DebConf23 https://debconf23.debconf.org/ took place from 2023-09-10 to –17 in Kochi, India.
Four employees (three Debian developers) from NetApp had the opportunity to participate in the annual event, which is the most important conference in the Debian world: Christoph Senkel, Andrew Lee, Michael Banck and Noël Köthe.
DebCamp
What is DebCamp? DebCamp usually takes place a week before DebConf begins. For participants, DebCamp is a hacking session that takes place just before DebConf. It’s a week dedicated to Debian contributors focusing on their Debian-related projects, tasks, or problems without interruptions.
DebCamps are largely self-organized since it’s a time for people to work. Some prefer to work individually, while others participate in or organize sprints. Both approaches are encouraged, although it’s recommended to plan your DebCamp week in advance.
During this DebCamp, there are the following public sprints:
- Debian Boot Camp: An introduction for newcomers on how to contribute to Debian more deeply.
- GPG keys 101: Get your keys ready for DebConf’s key signing party: An introduction to PGP/GPG keys and the web of trust, primarily targeting those new to Debian who don’t have a GPG key yet.
In addition to the organizational part, our colleague Andrew also attended and arranged private sprints during DebCamp:
- Debian Installer hacking: Debian installer is a complex project with multiple components. We had an on-site d-i hacker, Alper Nebi Yasak, who guided us in addressing issues specific to zh_TW locale users in the Debian installer.
- LXQt/LXDE hacking session: LXQt and LXDE are lightweight desktop environments for Linux users. Our colleague Andrew Lee leads the LXQt team in Debian and also provided assistance to the LXDE team in the absence of their original team leader from Ukraine.
It also allows the DebConf committee to work together with the local team to prepare additional details for the conference. During DebCamp, the organization team typically handles the following tasks:
- Setting up the Frontdesk: This involves providing conference badges (with maps and additional information) and distributing SWAG such as food vouchers, conference t-shirts, and sponsor gifts.
- Setting up the network: This includes configuring the network in conference rooms, hack labs, and video team equipment for live streaming during the event.
- Accommodation arrangements: Assigning rooms for participants to check in to on-site accommodations.
- Food arrangements: Catering to various dietary requirements, including regular, vegetarian, vegan, halal, gluten-free (regular, vegetarian, vegan), and accommodating special religious and allergy-related needs.
- Setting up a conference bar: Providing a relaxed environment for participants to socialize and get to know each other.
- Writing daily announcements: Keeping participants informed about ongoing activities.
- Organizing day trip options.
- Arranging parties.
Conference talks
The conference itself started on Sunday 10. September with an opening, some organizational stuff, GPG keysigning information (the fingerprint was printed on the badge) and a big welcome to everyone onsite and in the world.
Most talks of DebConf were live streamed and are available in the video archive. The topics were broad from very technical (e.g., “What’s new in the Linux kernel”) over organizational (e.g., “DebConf committee”) to social (e.g., “Adulting”).
Schedule: https://debconf23.debconf.org/schedule/
Videos: https://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2023/DebConf23/
Thanks a lot, to the voluntarily organized video team for this video transmission coverage.
Lightning Talks
On the last day of DebConf, the traditional lightning talks were held. One talk in particular was noticed, the presentation of extrepo by Wouter Verhelst. At NetApp, we use bookworm-based Debian ThinkPad’s. However, in a corporate environment, non-packaged software needs to be used from time to time, and extrepo is a very elegant way to solve this problem by providing, maintaining and keeping UpToDate a list of 3rd-party APT repositories like Slack or Docker Desktop.
Sadya
On Tuesday, an incredibly special lunch was offered at DebConf: a traditional Kerala vegetarian banquet (Sadya in Maralayam), which is served on a banana leaf and eaten by hand. It was quite unusual for the European part of the attendees at first, but a wonderful experience once one got into it.
Daytrip
On Wednesday, the Daytrip happened and everybody could choose out of five different trips: https://wiki.debian.org/DebConf/23/DayTrip
The houseboat trip was a bus tour to Alappuzha about 60 km away from the conference venue. It was interesting to see (and hear) the typical bus, car, motorbike and Tuktuk road traffic in action. During the boat trip the participants socialized and visited the local landscape outside the city.
