0.4 2026 2026-10-23 2026-10-24 2 00:05 https://pretalx.seagl.org https://pretalx.seagl.org/media/2026/img/SeaGL_logo_SoY1wrG.svg America/Los_Angeles Room 250 Keynote 2026-10-23T09:10:00-07:00 09:10 00:30 If you think Linux dating all the way back to 1991 is old, wait'll you hear about AT&T UNIX. This talk is a whirlwind tour of ancient UNIX quirks that existed long before Linus ever started kernel hacking; quirks we've all accepted in the community and have become so inured to working around that we don't even think of them as problems anymore, if we think of them at all. Come learn some history, learn some real-life gotchas and how to avoid them, and some words of wisdom all the greybeard old-timers forgot to give you. 2026-238-the-mv-command-doesn-t-move-things-other-stuff-new-users-don-t-know Keynote Toby Betts en false https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/TGRTZU/ https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/TGRTZU/feedback/ Room 250 Keynote 2026-10-23T09:40:00-07:00 09:40 00:30 As a hobby, I started building a personal web app to solve my needs as a Python community organizer and a public speaker. I call these my own “secret codes”, but there’s nothing secret about it. These are all open source Python web apps built on Django. Why build my own when there are existing SaaS products out there? Using SaaS products are free but they have hidden costs like: needing to accept third party cookies, having your data used/trained, having to pay for more powerful features. In this talk I'll walk through what I built, why I built it instead of reaching for free tools, and what it would take to let others use it too. Convenience, privacy, and trust are worth paying for. 2026-311-when-free-costs-more-than-you-think-open-source-infrastructure-for-all Keynote Mariatta en As a hobby, I started building a personal web app to solve my day to day needs as a Python community organizer. A QR code generator app, a personal scheduling calendar, surveys for collecting community feedback, and an expense tracker. I call these my own “secret codes”, but there’s nothing secret about it. These are all open source Python web apps built on Django. Why build my own when there are existing solutions out there? There are pre-existing SaaS products that can solve these for me. Why not just use forms and spreadsheets? They are free, and without maintenance. While it’s true some of these you can get for “free” without paying, but they have hidden costs like: needing to accept third party cookies, having your data used/trained, having to pay for more powerful features. Building your own apps looks like overkill, and at first it is. But once you've paid that, others come for free: additional apps for the same cost of hosting. What you get is an app without any ads, third-party cookies, trackers, and full ownership of your own data and code. In this talk I'll walk through what I built, why I built it instead of reaching for free tools, and what it would take to let others use it too. Convenience, privacy, and trust are worth paying for. false https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/JTFWJK/ https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/JTFWJK/feedback/ Room 250 20-Minute Talk 2026-10-23T10:30:00-07:00 10:30 00:20 Digital badges promise portable, verifiable recognition, but in practice, they’re locked behind proprietary platforms, expensive subscriptions, and rigid workflows. For many nonprofits and open communities, that makes them unusable. BadgeFed rethinks digital credentials for the open web. Built on the Open Badges standard and the ActivityPub protocol, it brings badge issuance, sharing, and verification into the Fediverse, fully open source, self-hostable, and designed to run on Linux. This talk explores how federated social infrastructure can replace centralized credential platform and build sustainable recognition systems without vendor lock-in. 2026-199-badgefed-open-decentralized-badges-via-activitypub Everything Else Maho Pacheco en A few years ago, while volunteering at a nonprofit, we kept running into the same blocker: digital badge platforms were simply not an option. Cost, lock-in, and lack of flexibility made them incompatible with volunteer-driven work. The idea of recognizing contributions kept dying—not because it lacked value, but because the tooling wasn’t built for us. BadgeFed emerged from that gap. BadgeFed is an open-source, federated badge system that combines: Open Badges for standard, portable credentials ActivityPub for federation and distribution A self-hostable .NET application designed to run on Linux Instead of issuing badges from a centralized platform, BadgeFed treats credentials as federated objects. They can be created, shared, discovered, and verified across independent instances—similar to how Mastodon federates social content. This unlocks new possibilities: Organizations fully own their credential infrastructure Badges persist beyond any single platform or issuer Recognition becomes part of the social web, not a silo We’ll also look at real-world applications through community-driven credentialing efforts, where nonprofits can deploy their own instances and participate in a shared, federated ecosystem false https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/UC3VVG/ https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/UC3VVG/feedback/ Room 250 20-Minute Talk 2026-10-23T11:00:00-07:00 11:00 00:20 A talk on how modern rockets use software (often times Open Source) to accomplish nigh-impossible tasks, such as taking off from Earth or very accurately getting to a certain orbit. Goes into a simulation I have made, which includes naive flight software capable of takeoff and orbit. 2026-296-what-is-a-flight-computer-anyway Everything Else Ian Botashev en **Overview** The entire talk will be based primarily around flight software for rockets, with some specific examples from NASA. It's hard to talk about specifics, since a lot of it is considered as government secrets, however there's some really interesting topics on how rockets navigate themselves (Like the classic, "the missile knows where it is by subtracting where it isn't from everywhere else"), what sensors it talks to, and et cetera. Some specific examples would be how the Apollo flight computer worked (It's so incredibly cool, and it's 60 year old technology! Written on MB's of ram! How? I'd love to talk about that!) **My own flight software** I would love to showcase as a simple example a simulation I've made of flight software. I have a very crude simulation of the Earth, gravity, and a basic rocket with a gimbal thruster, and how I was able to write the flight software for it to be able to accomplish a complex mission goal. It's not terribly complex, and I believe is an interesting starter for anyone who might be curious. **Okay, but how is this related to Open Source?** A lot of rockets, from what little the public knows, use open source software! For example, SpaceX's dragon uses embedded linux in some of it's systems. Some other really cool software I'd want to highlight is things such as *OpenRocket* (I'd leave a link here, but I'm afraid it might be flagged as malicious) which is used by enthusiasts to design rockets and test them, all open source. false https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/TUEC9T/ https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/TUEC9T/feedback/ Room 250 50-Minute Talk 2026-10-23T11:30:00-07:00 11:30 00:50 A small effort to keep old laptops out of landfills grew into The Computer Upcycle Project, a community upcycling program that's refurbished 3,000+ computers for people in need. This talk shares how a local donation program in Olympia, WA turned into a full-scale computer reuse effort — breathing new life into old hardware with a mix of Linux systems, including Debian, Bazzite, Fedora, and our own Nixbook OS, a simple, stable, auto-updating NixOS-based build. Learn how thoughtful design, the right OS for the right machine, and community action turn e-waste into opportunity. 2026-340-from-e-waste-to-empowerment-the-story-of-the-computer-upcycle-project Everything Else Mike Kelly en A small effort to keep old laptops out of landfills grew into The Computer Upcycle Project, a community upcycling program that's refurbished 3,000+ computers for people in need. This talk shares how a local donation program in Olympia, WA turned into a full-scale computer reuse effort — breathing new life into old hardware with a mix of Linux systems, including Debian, Bazzite, Fedora, and our own Nixbook OS, a simple, stable, auto-updating NixOS-based build. Learn how thoughtful design, the right OS for the right machine, and community action turn e-waste into opportunity. false https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/DEKVE9/ https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/DEKVE9/feedback/ Room 250 50-Minute Talk 2026-10-23T14:00:00-07:00 14:00 00:50 There is a vast treasure trove of free Latin language pedagogical content available on the Internet, but shockingly little of it is in plaintext -- the greppable, diffable, interoperable, and eternal format that is the fundamental substrate of GNU Emacs. In this talk I'll demonstrate how I use both local and cloud-hosted ML models to transform recorded Latin audio into glorious structured plaintext that not only encodes the text itself, but also its morphological and semantic context. Thus transformed, we can now render the text with attached metadata that enables powerful word-at-point features like linguistic details in the echo area, accurate dictionary lookups, and audio playback with precise word alignment. 