tools to pick from than hours in the day. It is so easy to spend more time maintaining the development pipeline than it is actually developing. What if the planning, coding, building, testing, and deployment could all be handled from one tool in one interface? Well it can! Gitlab can cut down on tool chain bloat and decrease cycle times!

Getting started in my career, I never imagined I would work in sales or go speak at conferences! I was very nervous and I think that showed. What was worse is I had the first breakout after lunch and the next room was a dive into chaos engineering! I learned a LOT from this event and later revamped my talk to present to the DevOps meetup in Kansas City.

In the IT Industry, many incidents have been misunderstood or blown out of proportion due to poor handling of communications during and right after a crisis arises. The how, when, and how much communication can be the difference between a media frenzy and an outage that people work through and forget about. Ever since a database outage in January of 2017, companies and contributors have received timely and effective communication from Gitlab.

The conference now seems like SO long ago! It was 4 crazy-packed days (plus 2 on the road) but it would not be overstating anything to say it has forever changed the course of my career.

The morning was meetings surrounding GNOME Engagement and getting thoughts and lessons learned ready for LAS2019! Being someone who has Linux, IT support, LED lighting design, live audio, photography and videography basics all crammed into my head, I could be a huge asset to conferences all over the country! It would seem to be time to get myself onto committees for more conferences.

The other realization I had was this conference is going to cost me a lot more money than just the travel expenses! I fell in love with talks about Purism’s Librem 5 phone and the whole of System76 and their efforts to manufacture the laptops and desktops in house to better support their products. I am sure in the next couple of years, as budget allows, both companies have already earned my business.

After a tour of System 76 and another cook-out, it was time to pack up and get ready for the 9 hour drive home to Kansas City the next day. I am looking forward to the upcoming changes I hope to make to my career: develop more in depth content on this blog, start a podcast/YouTube channel, become involved with projects too small to really promote themselves, attend conferences, and help others discover the passion and community behind open source!

Oops! The downside to staying up pretty much all night talking about FOSS, life, and everything else under the sun is that the next morning comes WAY to quickly!

So, after going to one of the local malls to buy a long sleeve shirt and picking up some food, I finally managed to get to the venue. As I alluded to in my previous post, I spent more time thinking about people and community than the technology that drew me to the conference in the first place. Probably the biggest example of this was a talk by Britt Yazel surrounding Scientists and open source.

What could be better than a Linux-powered science computer? Its more secure, more stable, faster than the other platforms…but the problem? Lack of packages and supporting libraries to carry out complex scientific analysis! What’s worse is that universities, research facilities, and science labs and stuck running Windows and a few proprietary applications that charge thousands of dollars per license per year!!! That is literally millions of US Dollars…tax payer money… being paid to a couple of businesses that have a corner on the scientific market! Now that bugs me on a number of levels!

We as an open source community need to branch out. We need to shake this nerd in their parent’s basement stigma we have carried for so many years, get out there, find needs, and build solutions to fix those needs! Instead of idling in IRC rooms waiting for some project we can bash, we should be out there fixing problems in our world!

After a though-provoking afternoon, we all met up for pizza and celebrated the release of GNOME 3.30 and followed that up with some vintage arcade games 🙂

I know, I know this is a lot later than I promised.

That is what happens when you go to a conference then come back to the real world…It seems to take a week of preparation before you leave and a week of preparation after you get back from any break to really get back in the swing of everything. Anyway, I digress…

So, its Day 2 of the conference. After an overwhelmingly awesome first day, everything sort of settled into a rhythm. We got the technical bugs worked out and started adding in lightning talks! (I think next conference I will have to sign up for one.)

The talks were amazing. We heard from KDE about their application deployment strategy and their application ecosystem. However, the not-as-technical talks is what really grabbed my attention. I was really surprised to be honest, I expected I would dive deep into technology on this trip… Not so much! Instead, I found myself drawn towards a few talks in particular:

The first was a pair of talks from Ryan Gorley, owner of FreeHive an open source graphics design agency. He talked about the need for innovation beyond Adobe Cloud and the needs of creatives from Desktop Linux and the accompanying application ecosystem. There were a pair of talks from Elementary as well discussing their attempts to monetize open source to allow developers to actually make money off their work!