Unfortunately, we had an accident at one of the daytrip options. Abraham a local Indian participant drowned while swimming.
https://debconf23.debconf.org/news/2023-09-14-mourning-abraham/
It was a big shock for everybody and all events including the traditional formal dinner were cancelled for Thursday. The funeral with the family was on Friday morning and DebConf people had the opportunity with organized buses to participate and say goodbye.
NetApp internal dinner on Friday
The NetApp team at DebConf wanted to take the chance to go to a local restaurant (“were the locals go eating”) and enjoyed very tasty food.
DebConf24
Sunday was the last day of DebConf23. As usual, the upcoming DebConf24 was very briefly presented and there was a call for bids for DebConf25.
Maybe see you in Haifa, Israel next year.
https://www.debconf.org/goals.shtml
Authors: Andrew Lee, Michael Banck and Noël Köthe
Open Source Summit is the world’s largest, all-encompassing open source conference. Topics such as the latest infrastructure software, development on the Linux kernel and current works in open source communities are discussed. Until now, open source databases were a missing part of the conference program.
However, databases such as PostgreSQL® or Apache Cassandra are one of the most important pillars in modern open source infrastructures.
Together with the Linux Foundation, we are pleased to announce that this year’s Open Source Summit North America and Europe each will have their own database track.
Together with Sunil Kamath (Microsoft) and Divya Bhargov (Pivotal), our Managing Director Dr. Michael Meskes forms the program committee for the new track of the event.
Dr. Michael Meskes comments this in his blog post at the Linux Foundation as follows:
“The open source database track will feature topics specific to databases themselves and their integration to the computing backbone for applications. The track will focus on databases of all kinds, as long as they are open source, and any deployment and integration topics.”
The complete blog post of the Linux Foundation can be found here.
The Linux Foundation and the program committee are looking forward to plenty of submissions for this track. Presentations can be submitted until 16 February (North America) and 14 June (Europe).
This year’s Open Source Summit North America will take place in Austin, Texas. Whereas the Open Source Summit Europe will be hosted in Dublin, Ireland. Both events are once again backed by credativ with a sponsorship.
This article was originally written by Philip Haas.
From mid to late June credativ attended 3 consecutive conferences in Asia. The Open Source Summit Japan, the LC3 China and the PG Open China.
Open Source Summit Japan
As in the previous year, the Open Source Summit Japan was held again at the Ariake Conference Center on Odaiba, in the Bay of Tokyo. In order to cover the increasing number of participants, the event area was extended by several rooms. Accordingly, there was plenty of space for everyone.
In addition to a large number of technical presentations, mainly on containers, cloud and applications for automotive, there were also business and strategy orientated talks. All visitors could find topics of interest for themselves.
Specifically the presentation “Is There an Open Source Business Model: YES or NO?” by Jeffrey Borek (IBM) and Stephen Walli (Microsoft), deserves special mention, as it was the starting point for extensive discussions that day. Jeffrey and Stephen each gave their views and then gave the floor to the attendees to mix ask questions or give comments. The title being worded as it is doesn’t really explain the topic in detail. What the talk really was about is the question if a Open Source business model exists for large software companies.
Further to be emphasized is the presentation by our CEO Dr. Michael Meskes, whose question ”Is There a Future for Open SourceLC3 China
LC3 China (LinuxCon + ContainerCon + CloudOpen) was held in Beijing at the China National Convention Center. In the immediate vicinity of the Olympic Green Olympia Park, which was built for the 2008 Olympic Games. Most of the presentations were held in English, although the vast majority of those attending were from China. A very welcoming gesture that definitely contributed to the international character. A large number of lectures with technical and business topics were held over the 4 days. Particularly interesting were the so called “office hours” as a separate position on the schedule. For this, 3 tables were provided at which discussions within the community could take place. On the whole, LC3 seemed to be a platform for China’s largest IT companies, but it also showed that hacker groups and student groups have their own place in the community. We were certainly very happy to be able to participate and are looking forward to the next year. Postgres’ growing success and the well-attended PostgreSQL® conferences, which have been held in China since 2015, led to the first PG Open China being held at the Hotel Nikko New Century Beijing this year. The aim of this conference was to provide a starting point for the Chinese PostgreSQL community and strenghthen its connection to the global PostgreSQL community . For or this purpose, an international committee was established consisting of Bruce Momjian, Joshua D. Drake, Oleg Bartunov, Ray Feng and Dr. Michael Meskes. After introducing this committee in a