2026-243-learning-an-ancient-language-with-an-ancient-text-editor Education Mike Hamrick en Slides: https://muppetlabs.com/~mikeh/latin_emacs.html Live website: https://fabulae.orbilii.com false https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/ANUBN3/ https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/ANUBN3/feedback/ Room 250 20-Minute Talk 2026-10-23T15:00:00-07:00 15:00 00:20 Open hardware and open software run on shared knowledge, but we mostly share the things that worked. The dead ends and half-broken attempts stay private, even though they often save the next person the most time. I want to make the case for sharing those too. My example is a flashlight I tried to 3D print from filament that conducts electricity. The first version barely lit up, and I posted it anyway as a "limited success." The second one worked. I will walk through both, with real measurements and a straight answer on what the filament is good and bad at. Cheap, printable, open hardware makes it low-risk to share the messy parts. And yes, I will bring flashlights to hand out. 2026-323-share-the-dead-ends-too-a-hands-on-argument-for-sharing-your-failures Community and Culture Trevor Johnson en [Presentation slides available here.]([url](https://ataary.com/seagl2026-sharethedeadendstoo.html)) false https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/PY7UXH/ https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/PY7UXH/feedback/ Room 250 20-Minute Talk 2026-10-23T16:30:00-07:00 16:30 00:20 Functional programming is often seen as difficult or only relevant to languages like Haskell, but its core ideas can make anyone a better programmer. In this beginner-friendly talk, we'll explore concepts like pure functions, immutability, higher-order functions, and type-driven design using familiar examples from Python and Java before seeing how Haskell brings these ideas together. You'll learn how functional thinking leads to code that's easier to understand, test, and maintain, and leave with practical techniques you can apply in your everyday projects, regardless of the language you use. This talk is meant for an audience with no experience with Functional Programming and Haskell. 2026-335-functional-programming-101 Education Dyuti De en Have you ever wondered why so many experienced developers recommend learning Haskell or functional programming, even if you never plan to use it at work? This session answers that question by introducing the core principles of functional programming in a practical, approachable way. We'll cover pure functions, immutability, function composition, higher-order functions, and how strong type systems can catch bugs before your code runs. Rather than focusing on theory, we'll connect these ideas to problems every developer faces. By the end of the talk, you'll understand why functional programming has influenced nearly every modern language and how adopting its mindset can help you write simpler, more reliable, and more maintainable software—whether you're contributing to open source, building production systems, or just looking to become a better thinker. false https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/SG7B3F/ https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/SG7B3F/feedback/ Room 332 20-Minute Talk 2026-10-23T10:30:00-07:00 10:30 00:20 Even though finishers will nearly always get the credit, starters are the secret power that changes the world. From the US civil rights movement to the push for community-controlled social media, finishers have always relied on dozens or hundreds of starters to lay the groundwork for them. We should do more to reward starters in open source. 2026-253-be-a-starter-not-a-finisher-for-yourself-and-for-the-world Community and Culture Deb Nicholson en Starting new things is undervalued. We love to reward people for finishing things and getting to the end of things, even though sometimes that’s easier. The really hard part is starting, whether we’re talking about software projects, creating new habits or changing the world. Without new approaches and new perspectives, our world becomes change-resistant and it becomes easier to let the biggest and most comfortable entities do what they’ve always done. Even though finishers will nearly always get the credit, starters are the secret power that changes the world. From the US civil rights movement to the push for community-controlled social media, finishers have always relied on dozens or hundreds of starters to lay the groundwork for them. We should do more to reward starters in open source. In this talk I will cover why many of us shy away from starting new things and why you personally might want to do more starting. false https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/V7RKJW/ https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/V7RKJW/feedback/ Room 332 20-Minute Talk 2026-10-23T11:00:00-07:00 11:00 00:20 To non-engineers, geeks often sound like a chorus of doom. When we say a codebase is "complete garbage" we're usually describing a 0.x% deviation from technical excellence - but the sales and markting teams quickly update their resumes. This talk explores the "Engineerspeak" dialect: why our brains are wired to prioritize edge cases, minutia, and fatalistic honesty. We'll break down how to bridge the gap between technical rigor and organizational communication without losing our integrity. Expect humour, horror stories, and a healthy dose of self deprecation. Let's optimize the most buggy stack interface: the one between teams. 2026-200-engineerspeak-translation-skills-between-teams Community and Culture Bri Hatch en false https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/97YMUS/ https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/97YMUS/feedback/ Room 332 50-Minute Talk 2026-10-23T11:30:00-07:00 11:30 00:50 AI assistants like Claude and ChatGPT are powerful, convenient, and a trap. The cost, in addition to the price itself, is that your data and your code are being handed off to a corporation and who knows who else. Breaking your dependency on cloud AI takes effort and sacrifices convenience, but the gap between local LLMs and frontier models is narrowing every day. The hidden challenge is the harness, everything that wraps around the LLM to make it useful. This talk shows how to run an agentic AI stack using open source tools and whatever hardware you have to make useful tools without giving up your privacy and your sovereignty. 2026-304-sovereign-ai-running-useful-self-hosted-agents-on-modest-hardware Open-Source AI and Data Science Brady Dibble en Cloud AI assistants are convenient, and they come with strings: metered pricing that changes, rate limits, models deprecated out from under your workflows, terms of service you don't set, and all your data leaving your premises. This is a practical tour of the alternative: an agentic AI stack you host and own. - We start honestly, with the tradeoffs. Open-weight LLM models give up some reasoning quality, some context length, and the polished tooling the big vendors ship. If you don't have crazy hardware, speed is also an issue. But for many agentic use cases, speed isn't necessary. Knowing what you actually lose is what lets you decide when local is enough and when a cloud call earns its keep. - Then we rebuild capability with open tools. Consumer hardware can run modern open-weight models with fast enough for real, useful work. From there we borrow from HPC. We'll show how to make a beowulf cluster with cheap secondhand mini-PCs, turning hardware most people would recycle into useful compute. A small routing layer puts every backend behind one OpenAI-compatible endpoint, so the agent tools you already run target your hardware instead of a vendor. - The missing piece is that once you have an LLM running locally, the hard part is the harness. - We close on the reason that matters most: sovereignty. Your data stays on your network, the model you validated behaves the same next month, you can run fully offline, and the cloud becomes an option you choose rather than a foundation you depend on. You will leave knowing how to get up and running with the hardware you have at home to begin making AI work for you and under your control. false https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/MAJNGL/ https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/MAJNGL/feedback/ Room 332 20-Minute Talk 2026-10-23T14:00:00-07:00 14:00 00:20 On March 27th, 2026, a coalition of European companies including IONOS and Nextcloud announced "[Euro-Office](https://github.com/Euro-Office)," an AGPLv3-licensed fork of OnlyOffice. While public discourse has rightly focused on the legal nuances of the AGPLv3 license, this talk will rather focus on one of the project's other key objectives: liberating the codebase from a vendor accused of "open-washing." 