LCA has a special place in my heart.

It has been happening now for 20 years (!). This year it was in Christchurch, New Zealand. Nope, nothing weird about it, keep it cool.

Linux Conf runs for five days. The first two days are mini-conferences, the last three the main conference. Contrary to what you’d expect, it’s a conference about all the things open. Open source communities, open hardware, open source products, team, processes, documentation, security. A little bit of everything.

Between talks we have the amazing BoFs (Birds of a Feather) sessions spontaneously happening for all sort of topics. This year I managed to learn how to knit!

Also tried a slackline and went to karaoke. Friendly people, nice talks, nice friends. The conference happens half IRL and half via email/twitter.

And next day video somehow always manage to provide livestream and release all videos in a couple of hours, which is nothing sort of a miracle imo.

So here’s my curated list of talks, for those interested.

Keynote: #WeAreNotWaiting: how open source is changing healthcare

Dana Lewis

So, hacking an artificial pancreas anyone?

Open Source Superhumans

Jonathan Oxer

Jonathan explains how tech can be used to help people living with disabilities.

Really good talk.

Right to Not Broadcast

Karen Sandler

This lady is amazing. She advocates for the our rights to not broadcast our health information, which is shared a lot further than we’d expect.

Open Source Magnetic Resonance Imaging: From the Community to the Community.

Ruben Pellicer Guridi

Want to create your own MRI? Maybe you want to take a look on this talk.

Facebook, Dynamite, Uber, Bombs, and You.

Lana Brindley

A little bit of history on how software has been used on not-so-morally-right positions.

“I’m sorry Dave, I can’t do that”: Ethics in Software Development

Dr. Morgan Leigh

Very interesting talk on ethics in Software development.

Being kind to 3am you

Katie McLaughlin

Some nice tips for on-call you.

Keynote: Beyond README.md

Rory Aronson

Open Source farming bots. I’m fairly sure I don’t need more to convince you to watch it.

Apathy and Arsenic: a Victorian Era lesson on fighting the surveillance state

Lilly Ryan

Comparing our attitude to mass surveillance and how Victorian Era interacted with arsenic.

The Value of an Apology

Jen Zajac

Reckoning on Linus’ public apology.

The Tragedy of systemd

Benno Rice

Systemd is terrible, isn’t it? Benno dives into why is that. You don’t need a bunch of knowledge on systemd or linux to enjoy this talk.

The Robots Won’t Take Away Our Jobs — Let’s Reframe the Debate on Artificial Intelligence

Martin Krafft

Very thought-provoking talk about AI, ML, and robotics.

Autopsy of a Browser

Erin Zimmer

Netscape, Internet Explorer, Browser engine who? If you want an overview on browser history and what are they doing, this is a very nice talk.

Stepping up the game against Web trackers

Martin Krafft

If you are interested on some firefox privacy plugins.

How Much Do You Trust That Package? Understanding The Software Supply Chain

Benno Rice

So you think NPM is bad, that javascripts dependencies are bad? Check this talk.

What the dep is going on with Go dependency management?

Adam Harvey

A nice overview on what has been happening with dependency management for Go (the language).

Writing Viruses for Fun, not Profit

Ben Dechrai

A nice demo of some very common techniques used by viruses. It’s a demo, so quite easy to follow.

Expanding the Soft Skills Toolkit: The Art and Science of Diagramming

Adam Moszt

Nice tips on creating diagrams.

Maybe you are keen on some random demos? For example, Sequencing DNA demo, hacking an SD card demo Quantum computing demo

Next year, LCA is going to Gold Coast, QLD. I hope to see you all there!