Speakers and Talks

User namespaces are at the heart of many interesting technologies that allow isolation and sandboxing of applications, for example running containers without root privileges and sandboxes for web browser plug-ins. In this tutorial, we'll look in detail at user namespaces, building up a basic understanding of what a user namespace is and going on to questions such as: what does being “superuser inside a user namespace” allow you do (and what does it not allow); what is the relationship between user namespaces and other namespace types (PID, UTS, network, etc.); and what are the security implications of user namespaces? We'll also explore some simple shell commands that can be used for creating and experimenting with user namespaces in order to better understand how they work. Along the way, there will hopefully be time for a few live demos.

You maintain an Open Source project with great code? Yet your project isn’t succeeding in the ways you want? Maybe you’re struggling with funding or documentation? Or you just can’t find new contributors and you’re drowning in issues and pull requests? Open Source is made up of many components and we are often better-trained in methods for writing good code, than in methods for succeeding in the other dimensions we want our project to grow. In this talk we’ll explore the different components of an Open Source project and how they work together. After this talk you’ll be well-equipped with a ideas and strategies for growing, cultivating, and nourishing your Open Source project.

For your project to succeed, all of its non-code components must be well-maintained. What are these different components and what methods can we learn to maintain them?

• Build real relationships with your sponsors and determine ways how both sides can benefit from this relationship, don’t just ask people for money.
• Establish a good communication system with your contributors: Keep them informed, listen to their feedback and input, make them feel heard.
• Thank the people who worked on ticket triage or marketing, not just those who wrote code, in your release notes.
• Make it easy for new contributors to get started: Write and maintain good documentation, answer questions in a friendly and timely manner.
• Market and evangelize in the right places and at the right time: Give conference talks, organize sprints, keep your project’s Twitter account active, always curate new and interesting content on your blog or website.
• Implement a Code of Conduct and enforce it if needed: Make your project a safe space to contribute for everyone.

With these methods and a half-dozen others, you’ll handle beautifully all the components your project needs to succeed.

In times when a major infection vector is email, it is relevant to use existing protection mechanisms (SPF, DKIM, DMARC, DNSSEC, STARTTLS etc) to protect your company and your company's customers. This presentaion by Fredrik Söderblom from StoredSafe will show how you can protect incoming and outgoing emails with relatively simple means, as well as run you through emerging techniques such as MTA-STS, TLS-RPT, ARC etc.

The standards community develops specifications. The FOSS community implements standards. The FOSS community also develops industry standards. How does this the interaction function? And is it working well? How do policy makers interact with the FOSS community to set safety standards and other requirements? What is the relationship between standards-essential patents and FOSS? What comes first, specification or implementation? Where does innovation happen, and what is the platform to develop consensus on technical standards in a market segment? Based on research work at TU Berlin and for the Joint Research Center of the European Commission and the work of the Open Invention Network to protect key FOSS projects from patent litigation, the presentation will discuss the current state of the debate at the European and international level, and provide an outlook on how the roles and functions of standards-development organisations and the wider FOSS community are converging. No live demos, unfortunately.

If you ever skimmed through a README, tried to follow a quickstart tutorial, attempted to decipher an error message, or typed '--help' in your console, congratulations -- you have encountered documentation!

Long gone are the days of massive books with never-ending stories about your software. Today's users are smarter and less patient, which means that we no longer need to document *all the things*, as long as what we do document is clear, concise, helpful, and accessible. And that's where the real work starts.

Documentation requires some attitude adjustment, since prose doesn't neatly compile into binaries as code does. But Don't Panic(tm)! No matter what your role is, you can apply a few key principles from the technical writing world to make your project more docs-friendly, and therefore more user- and contributor-friendly.

The future of computing is tiny. Most computers are not desktop, laptops, tablets or mobile phones, but microcontrollers. Small, integrated systems with a few KB of RAM. And their presence is ever growing. Last year alone 31 billion (!) of them were shipped, up from 23 billion in 2015. And they get more capable every day. A modern embedded system has threads, can run Python or JavaScript, and use machine learning models. Why are you not developing for them yet?

In this talk you'll learn that microcontrollers are not scary, that there's no magic involved, and that working in very constrained systems is actually very fun! You'll also learn a thing or two about getting things to run for years on a battery, try that with a web app. In this talk we'll use Mbed OS, the largest open source Real-Time Operating System for microcontrollers. In 2018 over 17,000 commits were landed in the project, it has over 400 unique contributors, and is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.