2026-240-art-of-the-fork-reclaiming-community-trust Community and Culture Edward Ly en Using Euro-Office and other high-profile forks as case studies, we will examine the critical role forks play when corporate stewardship fails and trust breaks down. We will move beyond the headlines to dissect the distinct factors that determine whether a fork thrives or withers, revealing that community cohesion and governance are often more decisive than code quality alone. Finally, we will provide a practical framework for developers considering a fork, drawing on historical precedents to outline the risks, benefits, and essential strategies for building a sustainable community. false https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/7QPE7N/ https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/7QPE7N/feedback/ Room 332 20-Minute Talk 2026-10-23T14:30:00-07:00 14:30 00:20 ### Have you ever wanted to achieve website perfection? Ever wanted to get (and maintain) four 100/100 scores in Lighthouse? Make automated accessibility tests like Axe DevTools pass completely? ... Even tame the most verbose and difficult of checkers, the W3C Validator? I am here to show you how to get there and show you its not as hard as it seems. Even under such rigid constraints, a lot of creativity is possible. In this talk I will demonstrate a handful of sites that are simple and pass tests with flying colors, and also show how they manage to be incredibly useful and communicate information. And best of all, you can make one too! 2026-337-chasing-perfection-websites-that-pass-all-the-tests Education airbr en For fun, we will embrace a practical kind of perfectionism for 20 minutes and accept nothing less than perfect. This talk is intended to be an engaging session showcasing several static websites created with a goal to pass as many quality performance and accessibility and code checker tests as possible that for many working websites might as well be an impossible dream. Despite these constraints, some of these websites have served very effective real world purposes and work well for humans, bots... and even AI Agents. An open source starter project, The HTML5 Boilerplate project, is chosen for a convenient starting point for teaching how to make such a website. Important and useful example tests including Lighthouse tests, Yellow Lab Tools, Arc Toolkit and the W3C Validator are introduced and discussed as to their merits and caveats. We may also run some tests on popular websites, just to see how wild the world can be venturing out of this cone of perfection to see how common imperfection always is in the real world. In this this talk we will question and critique the concept of perfection and the drawbacks of building to strict tests, while getting the joy of seeing some websites which achieve at high levels and learning skills to make our own. What does it mean to make a website where there are no more audits to respond to? Is it the end? Ultimately, I will leave you with some knowledge and skill to make your own "perfect website" and leave you completely free to make something different, but knowing a little more about the difference. false https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/WADZHG/ https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/WADZHG/feedback/ Room 332 20-Minute Talk 2026-10-23T15:00:00-07:00 15:00 00:20 It's larger than you can comfortably fit in your head. 2026-312-the-small-web-is-huge Community and Culture Romeo Solano en Come for an exploration of the "small" web. We'll explore what the small web is, why it's blowing up, how to participate in it as a writer and a user, and how to have FUN surfing the web again. There are a handful of huge websites that dominate the Internet and control the vast majority of users. This practice is antithetical to a free and open world wide web. In open rebellion to this trend, many Internet users have migrated some or all of their digital footprints onto smaller group platforms or individual sites. This talk will explore as many facets of this phenomenon as can fit in the timeslot. false https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/GQZEUY/ https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/GQZEUY/feedback/ Room 332 20-Minute Talk 2026-10-23T16:30:00-07:00 16:30 00:20 a simple guide on why and how to get started building a following or community on mastodon and/or the fediverse 2026-319-a-beginner-s-guide-to-mastodon-and-the-fediverse Community and Culture 🌈 vanta rainbow black 🌈 en false https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/NBZRNK/ https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/NBZRNK/feedback/ Room 332 50-Minute Talk 2026-10-23T17:00:00-07:00 17:00 00:50 Running thousands of snapshotted VMs pushes Linux networking to its limits. This talk covers battle-tested strategies balancing performance, isolation, and efficiency across large-scale topologies. We explore Geneve tunneling for scalable overlay networks, eBPF-accelerated networking for line-rate performance, and stateless NAT without connection tracking overhead. Prefix-based iptables/nftables rules scale to thousands of instances, while namespace pooling minimizes snapshot operation costs. We also address RTNL lock contention and its mitigation. Attendees will learn to architect network stacks for snapshotted workloads where VMs are cloned, restored, and migrated while maintaining security and predictable performance. 2026-292-network-infrastructure-at-10k-snapshotted-vm-scale Cloud and Infrastructure Shivendra SrivastavaPrashant Kumar SinghKshitij Gupta en Running thousands of snapshotted VMs presents unique networking challenges that push Linux networking primitives to their limits. This talk explores battle-tested strategies for designing large-scale network topologies that balance performance, isolation, and resource efficiency. We'll dive into practical solutions for high-density VM environments, covering: 1. Modern tunneling with Geneve for scalable overlay networks that outperform traditional approaches. 2. eBPF-accelerated networking to bypass kernel bottlenecks and achieve line-rate performance. 3. Stateless NAT techniques that enable network reuse without connection tracking overhead. 4. Smart firewall design using device prefix-based iptables/nftables rules that scale to thousands of instances. 5. Namespace pooling strategies to minimize creation/teardown costs during rapid VM snapshot operations. 6. RTNL lock contention and its operational impact on large-scale deployments, plus mitigation strategies. Attendees will learn how to architect network stacks that handle the unique demands of snapshotted workloads—where VMs are frequently cloned, restored, and migrated—while maintaining security boundaries and predictable performance. Real-world examples will demonstrate how these techniques reduce network initialization time from seconds to milliseconds and handle 10K+ concurrent VM instances on commodity hardware. false https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/FPTRLD/ https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/FPTRLD/feedback/ Room 340 20-Minute Talk 2026-10-23T10:30:00-07:00 10:30 00:20 As duopolies in technology continue to flex their power for purposes contrary to what users want to do with their machines, and governments insist upon pushing age-verification requirements into software and hardware, interest in Linux as an alternative (or the foundation of an alternative) continues to grow. However, Linux still holds a reputation as a technical and scary operating system for nerds. It needs a better "elevator pitch," a short, accurate, and interest-piquing description. Let's build one together! 2026-203-refining-the-linux-elevator-pitch Community and Culture Alex Byrne en As duopolies in technology continue to flex their power for purposes contrary to what users want to do with their machines, and governments insist upon pushing age-verification requirements into software and hardware, interest in Linux as an alternative (or the foundation of an alternative) continues to grow. However, Linux still holds a reputation as a technical, scary, complex operating system for nerds. Statements like "You're already running Linux on your phone" aren't enough to break that image, because of the work done to make Linux systems look friendly and abstract or obscure much of the technical details or customization options. And extolling the virtues of FOSS/FLOSS to people tends to make their eyes glaze over, unless they're already interested in such things. Helping get people interested in trying and sticking with Linux means putting together a useful elevator pitch for it - something that is descriptive, informative, and can be told to someone in an elevator ride between levels of a building.. So that's what we're doing - taking our elevator pitches for running, trying, using Linux, and refining them in directions so that more non-technical people will be interested in using Linux in the practicalities, instead of being interested in it in the abstract. false https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/HANBXQ/ https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/HANBXQ/feedback/ Room 340 20-Minute Talk 2026-10-23T11:00:00-07:00 11:00 00:20 This is a presentation about how to pick a Linux distribution. For new users, it can be a guide. For intermediate and experienced users, it can be a refresher as to what's out there. 