Simon Lyall's Blog

tips to build and repair empathy with other teams by Cait Macleod

• Consultant so often works with different teams
• Tips
• Signs
  • New to a Team and you notice weirdness
  • Feeling stressed or frustrated
• Observe
  • Team contexts (eg ops vs dev)
  • Common pain points.
  • Misunderstandings
    • Defensiveness – maybe something else is going on
  • self-awareness
• Influence
  • Working relationships with individuals
  • Giving Feedback – situation + behavior + impact
  • Challenge or Correct behavour
  • Restructure Interactions
  • Structural Change

I come to bury Ansible, not to praise it! by Daryl Tester

• Ansible
  • A set of tools doing Infrastructure as Code
  • Runs a Domain Specific Language
  • Agentless
  • Idempotent
  • Inventories, Playbooks, facts, state based
• Whats my beef with Ansible
  • Small Peeves
    • Transit python agent rather than true agentless
    • Lots of ssh sessions
  • Larger Peeves
    • Cognitive Overload with edge cases with launguage
    • YAML is difficult to work with. Lots of problems
    • Complexity of Variable precidence
    • Also – Global vars everywhere, lack of complex data structures, nested looping, blocks
• Can we do better?
  • Found I was sometimes bypassing Ansible to work with the direct python. But hard for others to understand
• Pyinfra
  • Inventories and deploys in python
  • Facts are loaded on demand
  • Requires a posix-ish shell at the other end
  • connectors are how we talk to a managed node ( ssh most common )
  • can run facts/operations from the command line
  • facts/operations are easily written/extended
• Mode of Operation
  • “run” the inventory – single remote command ssh session
  • connects to hosts
• On person project
  • Some others patching
  • Version 3 recently out
• Demo

Lightning Talks

• OER Collective
  • oercollective.caul.edu.au
  • Space to public Open Textbooks
  • Community, Grants, Professional development
  • Over 50 Open Books published. Creative Commons Licensed, Various formats besides just text
  • Have a talk to your librarian to find if OER Collective is the thing for you
• Disabled Data Sovereignty
  • Just say “disabled” . Word is okay
  • Against “Data Harms”
  • Disability-justice Informed
  • Ability is a temporary privilege
• Run a Conference
  • A brief history of the conference.
  • Wasn’t called Linux.conf.au at the start
  • Lots of changes. It evolves
  • Please run a conference, start small
• tax-ato
  • Update since announced in 2023
  • A personal income tax library in Haskell for Australians
  • Lots of updated features
  • Bugs, feature requests and patches welcome
• Quirkey Keyboard update
  • Hard to update everybody because they are all use different social media spaces
  • Use blogs, email cause searchable and open to everyone
• Our purpose and make sure thats what the system does
• OS solutions to protect daughter’s online browsing habits
  • Education
  • Content Filtering
  • Discussion and Verification
  • Only 7 so higher level of watching than older kids
  • Pi-hole filtering
  • Browser History
  • Browser policies
  • App pulls browsing history and sends to discourd every 5 minutes. Prometheus Metrics
• How to Program Human Beings
  • I am course talking about Scottish Country Dancing
• QMK Keyboard
  • Lots of magical macros
• ipv6
  • No NAT, No DNAT
• Quadlet – Running containers via systemd
  • included with podman
  • Does all sorts of cool stuff
  • Looks just like another systemd service
• Blue Hackers
  • In recent years added neuro-diversity – ASD, ADHD, Bipolar 1 and II, etc
  • Also plugging Sunshine Coast Security Conference in mid-2025
• A quick reminder about Gender
  • Not the same as Sex
  • Could mean several things
  • Lots of non-traditional genders
  • Can change
  • The GenderBread Person – www.genderbread.org
  • Lots of things only sorta connected
  • Gender question should be a text field

Conference Close

• Thanks everybody
• If you are keen to run your own conference ( eg EO 2026) contact the council
• Pycon Au 2025 coming later this year
• DrupalSouth Melbourne in March 2025
• Kiwipycon in November 2025
• DDD Melboune 2025 – 22 Feb – Dev conference

