Synopsis Freedom and convenience are often at odds, especially in the modern world of cloud computing and mobile devices. This talk will present the speaker's journey from using a largely closed source, closed protocol mobile platform to a much more free and open mobile operating system. Due to the relationship between mobile and cloud computing, a significant portion of the journey involved choosing free software for the server side as well. Many challenges were faced along the way! This talk will discuss the various free client and server software components that were necessary to protect the speaker's privacy and freedom, while maintaining a comparable level of service to that which was enjoyed before. A few alternatives to these choices will also be discussed, and during the Q+A session suggestions for competing software will be welcomed.

Bio Randy Barlow is a software engineer at Red Hat, Inc. He currently works on the Pulp Project, a component of Red Hat Satellite 6 that performs software repository management. He has been working with Python since 2006 and has also worked with C++, Java, and PHP prior to that. His experience includes scientific computing, natural language processing, systems management, and web development. He is a Linux geek and loves free software.

Video: https://youtu.be/es6xBRhtaN8 Slides: http://trilug.org/~rpbarlow/open_source_your_phone.odp

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