2026-320-choosing-a-distro Education Larry Cafiero en I will be discussing what to look for in a Linux distribution, after writing the "Distro of the Week" column for FOSS Force & continuing with distrooftheweek.com. false https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/Q7WBAS/ https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/Q7WBAS/feedback/ Room 340 20-Minute Talk 2026-10-23T14:00:00-07:00 14:00 00:20 **Learn how to use the `man` command on Linux to read documentation!** Man pages have a reputation for being cryptic, intimidating, and written for people who already know the answer. However, they're available offline, pre-installed in most places, and consistently structured. Once you can "RTFM" (read the friendly manual), you'll never go back! This talk is for people who have never heard of man pages, and those who've never opened one without fear and trepidation. I will: - Use Ubuntu and basic command line tools - Explain how to navigate the document structure of `man` pages - Solve some simple problems using `man` pages - Install some tools to make your `man` prettier and friendlier 2026-246-beyond-help-a-beginner-s-guide-to-man-pages Languages and Tools Joni Hendrickson en false https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/VWDXGN/ https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/VWDXGN/feedback/ Room 340 20-Minute Talk 2026-10-23T14:30:00-07:00 14:30 00:20 I have high demands for my private computing! Data privacy, control over my CPU usage, fast performance on old hardware, and organized retrieval of uncountable local research notes for fiction and non-fiction writing. I am not a developer, and rarely use the command line, but I know what I am doing, and know my limits. Here is one way to be a user of a Linux desktop environment. 2026-334-using-debian-linux-desktop-gui-since-2003-a-user-tour Everything Else Delib en Advanced user? Configuration meddler? A long time user shares typical workflow and file-management for practically all-local data. Writing, layout, graphics, and archiving research topics; typical uses. This is a simple tour of a Debian user's 'every-day-drivers'. LibreOffice, Emacs org-mode, Thunar, Meld, XFCE, Thunderbird, Evolution, Calibre, Dino, Firefox, FoxtrotGPS, KeePass, Gramps, Osmo, Filezilla, VLC, Scribus, Blender, GIMP, Xournal, Qalculate, AisleRiot. Fish (and like that) false https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/LYXQ8H/ https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/LYXQ8H/feedback/ Room 340 20-Minute Talk 2026-10-23T15:00:00-07:00 15:00 00:20 Resist Tech Monopolies (RTM) runs a game called Mapbattle, at which participants use public transportation to go around the city and make Open Street Map (OSM) contributions to gain territory. The presentation will go over the idea of the game and what inspired it (spoiler: SeaGL 2025 is part of that story), the technology behind the game's website, and the observed community benefits of running this game as well as other benefits we hope the game achieves as it keeps running. 2026-249-mapbattle-how-rtm-is-building-a-community-around-osm Community and Culture mmarLinnea en By visiting [this](https://mapbattle.resisttechmonopolies.online/game/birthday) or [this](https://mapbattle.resisttechmonopolies.online/game/abcd) you can see how the map looks like for a game. This website is [an open source](https://git.coopcloud.tech/RTM/mapbattle) tool we developed for the players to use alongside other OSM tools and apps they can use. Rules of the game are made to encourage bonding with your teammates and interacting with your city and its transportation network. false https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/ELD8HD/ https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/ELD8HD/feedback/ Room 340 20-Minute Talk 2026-10-23T16:30:00-07:00 16:30 00:20 AsciiDoc is a great text tool for documentation from simple notes to books. Asci iDoc is human readable plain text markup. Since it's plain text, AsciiDoc lends itself to revision control systems. Even WebUI systems like GitHub wiki can support it. AsciiDoc was created in 2002 as a human readable format for publishing DocBook XML. Via different backend processors, it can also be converted to many other formats. Plain text, revision control, and wikifiable is a trifecta of sysadmin documentation awesomeness. Attendees will become familiar with use cases, document conversion, and basic syntax. 2026-300-asciidoc-plain-text-for-fancy-output Languages and Tools lufthans en AsciiDoc is a great text tool for documentation from simple notes to books. AsciiDoc is human readable plain text markup. Since it's plain text, AsciiDoc lends itself to revision control systems. Even WebUI systems like GitHub wiki can support it. AsciiDoc was created in 2002 as a human readable format for publishing DocBook XML. Via different backend processors, it can be converted to many other formats as well. Plain text, revision control and wikifiable is a trifecta of sysadmin documentation awesomeness. Important AsciiDoc features: * human readable plain text markup * easy learning curve * many output formats ( HTML, DocBook, man pages, ODF, ePub, PDF, and more ) * widely supported * ease of revision control * detailed, complex formatting available when needed * GPLv2 After attending this session, audience members will be familiar with basic AsciiDoc syntax and exporting to different backend formats. They will also learn advantages and disadvantages of AsciiDoc and Markdown. false https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/PAPGUT/ https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/PAPGUT/feedback/ Room 340 50-Minute Talk 2026-10-23T17:00:00-07:00 17:00 00:50 This talk will discuss the importance of environmentally-minded technologists, how you can become one, & what technologies there are for us to be excited for. Additionally it will discuss why "AI" isn't amongst them. It was originally presented at the Wakaatu Arts & Action! Club in Nelson, New Zealand. 2026-306-alternate-technological-futures-what-we-sacrifice-at-the-altar-of-ai Community and Culture Adrian Cochrane en false https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/S3AADB/ https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/S3AADB/feedback/ Room 250 50-Minute Talk 2026-10-24T09:00:00-07:00 09:00 00:50 The world is rich in old computers that work just fine and unprotected free Wi-Fi. Every time I stay in a hotel room, I wonder "how long could you hide a computer here?" The first volley came in the form of https://pretty.dubious.computer/, an internet radio station coming live from an old cell phone I plan to hide in a bike locker somewhere in Bellevue. There's some fun technical challenges and my own personal sense of whimsy. You like whimsy, right? Oh yeah, come ask for goodies after the show, too. 2026-288-dubious-computers-in-bad-colocation Performance Art Princess Grace en Honestly, I'm not really sure what would go in a description that doesn't go in the abstract. false https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/WZLRPK/ https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/WZLRPK/feedback/ Room 250 20-Minute Talk 2026-10-24T10:00:00-07:00 10:00 00:20 What if we developed a Federated network that was intentionally... not connected to the internet? An off-line first, off-grid network... Where limited range and high degrees of locality were a feature to help build connections between neighbors? Where slow and possibly infrequent, sporadic connectivity between neighborhoods was a design intention, maybe even a special occasion? Where information could be delivered by bicycle, or seriously, why not carrier pidgeon? There is free software to make this possible already, time to put the pieces together! 2026-331-off-grid-inter-neighborhood-networks Community and Culture Vagrant Cascadian en false https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/7ML7A8/ https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/7ML7A8/feedback/ Room 250 20-Minute Talk 2026-10-24T10:30:00-07:00 10:30 00:20 I find that it's difficult for me to transform the words in my head into the audio that people can hear. Sometimes, even the right words sound wrong due to the auditory properties of how I say them. To be able to get the words out with more ease, in ways that feel more comfy, I've created a portable text to speech software, built on top of open-source hardware and existing FLOSS. 