We are sponsoring the Friday night party at LinuxFest NorthWest 2019

Our team is excited to both attend and sponsor the Friday Night Board Games Night event at LinuxFest Northwest, which will be held again at Bellingham Technical College (WA state) on April 26 – 28, 2019. Click through to https://lfnw.org/ for details and to register.

It’s actually FREE to attend (tickets are optional) due to donations, event sponsors, and an army of grassroots volunteers. This year, we will be again sending a big part of our team to attend sessions, will be sponsoring the opening night party, and Richard & Rob will be presenting some hot topics as well! While the event is free, it of course does cost time & money to travel there. Here are some reasons to invest in your team members:

We have attended many times over the years. The LFNW community puts on a fantastic event. Low budget, volunteer run, great content and presentations. Free admission and parking – donations welcome of course. Great for geeks and also professionals looking to keep learning about new technologies and ways of doing things. It’s not a small event either – over 2000 people attend ever year.

Drop us a note if you plan to be there!

REASONS TO INVEST IN SENDING YOUR TEAM TO LFNW

Stay on top of new technologies that could help them be much more effective
Be better able to manage other employees or contractors that are handling these types of technologies
Find new ways of solving old problems, and new uses for old tools
Reward them for working so hard the last year!

GREAT CONTENT FOR EVERYONE – GEEKS OR NOT!

NEW Linux users – there are always topics for Newbies
Software developers – wide variety of programming topics with multiple languages, Git and more
Database administrators – MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL query optimization
Network administration
Cloud computing, including Docker, Kubernetes, Listio, Vagrant etc.
Security – what to do when you’ve been hacked, encryption, privacy

Even if you’re bored out of your tree, WA in spring is beautiful

RICHARD’S TOPIC: CHAT OPS – EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN!

Chat Bots are nothing new, but the buzzword mill has recycled bot excitement for a new generation. Bots are awesome and Chat provides an easy to develop and deploy user interface for Devops functions (and basically anything).

We will quickly run through a brief overview of the history of chat, and bots, what the new Chat Ops buzz word means, then jump right into the demo thunderdome by creating a simple bot deployed against an open chat room that the audience will be invited into. The audience will also be invited to follow along with the development, and hook in their bot into a chaos channel, all itself powered by a bot.

If all the technology co-operates, a good time should be had by all, but worst case I will have enough supporting slides so that everyone can get started bringing this recycled UI to help with their development teams needs, or whatever other system that a chat based UI could be handy.

ROB’S TOPIC: AUTOMATION WITH NODE-RED – FLOW-BASED PROGRAMMING FOR THE IOT

Node-RED is a flow based programming tool for connecting hardware devices, APIs and online services together in a new and interesting way – with little to no programming skills required at all.

In this session we’ll explore Node-Red and how I’ve used it for: