Topic: How to Give a Tech Talk Presenters: Brian Gerard, Daniel Farrell, Jason Hibbets, Sandi Metz, Chris Collins When: Thursday, 14th May, 7pm (pizza from 6.45pm) Where: NC State Engineering Building 2 Room 1021, Centennial Campus Parking: The parking decks and Oval Drive street parking are free after 5pm Map: Google Maps Video: Youtube

Synopsis: Giving a tech talk can seem daunting. Come get some tips and tricks from folks who have done it before.

This presentation will be a panel discussion about how to give a technical presentation. Panelists Brian Gerard, Daniel Farrell, Jason Hibbets, Sandi Metz, and Chris Collins will join us to talk about how they prepare to give a presentation, what to do and avoid during a presentation, how they handle questions from the crowd, and other aspects of presenting.

Bios:

Brian Gerard has been working with various *nixes, and Linux specifically, since the mid-'90s, as a Systems Administrator, a Software Engineer, and an end user. After eight years developing abuse defenses for Yahoo! and training their engineers, he now uses his expertise doing deployment automation and security work for WebAssign.

Daniel Farrell is a Software Engineer on Red Hat’s SDN Team, where he contributes to upstream OpenDaylight and OPNFV. He has been involved in SDN’s development since it emerged from Stanford, including early OpenFlow and OpenStack work. He’s now an active committer on OpenDaylight’s Integration Team.

Jason Hibbets is a senior community evangelist in Corporate Marketing at Red Hat where he is a community manager for Opensource.com. He has been with Red Hat since 2003 and is the author of The foundation for an open source city. Prior roles include senior marketing specialist, project manager, Red Hat Knowledgebase maintainer, and support engineer.

Sandi Metz, author of "Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby", believes in simple code and straightforward explanations. She prefers working software, practical solutions and lengthy bicycle trips (not necessarily in that order) and consults and teaches and speaks on all things OOP.

Chris Collins began working for Duke in 2006, and became a systems administrator with the Duke Office of Information Technology's Linux team in 2008. As a technical lead and tech enthusiast, he teaches introductory and intermediate courses and workshops to a wide variety of audiences around campus, and regularly gives presentations highlighting new projects and technologies.

Topic: Living the Devops! Presenter: Barry Peddycord III When: Thursday, 9th April 2015, 7pm (pizza from 6.45pm) Where: NC State Engineering Building 3 Room 2201, Centennial Campus Parking: The parking decks and Oval Drive street parking are free after 5pm Map: Google Maps

Synopsis: This presentation will introduce and describe the workflow and tools used by the Customer Engineering team at Cumulus Networks to manage and improve their internal infrastructure. The team is distributed from San Francisco to Cary to Wales, and uses a combination of issue tracking (Jira), version control (Github), and configuration management tools (Puppet) to manage a fleet of Virtual Machines that provide continuous integration, package management, and other services for the team to use. This presented assumes no prior knowledge of the tools that will be discussed, and should be approachable to a general audience with a technical background.

Bio: Barry Peddycord III is the current chair of the Trilug Steering Committee and has been an active member of Trilug since 2011. Barry holds a Bachelor's and Master's degree in Computer Science from NC State, and has recently started working at Cumulus Networks, a company that develops a version of Linux designed to run on network switches.

Topic: Workshop on DevOps and TriLUG Infrastructure When: Thursday, 16th April 2015, 7pm - 9pm Where: WebAssign 1791 Varsity Drive #200 Raleigh, NC 27606 (NCSU Centennial Campus); and #trilug-sys on freenode Parking: The parking deck at the rear Map: Google Maps

Work on a personal project, hone your skills, or try something you learned about at a recent meeting. While you're at it, help us maintain the TriLUG infrastructure.

This month we continue tweaking our offsite backups, take the first steps down the path to the next incarnation of our infrastructure, and set up a group infrastructure git repository. Come on down and dig in!

Topic: Workshop on Performance Tuning and TriLUG Infrastructure When: Thursday, 19th March 2015, 7pm - 9pm Where: WebAssign 1791 Varsity Drive #200 Raleigh, NC 27606 (NCSU Centennial Campus); and #trilug-sys on freenode Parking: CHANGED: NCSU Partner Surface II lots Map: Google Maps

Work on a personal project, hone your skills, or try something you learned about at a recent meeting (playing with "perf", anyone?). While you're at it, help us maintain the TriLUG infrastructure.