2026-317-tool-assisted-speech-diy-speech-synth-for-aac-and-affirmation Languages and Tools Kasanwa-Solane Aster-Hope en false https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/ZBH9WX/ https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/ZBH9WX/feedback/ Room 250 20-Minute Talk 2026-10-24T11:00:00-07:00 11:00 00:20 So you've got a great open source project. How do you get people to try it? One senior technical writer shares how to write tech docs that cater to all skill levels, get users started quickly, and represent your project to the world via SEO and AEO. It's easier than you think! 2026-329-tricycle-riders-to-muscle-car-drivers-tech-docs-for-everyone Everything Else Liz Kellebrew-Davies en false https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/V7VWRF/ https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/V7VWRF/feedback/ Room 250 50-Minute Talk 2026-10-24T11:30:00-07:00 11:30 00:50 It's time once again for the 2026 FLOSS Research Roundup! Hundreds if not thousands of research papers are written every year about open source software! How should we make sense of it all and what does it mean? In this talk, I carefully harvest the latest research from around the world, filter it for real world relevance, shake it up with the latest trends, and then serve it up with a slight dash of attitude. 2026-310-today-i-learned-the-2026-floss-research-roundup Everything Else Kaylea Champion en You'll hear about the most recent findings from the systematic study of topics that are key to our community, such as: * What can academia tell us about solving our real-world problems in FLOSS? * Which engineering, cybersecurity, design, and management practices really make a difference? * How can we work together to build more awesome communities to sustain open source projects? You'll walk away from this beginner-friendly talk with: * evidence about what works and what doesn't * analysis about the size and scope of the challenges we face * new ideas for taking action personally and inside organizations * plus all the insights from data, quick tips, and news you can use I can pack into my timeslot. See you soon! false https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/QASBMG/ https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/QASBMG/feedback/ Room 250 20-Minute Talk 2026-10-24T14:00:00-07:00 14:00 00:20 "Why isn't my distribution shipping the latest version yet?" It's a question almost every Linux user, developer, or platform engineer has asked. Behind that seemingly simple question lies one of the most important—and least understood—engineering tradeoffs. Every package update must balance security, compatibility, regression risk, reproducibility, dependency management, architecture support, release criteria, and long-term maintenance. What appears to be "slow" is often deliberate engineering designed to reduce risk for millions of users. 2026-339-linux-s-secret-sauce-why-linux-releases-take-so-long Everything Else Autumn Nash en In this session, we'll follow a package from its upstream release to its arrival in a Linux distribution, exposing the decisions, tradeoffs, and engineering practices that happen along the way. We'll explore why maintainers backport fixes instead of always upgrading, why regression prevention often outweighs feature velocity, and how release engineering quietly protects the software ecosystem that nearly every modern application depends on. Whether you build applications, manage infrastructure, contribute to open source, or operate production systems, you'll leave with a practical mental model for understanding how Linux software reaches your systems—and a deeper appreciation for the engineering judgment required to balance innovation, stability, and trust at scale. Linux distributions aren't slow. They're deliberate, because reliability is built one engineering decision at a time. false https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/P7BGWG/ https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/P7BGWG/feedback/ Room 250 20-Minute Talk 2026-10-24T14:30:00-07:00 14:30 00:20 What would a Linux text interface designed for mobile devices look like? At the beginning of 2026, I started building a Nix-based distribution with a TUI shell, called Huckleberry. It's intended for small laptops and handheld devices with keyboards. We'll follow the development, starting with a search for existing, well-supported console software, and continuing to developing a bespoke menu-based mobile shell, and integrating the various selected and developed software into a portable Nix configuration available for public testing. We'll look at some of the issues that have come up from early Huckleberry use, and review the process of designing and redesigning huckleberry to patch them. 2026-307-building-a-mobile-tui-environment Education nc krantz-abfajer en false https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/9ARKBD/ https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/9ARKBD/feedback/ Room 250 20-Minute Talk 2026-10-24T15:00:00-07:00 15:00 00:20 This talk explores how systemd-nspawn, a little-known but extremely versatile native process encapsulation subsystem for Linux, could be used as a resource-efficient and secure alternative to containers or virtualization as part of a privacy-conscious self-hoster's toolbox. 2026-315-a-paranoid-s-guide-to-resource-efficient-self-hosting-using-nspawn Cloud and Infrastructure Tim Knox en nspawns (a portmanteau of "namespace" and "spawn") are a built-in feature of the systemd startup manager that uses existing kernel-based process encapsulation technologies to implement FreeBSD jail-like functionality on Linux. In a way, it's something that would sit between Docker and chroots, combining the diverse configuration options of the former with the simplicity and flexibility of the latter. Surprisingly, considering how ubiquitous systemd is across most major Linux distributions, nspawns are a relatively obscure feature. In this talk, I will cover how I found my application for it as part of my journey of switching from cloud-based to on-premise self-hosting, along with what upsides and drawbacks I encountered while setting up an nspawn-based environment on a Red Hat-based system hooked to my own home LAN. false https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/PQ9AJ7/ https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/PQ9AJ7/feedback/ Room 250 20-Minute Talk 2026-10-24T16:30:00-07:00 16:30 00:20 OpenHospital is a free and open-source health information management system used in hospitals across Uganda, Ethiopia, and other resource-limited regions. Built by Informatici Senza Frontiere, it manages patient records, laboratory results, pharmacy stock, and statistical reporting for healthcare workers and patients who depend on it daily. As a team of four undergraduate students contributing to OpenHospital for the first time, we each tackled separate “good first issues” across reporting infrastructure, interface consistency, localization cleanup, and GUI data accessibility. This talk shares what we worked on and what we learned contributing to production healthcare software as first-time open source contributors. 2026-252-contributing-to-openhospital-a-team-s-first-open-source-experience Everything Else Abhigna NimmagaddaLikitha NanduriKok Hua NgAditi Bonepalli en This proposal is from a team of four undergraduate students at the University of Washington Bothell contributing to OpenHospital as part of a university open source software course taught by Dr. Kaylea Champion. Each team member independently worked on a separate Jira issue over a four-week period. Our issues were all labeled “good-first-issue” and ranged from GUI usability improvements (OP-278), to codebase cleanup (OP-1383), to refactoring (OP-1024), to exploring structural improvements to the report localization system (OP-214). We envision this as a short 20 minute talk with four team members presenting in person, each covering our own components paired with a shared introduction and reflection section. We think our experience is valuable both to first-time contributors and to maintainers interested in understanding the onboarding experience from a student perspective, including what felt confusing, what helped, and how large open source projects can feel more approachable to new contributors. false https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/WPLG8R/ https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/WPLG8R/feedback/ Room 250 Keynote 2026-10-24T17:00:00-07:00 17:00 00:30 How did we build community for, with, and around FOSS technologies? Why does community-building matter now more than ever? In this talk, I will present a book project where I respond to these questions. As I will demonstrate, one of the most powerful things we accomplished as a community was to build common circuits for the circulation of people, projects, and technologies that played an "infrastructural" role. Given the infrastructural nature of FOSS projects, they have become not only invisible but also vulnerable to all sorts of enclosures (including the newest ones with the rise of commercial AI). Join me in this talk to discuss how we can respond to the present technopolitical challenges and thrive as a collective of FOSS collectives. 