However, I think the talk that I engaged with more than any of Day 2 was a talk about making open source attractive to students. Heidi Ellis and Gregory Hislop are working to integrate open source into the college curriculum at large but more than that help students fall in love with the FOSS community. Having dealt with the dumpster fire that is /r/Linux (Reddit) and seeing some of the venom of a small minority of the FOSS community, it played back into my thinking about how to introduce students, creatives, and non-technical folks into what the true intent of the open source community really is…

The night continued with Game Night, trivia led by System76’s own Emma Marshal and dinner with different people from the conference. Talks went late into the night…but it was all worth it!

IT IS HERE! Libre Application Summit 2018. This is the first IT conference I have attended since a VMware Summit in 2012.

Not only do I get to listen to some really cool talks…okay, let’s be real. A lot of this is at the edge of my understanding. After all, I am in a room filled with some of the brightest developers from all across the globe. I am just a dumb Sysadmin, haha. It is amazing material non-the-less. I even doubled-down on my usage of Flatpaks.

The venue, Parkside Mansion, is beautiful and the staff have been nothing but accommodating. I fully expected to use my skills and an outgoing personality and as a IT Guy at this conference, however, the one set of skills I didn’t give much thought to was my knowledge of live production. I have been helping get lighting levels right, troubleshooting audio feedback, and helping plan for the future of GNOME conference technological offerings.

While the talks have been interesting, the real call of events like this is to be able to meet and interact with people from all over the world. Within the first 30 minutes of the doors opening, I was able to guide a developer to guys from Elementary OS; the developer was looking to put a mechanism into Flatpak that would allow for end users to donate money back to the developer. Who better for him to talk to than the project that is already trying to do that with their app store?!

I have interacted with people from Red Hat, Endless, KDE, and others. We have discussed American history, Steam gaming on Linux, and solved all of the worlds problems…maybe we’ll tell the world, maybe we won’t.
This conference is starting to sway my opinions on the future of my career. Maybe my time in the deep weeds of code and terminals is coming to a close in the near future to give way towards a focus on people – organizing events, making connections between people, providing a spotlight on growing projects making a difference or in need of help… now that…that sounds like a career to be proud of!

The ladies headed off to a nice dinner up on a rooftop, meanwhile, the guys headed over to the Code Think Air BnB for some grilling, card games, and some amazing conversations: The need for funding the foundations, some history of KDE, and bug tracking horror stories!

Day 2 looks like it’ll be EVEN better!

Kansas City, Missouri to Denver Colorado, 1 Interstate, 609 miles, 8 hours of podcasts… Nothing but rain! However, the nice thing about this road trip was it gave me time to consider a few things about my home lab, my career, you know big things.

I have spent the majority of my career deep in the weeds as a Linux Systems Engineer. I have worked with Red Hat, CentOS, and Ubuntu. The operating system has been my domain for a long time. The problem is, in the past couple of years, the area I have been deriving the most energy from has been the community. This summer, I have been working social media for the GNOME Foundation, made appearances on the Linux Unplugged podcast, helped manage Peer Tube and Gitlab instances. Now here I am on the eve of my first FOSS conference.

Another big decision I made while dodging visibility-killing downpours was how to rebuild my home computer lab. I have been using Digital Ocean to manage services like Quassel and Nextcloud. Part of my responsibilities as a Systems Engineer is to stay on top of trends. Well, for projects to survive the velocity of development these days containers and automation need to be at the heart of all their efforts. To be a responsible Sysadmin, I need to be prepared for that shift. So, I plan on setting up a Kubernetes cluster and running all my home services out of a Gitlab instances into containers!

The last big thought I spent time on was the next step in my education. I am a huge fan of Linux Academy. Learning from their courses is great, but it doesn’t necessarily translate into something industry recognized: IE a certification. The only cert I hold at this point is a RHCSA (Red Hat Certified Systems Administrator) in RHEL6. After this road trip, I hope within the next 3 years to hold my RHCA (Red Hat Certified Architect)!

After a drink and some tacos, its time to hit the sack and get ready for LAS2018 tomorrow!