Our primary infrastructure objectives for this month's hack night will be setting up backups for pilot and discussing the next incarnation of TriLUG infrastructure; we would love to get your help and input on those!

Topic: Performance Analysis Presenter: Jeremy Eder When: Thursday, 12th March 2015, 7pm - 9pm (6:45pm for pizza) Where: NC State Engineering Building II Room 1021, Centennial Campus Parking: The parking decks and Oval Drive street parking are free after 5pm Map: Google Maps Video: YouTube Slides: http://people.redhat.com/jeder/201503-trilug.pdf

Synopsis: Jeremy will provide an overview of how the Performance Engineering group at Red Hat approaches performance analysis, show specific examples of testing methods that produced interesting results, and show how they are able to performance-tune infrastructure in the field using tools like tuned.

You will leave with a new appreciation for how many knobs and levers are available in the Linux kernel, and understanding how a practical approach to performance tuning can have a big impact on every-day deployments.

Bio: Jeremy Eder is a Principal Software Engineer and Network Performance Lead at Red Hat Inc, where he specializes in measurement and analysis of kernel-related performance metrics, and using that analysis to guide performance-tuning of real-world infrastructure.

Topic: Workshop on Un-Meeting Topics, and Backups for pilot When: Thursday, 19th February 2015, 7pm - 9pm Where: #trilug-sys, on freenode

NOTE: ONLINE ONLY (due to weather / street conditions)

Work on a personal project, hone your skills, or try something you learned about at a recent meeting. While you're at it, help us maintain the TriLUG infrastructure.

Our primary infrastructure objective for this month's hack night will be setting up backups for pilot; we would love to get your help on it!

There is a TriLUG channel on the Freenode IRC chat server. You can join the IRC using an IRC Client or using the web client below.

IRC Server: irc.freenode.net Channel: #trilug

Topic: Un-Meeting Presenter: You! When: Thursday, 12th February 2015, 6.45pm (pizza at 7pm) Where: NC State Engineering Building 3 Room 2201, Centennial Campus Parking: The parking decks and Oval Drive street parking are free after 5pm Map: Google Maps Video: YouTube

Overview: In the fine tradition of the BarCamp Un-Conferences, we're having an Un-Meeting!

BarCamps ... are open, participatory workshop-events, the content of which is provided by participants. - Wikipedia

We are looking to have a handful of topics (suggestion form below), each of which should be well suited for a 10-15 minute mini-panel. On the night of the meeting, there will be print outs of each suggestion, with space to place a mark for whether you have something to say about it, or want to learn about it - or both. You can also sign up to be the "driver" for the topic. We will then pick the most popular topics to go through in sequence, doing a group demo/panel on each.

The driver for each topic will be the "hands on the keyboard" and kick things off by showcasing some tip, trick, best practice, etc on that topic. Each of the other panel members can then share their own favorite points, and we'll end each topic with some brief Q&A from the audience.

Topic Suggestions: Propose a topic you're interested in. Pick something that will lend itself well to discussion, and is narrow enough to be one of a handful for the evening. Submit your idea via the Suggestion Form.

Bio: Our speaker this month is you! This is meant to be a highly participatory event. Vote for topics you find interesting enough that you want to actively contribute to the dialog about them. Ask questions, give us your favorite tips and tricks, etc.

Proposed Topics

1. Useful Vim Plugins and How To Manage Them There are a few really good Vim plugins that make some common tasks a lot easier, if not downright enjoyable. I'll demonstrate a couple of them, and show one that makes managing vim plugins dead simple. Then share your favorites! http://vimawesome.com/ Demo github link: https://github.com/briangerard/vundle-and-vim-plugins-demo Aaron's github link: https://github.com/aschrab/dotfiles/tree/master/vim
2. MythTV "Linux in your living room": Do you run MythTV ? Tell us what frontend hardware you have ? Want to share a cool add-on or remote control ? https://www.mythtv.org
3. Github Flow Using pull requests, web hooks, and code review to avoid breaking the build https://github.com
4. Linux File/Directory Permissions and Filesystem Concepts Per newcomer request, let's go through all the permission settings on files and directories, and what they all mean. If we have time in the slot, we can also explore some fundamental filesystem concepts (inodes, superblocks, etc). http://tldp.org/LDP/intro-linux/html/sect_03_04.html Demo github link: https://github.com/briangerard/linux-permissions-demo

Source for the original version of the "Learn All The Things!" image: Hyperbole and a Half