2026-342-common-circuits-hacking-alternative-technological-futures Keynote Luis Felipe Rosado Murillo en false https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/J3DHQX/ https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/J3DHQX/feedback/ Room 250 Keynote 2026-10-24T17:30:00-07:00 17:30 00:30 Not since the 1980s has technology changed as quickly as in recent months. Reprising the early PC era, large for-profit companies dictate the pace and control of Large-Language-Model-backed generative artificial intelligence (LLM-gen-AI). The FOSS community was built on sharing and collaboration. As in past eras, the big tech companies pushing us to use their products do not share these goals, preferring to make us dependent on what they sell rather than giving us control over the technology we use. We must push back, but we must do so carefully and strategically. 2026-341-the-llm-gen-ai-elephant-in-our-foss-room Keynote Denver Gingerich en The rise of for-profit LLM-gen-AI has created huge, and very reasonable, backlash against these companies, and sometimes against LLM-gen-AI itself. Outside the FOSS community, nearly every software developer uses LLM-gen-AI tools every day. Within our FOSS world, many have been able to continue their work without LLM-gen-AI tools, and many FOSS projects support this approach. Tension abounds between these approaches, and our community has been drawn into the fray. Of course, we shouldn't accept useless slop; yet, LLM-gen-AI does not necessarily represent an existential threat to FOSS. Disciplined and careful usage of LLM-gen-AI may — just as early PCs did — provide us with the very tools we need to improve our community, and undo the bad policies promulgated by the big tech companies who sell the most popular versions of these tools. In this talk, we will explore the landscape of LLM-gen-AI tools, and how they can help and hurt FOSS, while also examining the inequalities that LLM-gen-AI will exacerbate if we fail to tackle them. false https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/HTMWCX/ https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/HTMWCX/feedback/ Room 250 Social 2026-10-24T18:10:00-07:00 18:10 01:00 KDE: The Documentary tells the story of the pioneering open source community that gave computer users a free and open alternative to proprietary desktops like Windows. 2026-344-kde-the-documentary-the-story-of-free-software-underdogs-screening en The story starts in 1996, when Matthias Ettrich, a student at the University of Tübingen, posted to a Usenet group asking for programmers to help build a desktop for Linux. What followed became KDE, one of the largest free software communities in the world. KDE made Linux usable as a desktop for people who weren’t system administrators, giving it a complete, consistent graphical environment at a time when there was none. The film covers the highs and lows of three decades of KDE: the Qt licensing fight and the rivalry with GNOME; the success of KHTML, the browser engine that became the basis of Apple’s WebKit and Google’s Chrome; and the contentious release of KDE 4 and the rebuild that followed. Along the way, KDE invented much of how open source communities organise themselves. KDE e.V., the non-profit association that holds the project’s legal and financial responsibilities while leaving technical decisions to contributors, became a model for many other open source projects. Today, KDE is the default desktop on major Linux distributions and on the Steam Deck, and the centre of a whole ecosystem of free and open software. Above all, the film is about the people who built KDE, the friendships that formed, and why generations of developers have given their free time to it. https://kde.org/ true https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/VRLA9S/ https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/VRLA9S/feedback/ Room 332 50-Minute Talk 2026-10-24T09:00:00-07:00 09:00 00:50 There are a lot of convenient & cheap ways to learn about AI, but most of them come with strings attached. Usually, free AI services use your data to train their AI models - a privacy nightmare. Instead of relying on proprietary AI providers, you can take advantage of open-source software and open weight models to learn AI concepts while maintaining your privacy. In this talk, I'll share the setup I use, giving a lightning-fast tour of many open source projects that can be used to learn about AI engineering at home, with a focus on inference with small models, image generation and recognition, and basic observability. 2026-295-privacy-first-ai-learning-in-your-own-homelab Open-Source AI and Data Science Kevin Howell en false https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/RLWVJU/ https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/RLWVJU/feedback/ Room 332 20-Minute Talk 2026-10-24T10:00:00-07:00 10:00 00:20 For decades, OSS communities grew through visible friction. Newcomers filed issues, asked questions, and in doing so announced their arrival. Maintainers noticed. Contributors became maintainers. Now AI is removing that friction. Through an NSF-backed program, stdlib conducted 100+ stakeholder interviews and found the same pattern: newcomers increasingly rely on AI instead of engaging with communities. Maintainers never see them arrive, and communities lose opportunities to grow contributors. This session is intended for maintainers, OSPO leads, and researchers interested in the future of FOSS, Attendees will leave with evidence-based frameworks for growing contributors & community as the old, accidental on-ramps quietly disappear. 2026-326-the-invisible-newcomer-rebuilding-oss-governance-post-ai Community and Culture Neeraj Pathak en This talk is based on a problem widely faced by OS organisations around the ecosystem in today's time. Although AI has accelerated the growth and productivity of individuals but beginners tend to overplay this great resource in un-rightous activities. As the recent Google Summer of Code program was announced we maintainers saw a huge wave of contributors flooding the pipelines with AI based PRs. 1000+ lines of code just to fix a lint error, nearly causing `npm` security threats and breaking functionalities with un-desired deps. OSS depends on it contributors, maintainers and Admins. But only a technically and truthfully strong contributor can become a great maintainer on which the growth of the project depends. To make a tall and strong building the foundation should be built very-strong and without any faults. This talk is deeply referenced by the scenarios we faced in the last one year. The sole aim behind this talk is to provide other OS maintainer and OSPOs with real-world strategies and best-practices which they can follow in their projects to sustain and maintain the project. But again, How do we know our strategies have worked around? After taking 100+ interviews with our stakeholders as part of NSF-Pose Program we say clarity for 2 things. First what challenges has the OS community faced in the last few years after AI became huge. Second, How our strategies sustained this shift to provide its users with the best-experience and Technology used actively by 10,000+ users world-wide This talk is referenced by a year worth of effort from the stdlib community which we expressed through our blogs:- - https://blog.stdlib.io - https://blog.stdlib.io/ai-and-the-invisible-newcomer-in-open-source/ false https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/UFFNQ9/ https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/UFFNQ9/feedback/ Room 332 50-Minute Talk 2026-10-24T10:30:00-07:00 10:30 00:50 Introducing Painted Wolf Code. This Apache-2.0, local-first AI coding agent is built and tuned for open source models. Agent personas and coordinator guidance use composable templates, multi-step work is declarative YAML workflows you extend, compose from templates, or override per project. An evidence ledger grounds agent output. Security scanning is built in, including supply-chain, secrets, and SAST, wired into workflow gates. Local first, open source AI coding has arrived. 