You’ve been laid off. Now what? by Mike Jang

• Author is older
  • Doesn’t advertise age
  • Limits Linkedin to more recent jobs
  • Sees reaction when potential employers see his age
• Empathy for the Hiring Company
  • What do they want, what are they looking for?
• 11 Steps after a layoff
  • Negotiate your layoff – eg in US extended medical insurance. From a different budget. The laptop
  • Applying for Unemployment
  • Regain Focus – Accept the job is going and focus on next step
    • Get over your anger. It shows up in Interviews
  • Setup a git repo with resume, stuff you are proud, samples, other professional stuff
    • Clone and customize repo per job potentially
    • Maybe a professional website
    • The git profile is not enough
    • Show you domain expertise – k8s, cicd – say what you have actually done
  • Don’t just ask for help
    • “Reaching out to my network”
    • Be credible – don’t say you “love the company that laid you off”
    • Add a headline with what your expertise do
    • Describe expertise and create posts about them
    • A good linkedin recommendations especially from company that laid you off is good
    • Craft recommendation for others to sign. Offer to write in return
    • Followup posts
    • Elevator pitch. Remind you contacts (cause contacts might only vaguely remember you)
    • Empathy for your contacts, they want to know what to say
    • Laid off groups: common ground
    • Chat groups. Slack, discord. Maybe don’t include those still with your ex-employer. Alumni groups ( job posts, referrals )
    • Social Media – Shares Solutions, Endorse others. Don’t abuse companies or people/groups.
  • Finding a Hiring Manger
    • Target a company. Check see any contacts on Linkedin that work there or 2nd level contacts that do.
  • Customize the Application
    • Match the job description
    • Customize your resume
    • Include a cover letter
    • 4-8 hours / company
    • If the company does open source then contribute to their OS
    • Don’t – No Generic Resumes
    • Link to portfilio and domain knowledge
  • Share your schedule
    • Set up a calendar (you can share a calendar, but block off some time for other other stuff and to show you are busy)
  • Show what you can do – When you should do extra
  • Prepare for the interview
    • Review all your stuff from above
    • Your stories, your portfilio
    • A closing statement, like an elevator pitch with stuff from the interview. Makes it easy for interviewer to prepare their report
    • Followup and thank
    • Help the Interviewer remember you. Followup and remind something postive from interview. But don’t nag after that
  • Negotiate an offer
• Non-Traditional Searches
  • Specialty Groups – OWASP, Y-Combinator
• Remember the Empathy
  • They want to solve problems. Show them you can solve those problems.
  • Like your elevator pitch.

Modularisation of Open-Hardware to Tackle the Digital Winter by Paul Gardner-Stephen

• Mega65 Project
• nlnet Foundation – Funded from the EU and in turn fund Open Source projects
• Digital Winter
  • What happens when our ability to build open hardware systems is broken?
  • Supply Chain Disruption
  • Regulatory Capture
    • Especially in Radio frequency space
  • Conflict or social unrest
  • Technology Passes Complexity Event Horizon
    • Already at there for chips
      • Protocol complexity for something like a web-browser
• If we want to make systems that can survive a digital winter
  • Needs to be simple enough to implement the software
  • Hardware needs to be at least simple enough to salvage parts for bad units
• Software
  • Simply enough to maintain and have a smaller attack surface
  • But enough complexity to be useful
  • Cut out dependencies
  • Cut out complexity and uneeded feature
  • Graceful degradation if offline or with lower resources
  • If device is small enough ( eg 64 MB of RAM) there is less room for the malware to hide
  • Browser in 32KB ( could be smaller if was in assembler )
• Previous Board was big
  • Took long time to iterate a new design. Lots to redo each cycle
• Module System Design Criteria
  • Large PAD size
  • Unambiguous orientation and placement
  • No sharp protrusions so easy to stack boards togeather
  • Relatively small
• Decisions
  • Half-round castellated Pins
  • Easy to attache and unattached boards from each other as you soldier.
  • Can add glitter to attached modules so tamper obvious
• Next
  • Design and fabricate various modules
  • Assemble and test
  • Design and fabricate simple case
• What you can do for your projects
  • Offline functionality
  • Segregate your subsystems
  • Energy and Comms sovereignty
  • Simple 80% alternatives / fall-back modes
  • Fell free to help with our project.

