Wow! It’s that time of year when linux.conf.au has come around, and this year, for the first time, it’s in the stunning Gold Coast, 13th-17th January 2020. After having a read through the schedule, I’ve made a plan for which talks I’d like to see.
Monday and Tuesday – Miniconfs
Monday and Tuesday of conf are Miniconfs – essentially special interest groups in different areas of open source. The schedules aren’t all up for Miniconfs at the time of writing, but on Monday I’ll probably be somewhere between Creative Arts, Documentation and Sysadmin. On Tuesday I’ll be between GO Glam (top work, Sae Ra Germaine and Hugh Rundle!) and Identity, Privacy and Security (likewise, Ben Dechrai!). In particular, I’d like to hear William Brown’s talk on the psychology of multi-factor authentication. I heard William talk at PyconAU lightning talks earlier this year and he’s an excellent presenter.
Monday night is the Linux Australia Annual General Meeting, which I’d like to attend. Voting is open for the elections, if you’re a member. You’re not member? You should be. It’s free as in beer, and free as in freedom.
Wednesday – Main conf
I’ll be giving my talk on Wednesday about SenseBreast – a mastectomy prosthetic that was developed as a student project as part of the Masters in Applied Cybernetics at the 3A Institute earlier in the year. Apart from that, I’d like to see Karen Sandler’s talk on how to understand the intentions of others and build stronger communities. Karen is amazing, and I always get something out of her talks.
Keith’s talk on his new Snek Python-based language for embedded devices will be great for the Pythonistas, but I’m also worried that the fragmentation in this space – Micropython is a clear leader – will actually make adoption of Python on embedded devices and micro-controllers harder. I also don’t want to miss Daniel McCarthy’s talk on building hexapod robots – I know Daniel from the two years I spent leading GovHack Geelong and he has an incredible mind.
Dr Peter Chubb is always an excellent presenter, and his talk on electronics from household components promises to be entertaining. David Tulloh is always a leader in the “crack track” of LCA (his Linux microwave talk from Geelong 2016 is unmissable), and I had considered going to his presentation on KiCAD PCB-drafting software, but I think it will be over my head. Those in the HPC space might want to consider seeing Hugh Blemings’ talk about the OpenPower stack and ecosystem, which focuses on open hardware for HPC, which is a relatively new development.
Thursday – Main conf
On Thursday, I want to see Marissa Takahashi’s talk on an ethical data infrastructure, and Christopher Bigg’s talk on privacy-preserving IoT, but they’re scheduled together.
I definitely want to catch Opal Symes’ talk on collecting information with care. She has a rich, and challenging narrative to share and we all stand to learn a lot from her journey. Nicola Nye’s talk seeks to challenge the prevailing opinion that capitalism and ethics can’t co-exist, and I want to hear more on this.
Friday – Main conf
On Friday, I’ll be giving a tutorial on Scribus, and will probably need a break in the morning, but I do want to catch mnot’s talk on security internet protocols, and the work that’s left to be done in this space – particularly given how antiquated TCP/IP is now, and that Australia doesn’t have good penetration of IPv6 yet.
What are your picks? Leave your comments below.