2026-327-painted-wolf-code-local-first-ai-coding Open-Source AI and Data Science ChrisBeckman en What it is - Apache-2.0 local-first AI coding agent built and tuned for open source models - Local first, totally customizable. Built in Go. Why another agent? - To be frank, I built it for myself. I wanted greater transparency than SaaS products, but couldn't find an OSS project that was quite what I wanted, though many excellent options do exist. - Painted Wolf Code is a workflow engine: everyday coding runs a workflow manifest; catalog flows share the same phases, gates, and proofs. Customization - Composable templates for agent personas, coordinator surfaces, and structured tool guidance. - Declarative YAML: extend bundled recipes, compose from templates, or author your own. - Reusable primitives (intake, review loops, human approval, fan-out) — engine furniture, not prompt luck. Evidence & grounding - Durable evidence ledger captures tool output at commit time. - Typed citations verified against observed results. - Gates require proof before advance; scan and worker findings feed the same ledger. Security scanning - Built-in SCA, secrets detection, and SAST. - Runs at project open; wired into workflow gates and closeout. Takeaways - Customize deeply, verify claims, gate on evidence and scans — orchestration tuned for open source models. - Local-first, open source AI coding has arrived. false https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/9WFVJB/ https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/9WFVJB/feedback/ Room 332 50-Minute Talk 2026-10-24T11:30:00-07:00 11:30 00:50 Whether you want to explore launching a new open-source project, dip your toe into freelance work, or identify a good startup idea, getting direct input from many potential users or customers will ensure that your venture is received with enthusiasm and receives the support necessary to be sustainable over the long term. Unlike user experience research that asks about specific features of specific software already in development, customer discovery is a process of learning what the customer most needs and wants. In this session, the presenter will conduct and debrief several abbreviated interviews to demonstrate effective techniques for uncovering valuable unexpected data to inform new ventures and pivots. 2026-332-a-live-interactive-demo-of-customer-discovery-interviews Open-Source Careers Jocelyn Graf en It’s important not to start a business or project that serves other people with assumptions of what they want and need. Most people are agreeable. If you ask them, “Do you like this tool? Would you buy/use it?”, they will show enthusiasm. It can be painful (and sometimes expensive!) to realize that all those people were just being nice. Even if they had good intentions, they never had the drive to go out of their way to use or buy the software, hardware, or service you worked so hard to develop. So how do you find out what people will really buy or use? Customer discovery is a semi-structured method for identifying what really motivates potential customers. The goal is to discover what would motivate the customer so strongly that it would be worth abandoning a routine: It could be switching to an open-source tool, hiring you as a freelancer, or buying a product. The presenter has been coaching a team of local techies interested in starting a worker-owned cooperative in Seattle. The group has recently conducted dozens of customer discovery interviews. Members of this team will play the role of customer in the live demo interviews. Audience members will also have the option to volunteer to be interviewed. This demo session will start with a hypothesis about a customer need: “If [product/service] solves [problem] then [specific type of customer] will adopt the solution.” The audience will learn how to document and analyze the interview data to support or disprove the hypothesis. The customer discovery process takes practice, but is not particularly complex, and audience members should leave the session with the knowledge to conduct and analyze their own interviews. false https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/Y8SEUY/ https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/Y8SEUY/feedback/ Room 332 20-Minute Talk 2026-10-24T14:00:00-07:00 14:00 00:20 Modern services depend on far more than compute- databases, messaging, observability, CI/CD, service meshes, IAM, and cloud resources must all work together reliably. Managing these consistently across production, staging, and developer environments remains a persistent challenge.This talk explores how open-source Kubernetes operators can be combined to build complete, isolated, self-service environments. Using Config Connector, Istio, Argo CD, observability operators, and Crossplane, we'll see how infrastructure, networking, deployment automation, and cloud resources compose into higher-level platform APIs. 2026-287-building-production-environments-with-open-source-kubernetes-operators Cloud and Infrastructure Pushkar Gopalakrishna en Production services rarely consist of a single deployment. They often require databases, message queues, cloud functions, observability systems, deployment pipelines, IAM policies, networking controls, and service mesh configuration. Provisioning and operating these resources consistently across multiple environments is often one of the largest sources of operational complexity. In this talk, I will share practical lessons from building a platform that provisions complete, isolated service environments using Kubernetes-native APIs and open-source controllers. The foundation of the platform consists of specialized Kubernetes operators: • Config Connector for managing GCP resources such as Spanner, BigQuery, Pub/Sub, GKE, and IAM. • Argo CD operators for GitOps-driven deployment automation. • Humio and Chronosphere operators for logging and observability services. • Istio CRDs for service mesh configuration, traffic management, ingress, mTLS security, and progressive delivery. • Crossplane compositions for combining these lower-level resources into reusable platform abstractions. Rather than exposing dozens of infrastructure resources to application teams, Crossplane compositions create higher-level APIs representing complete service environments. A single platform resource can automatically provision cloud infrastructure, networking, deployment pipelines, observability tooling, security controls, and service mesh configuration while enforcing organizational standards. Attendees will learn how Kubernetes operators can be used as building blocks for platform engineering and how Crossplane enables teams to build opinionated self-service platforms without sacrificing flexibility. false https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/X9BRZY/ https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/X9BRZY/feedback/ Room 332 50-Minute Talk 2026-10-24T14:30:00-07:00 14:30 00:50 The security characteristics of LTS vs regular release models haven't fundamentally changed over the last 30 years, but the general community sentiment toward them has. As adversaries develop and adopt better tools, it becomes increasingly important to understand the difference between LTS and regular release models. This talk will explore the basic challenges that exist in keeping LTS systems secure, especially as they continue to ship code that is no longer maintained upstream. 2026-244-security-showdown-lts-vs-regular-release-systems Security and Privacy Gordon Messmer en This talk will cover: different interpretations of security as a characteristic of a product, the difference between stable software and unmaintained software, what patch frequency actually says about security, the purpose of LTS systems, how LTS systems are developed and maintained, previous studies about security vulnerabilities, and some guesses about how things will change in an era where our adversaries use AI tools to accelerate the discovery of vulnerabilities and the deployment of exploits. false https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/RZGP8K/ https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/RZGP8K/feedback/ Room 332 20-Minute Talk 2026-10-24T16:30:00-07:00 16:30 00:20 Programming sucks. Code sucks. It's hard to read, hard to test, and hard to maintain. Only a handful of people can understand any particular software project. All users deserve to be able to control their own software, regardless of their capacity to code. Because of this, we should develop tools for visual, literate, and natural language programming that lets anyone instruct their computers what to do without relying on LLMs and Generative "AI". 2026-325-towards-understandable-software Languages and Tools Anna Liberty en false https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/AAER9Y/ https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/AAER9Y/feedback/ Room 340 50-Minute Talk 2026-10-24T09:00:00-07:00 09:00 00:50 Kalpa Desktop is a transactional and atomic desktop, based on openSUSE and KDE Plasma One of it's aims is to provide a more flexible system that is a middle ground between a traditional read-write Linux installation, and more modern read-only "immutable" systems This talk will focus on introducing the Concepts and Architecture of the Kalpa Desktop, and some of the difference with other similar products 2026-245-kalpa-desktop-trying-to-provide-the-best-of-both-worlds Everything Else Shawn W Dunn en false https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/7KCHEN/ https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/7KCHEN/feedback/ Room 340 20-Minute Talk 2026-10-24T10:00:00-07:00 10:00 00:20 Most Linux distributions ship precompiled software or compile at install time. This talk explains the architecture and design of a distribution that does not do this. ccix, an experimental Linux distribution, explores deferred compilation (a.k.a. compilation-on-demand), a technique where applications are compiled when they are invoked. It uses a custom 'deferred compiler' based on libtcc that can resolve symbols and cache outputs. It is performant, compiling bzip2 in 0.07 seconds on an i5-6500. 