keynote, the event rooms were used for presentations and talks from the Chinese community. Joshua D. Drake and Oleg Bartunov also held a presentation. All lectures were translated with the help of an interpreter, so that all those present with less understanding of the English language nuances could comprehend everything. The number of visitors of the PG Open China fortunately exceeded expectations and as such that the growth potential can clearly be seen. Especially with the focus on connection to the international community, the conference will certainly grow significantly over the next few years. It is therefore highly probable that we will be back on site next year. We were very happy to be one of the fist to participate in the PG Open China. Last weekend, DebCamp, which is the pre-event of the largest Debian conference worldwide – DebConf, started. This years DebConf will take place in Taiwan from July 29th to August 05th. After we already took part in this years MiniDebConf in Hamburg, we are now also going to visit Taiwan to attend the DebConf, also because credativ is sponsoring the event this year. Even if the flights last 16 hours on average, the anticipation of the colleagues is already great and we are very curious what the event has in store for its visitors. Meanwhile the packed lecture program has been published. There will be around 90 presentations in 3 tracks on the following 8 topics: Many of the presentations can even be streamed. The links are as follows: We are especially looking forward to the SPI BoF (Software in the Public Interest – Birds of a Feather) and the DSA BoF (Debian System Administrators – Birds of a Feather), in which our colleague and Debian sysadmin Martin Zobel-Helas participates. For us at credativ, the Job Fair is of particular importance. Here we meet potential new colleagues and hopefully many visitors interested in our company. If you want to have a chat with our colleagues: Noël, Sven and Martin will be available for you at the Job Fair and on all other days of the event. In addition to exciting discussions, we of course hope for one or two interesting applications that we will receive afterwards. The Job Fair takes place one day before DebConf18, on 28 July. Of course there will also be the “Daytrip” this year, which will show the conference visitors the surroundings and the country. Participants have a whole range of options to choose from. Whether you want to explore the city, go hiking, or hold a Taiwanese tea ceremony, there should be something for everyone. In addition to the daily breakfast, lunch, coffee break and dinner, there will be a cheese-and-wine party on Monday 30 August and a conference dinner on Thursday 2 August. Our colleagues will attend both events and hopefully have some interesting conversations. The free operating system Debian is one of the most popular Linux distributions and has thousands of users worldwide. Besides Martin Zobel-Helas, the credativ employs many members of the Debian project. Also our managing director, Dr. Michael Meskes, was actively involved in Debian even before credativ GmbH (1999) was founded. This also resulted in a close and long-standing bond with the Debian project and the community for credativ. This article was originally written by Philip Haas. Debian 9 “Stretch”, the latest version of Debian, is about to be released and after a full-freeze on February 5th everyone is trying its best to fix the last bugs that are left. Upon entering the final phase of development in February the test version was “frozen” so that no more packages could be added or removed without the approval of the release team. However, Stretch has some bugs left, which need to be resolved until the release date, especially the so called release critical bugs (RC). For this purpose, numerous Debian developers host worldwide meet ups. These meet ups are a long standing tradition and are lovingly called “Bug Squashing Party”. Despite the cute name, these events usually turn out to be one the most focused, intense and hard working days in the life cycle of a new Debian version. Pressured by the upcoming release date, everyone gets together to get rid of the nasty release critical bugs and focus on unfinished packages. This weekend, from the 17th to the 19th of March, the Debian developers from credativ are hosting a Bug Squashing Party in the German Open Source Support Center in Mönchengladbach. The Open Source Support Center employs the likely biggest number of European Debian developers in one place. Therefore credativ GmbH is providing the location and technical infrastructure for everyone who decided to join the Bug Squashing Party. We hope that this year’s meeting is going to be as successful as in the previous years. Developers from all neighbouring countries took part in past events and some even found their future employer. Coordinating the event are: Martin Zobel-Helas “zobel” (Debian system administrator) and Alexander Wirt “formorer” (Debian Quality Assurance). If you would like to participate, feel free to sign up! We are looking forward to your visit. Here is the announcement on the mailing-list: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2017/02/msg00006.html Here is the entry in the Debian wiki: https://wiki.debian.org/BSP/2017/03/de/credativ This article was originally written by Philip Haas.
PG Open China
Lectures, Talks and BoFs
Job Fair
Daytrip and other events
Debian and credativ