2026-298-what-if-your-linux-install-is-just-source-code Systems and Platforms prescott2m en ccix is a Linux distribution that uses deferred compilation. This means that there are almost no binaries on the entire system. As a consequence of doing this, ccix: - Is easier to port across architectures than conventional distributions - Is hackable, as there is no need to download or recompile packages to modify them - Has a small package repository as source code compresses well - Avoids ABI mismatches between packages, as they aren't linked against specific versions - Does not use any build systems like Autotools, CMake, etc. - Has superior transparency, as there are no binaries to obscure potentially unwanted behavior ccix's compiler is relatively simple, as it's mostly just a wrapper over libtcc. However, unlike `tcc -run`, it can automatically resolve symbols, put together multi-file codebases on the fly, and cache outputs. To make C source code executable, ccix uses the binfmt_misc feature in the Linux kernel. false https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/L9SWK7/ https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/L9SWK7/feedback/ Room 340 50-Minute Talk 2026-10-24T10:30:00-07:00 10:30 00:50 We’re packaging the Sparrow Bitcoin wallet as a bootstrappable build for Guix, targeting the open-firmware POWER9 platform. This goes beyond an ordinary reproducible build in that Sparrow and its full dependency graph, including build tools, are built from source, minimizing the number of parties you need to trust in order to trust the program. In the process, we’re bringing the modern Java ecosystem to Guix, and solving problems from Rust bootstrap compiler bugs to a circular dependency between Gradle and Kotlin. I’ll cover the problems we’ve encountered and the tools and techniques we’re using to address them. I’ll also discuss future directions for the project, such as using Guix to package Sparrow for Debian and other distributions. 2026-338-bootstrappable-sparrow-on-power9-with-gnu-guix Languages and Tools Robin Templeton en false https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/WTMAS8/ https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/WTMAS8/feedback/ Room 340 50-Minute Talk 2026-10-24T11:30:00-07:00 11:30 00:50 Transactional systems offer a middle ground between Fedora Atomics, and their image based updating, and read-only filesystems and Traditional Fedora, with it's read/write filesystems, as they can be configured to do either, offering great flexibility. Transactional systems offer Atomic updating, offering the possibility of more reliable updating, more stable systems over time, and the ability to "rollback" snapshots, in case of issues. or for troubleshooting purposes. This talk will discuss the basic ideas behind Transactional Updates, how they're used in openSUSE, and what it takes to bring them to Fedora. 2026-316-transactional-systems-in-the-fedora-ecosystem Systems and Platforms Shawn W DunnNeal Gompa en Transactional systems offer a middle ground between Fedora Atomics, and their image based updating, and read-only filesystems and Traditional Fedora, with it's read/write filesystems, as they can be configured to do either, offering great flexibility. In a read-only context, transactional Fedora offers a minimal system, and workloads are handled through podman or docker containers, for server usage. On the desktop, toolbox, distrobox, flatpaks, and potentially other application delivery mechanisms can be used, while still providing the possibility of local modifications to the read-only filesystem, for things that just make sense to be delivered via RPM. In a read-write context, Transactional systems offer Atomic updating, offering the possibility of more reliable updating, more stable systems over time, and the ability to "rollback" snapshots, in case of issues. or for troubleshooting purposes. This talk will discuss the basic ideas behind Transactional Updates, how they're used in openSUSE, and what it takes to bring them to Fedora. false https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/9H9VZB/ https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/9H9VZB/feedback/ Room 340 20-Minute Talk 2026-10-24T14:00:00-07:00 14:00 00:20 The Signet Hardware Password Manager is an example of just how unstoppable open source hardware and software can be. This talk will include a payload that demonstrates how software password managers can be no better than a text file in the event of even just a momentary non-root compromise. I'll also explain how using hardware limits the damage. As you'd expect, all the hardware is open source and you can build your own at home, inspect compile the firmware and software, or extend it to do more. 2026-201-signet-hardware-password-manager Security and Privacy Adam en I'm the maintainer of the Signet and the sole manufacturer, but I am not the original creator. In fact, I've never been in contact with him. This is a story of a project which was successfully crowdfunded and then the creator mysteriously disappeared, leaving me with no source for buying another device. I'm a security researcher, not a hardware engineer, but I leveled up my skills and was able to keep this project alive. But this isn't just a story about the unstoppable power of open source, it's also a story showing the gap between the expectations of a senior security researcher and that of an average person, or even someone who is tech savvy. Many believe that because their software password manager is encrypted with something like AES256, that they're safe. If their computer was compromised, the attacker would only have the file with no way to decrypt it. Short of the attacker gaining root, they wouldn't be able to install a keylogger, so your password is safe, right? Yeah, not so much. The good news is that it's not hopeless. The damage can be limited even in the event of a compromise. Obviously the focus will be on how Signet accomplishes this, but we'll also touch on some other solutions such as FIDO2/passkeys, the role of 2FA. We'll also mention the limitations of all of these security solutions so you can better understand what it takes to compromise your systems and what the damage will be. false https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/LXPAAJ/ https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/LXPAAJ/feedback/ Room 340 50-Minute Talk 2026-10-24T14:30:00-07:00 14:30 00:50 Tired of relying on big Tech or klonky stacks? If so, come learn how to build self-hosted and scalable privacy-centered network infrastructure using mainstream FLOSS. This presentation explores complete DNS sovereignty with both LAN and WAN solutions. On the LAN side, it covers deploying OpenWRT on GL.iNet hardware with virtualized Pi-hole instances paired with Unbound for fast cached recursive DNS resolution and powerful network-level ad and tracker blocking. On the WAN side, it details securely hardening Unbound for public-facing use, with clustered Webmin for centralized management and Bind9 delivering authoritative DNS records. Geared toward home lab hobbyists, dedicated hosting, and data center colocation professionals. 2026-251-simple-scalable-privacy-unleashing-openwrt-pi-hole-unbound-bind9 Cloud and Infrastructure Jonathan Haack en In this session, Jonathan will guide attendees through building simple and scalable DNS infrastructure using only free, libre, and open source software (FLOSS). Jonathan will walk participants step-by-step through the LAN-side architecture: deploying OpenWRT on affordable GL.iNet hardware, setting up virtualized Pi-hole instances paired with Unbound to create fast, cached, recursive DNS that blocks ads and trackers. Jonathan will share real-world configuration tips, common pitfalls to avoid, and best practices he's learned along the way for smooth setup and integration that delivers excellent performance without complexity. Moving to the WAN side, Jonathan will demonstrate how to securely harden Unbound for public-facing scenarios, implement secure and clustered Webmin for reliable centralized management, and leverage Bind9 for authoritative public DNS records. Throughout the presentation, Jonathan will emphasize simplicity and scalability — showing how the same stack can grow from a home lab to dedicated servers and/or data center environments. Attendees will leave with a clear, actionable blueprint and the confidence to implement their own self-hosted, no-fee, and privacy-respecting DNS infrastructure. false https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/VECMJR/ https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/VECMJR/feedback/ Community Community 2026-10-24T19:30:00-07:00 19:30 03:00 Enjoy some refreshments and great conversation at Big Time Brewery located close to the University of Washington on the Ave. 4133 University Wy NE, Seattle, WA 98105 https://www.openstreetmap.org/?#map=19/47.657852/-122.313575 2026-343-social-at-big-time-brewery en Brewpub in yellow brick building open since 1988, drawing college crowd with suds, pizza & bar fare. true https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/BLMHFL/ https://pretalx.seagl.org/2026/talk/BLMHFL/feedback/