I skipped a couple of talks to do Hallway track and other stuff

Koha – not your average library system by Aleisha Amohia

• Name because software was made open source as a gift to the community
• Started in 1999
• First fully web-based opensource library system
• Bugs and external patches soon after
• Customizable and Configurable
• Used in 18,000+ libraries
• It is just a big database
  • Can be used as not just a library system
  • Can be used to catalog other stuff at organisations other than libraries like documents
• Configurable via CSS, fonts, languages, CMS, feature toggles, etc
• Customisable views for each branch are possible
• Special Beyond the code
  • Offline circulation
  • Supports non-ascii characters
  • Translation capability
• Is it harder to find people to work on stuff since it is writter in perl which is effectively a legacy language? – Has a good onboarding and support for devs and things still work
• What are challengers with it being open source? –
  • People worry about quality of OSS. Fix: Good robust quality procedures
  • Think it is free – Have good support that is worth paying for
  • DB backend – MySQL and MariaDB

The circle of life: The Digital Skills GitBook project by Sara King

• Working on project for last 5 years that is in the process of winding up
• tinyurl.com/5539zzpx <- more information
• Starting early 2019
• 5 years later project is coming to the end of a natural cycle
• Context
  • Group of 60 libraries looking for projects – CAUL Digital Librarians
  • Is there a book that teaches modern not-quite-technical computer skills?
• With Pandemic lockdowns everybody started working from home
• Why Gitbook?
  • “Book” is in the term helped
  • Similar project using github etc
  • CAUL eventually went Pressbooks, but not till later
  • Also qualified for free version
  • Learning git was a useful thing
• Did the community really need this? – Wasn’t checked in detail, but seemed a cool idea
• Happened at start of pandemic
  • Everyone online
  • Supportive community was good at start of pandemic
• Took some courses in git and other tools
• Did a prototype book on another subject to get the hang of the tech
• “Gave ourselves permission to not know what we were doing”
• Created chapters of the books to give outline
  • Each Chapter had 3 levels of knowledge in it. Novice, proficient, advanced
• Went public in late-2021
• Also did code of conduct, license, contributions guidelines
• Told people about it via various methods
• Worked to get people to contribute ad-hoc
• But didn’t get the amount of contributions they were expecting
• In 2023 University libraries having problems, budgets shrinking etc
  • People leaving or too busy
  • Some used experience on the project to get new more technical jobs
• No new people joining to replace those leaving
• 2025 reflecting on the project
• Process and product are different
• We equated enthusiastic about the idea and the process. But didn’t join in or wasn’t super into the product
• Not shared a lot or got many hits
• Goal of training people to create stuff was a big success
• People gained lots of confidence with new tech
• Support of CAUL was great, but no longer availbale
• Next? – If people like the process maybe we should talk about that
• Create a roadmap for other projects
• Hand it over to somebody else? Doesn’t seem to be interest

Skill Trees: Gamifying The Hard Things by Steph Piper

• A list of skills
• Each area has a series of skills that can be colored in.
• Design
  • Hexagons are good
  • Can be done in any order, hard to connect meaningfully
  • Simple, flexable milestones
• Reception
  • First on was 3d printing & modeling
  • Tested on makerspace student staff members. Good to identify gaps
• Benefits
  • Reduce imposter syndrome or on the other size overconfidence
  • Target areas for improvement
• Online on git – https://github.com/sjpiper145/MakerSkillTree
• How to make a skill tree
  • Flexibility, not too cost restrictive, globally applicable
  • Peer reviewed
  • Final skill tree and translation
• Book – The Learning Game by Ana Lorena Fabrega
• Beta testing book of a collection of these skills.
  • Good published through “Make: Magazine”
  • 68 tiles per tree, 1020 skill tiles in the book
• Tips for writing
  • Continue to evolve and improve
  • Do own illustrations was huge time saver from the publisher
  • Confidence in your work. The publisher will only do the final publishing
• Looking to fill the gaps
• Working on a kids version of the book

The Token Wars: Why not everything should be open by Kathy Reid

• The Token Wars
  • A resource conflict fought through technical, social and legal means
• What is a token?
  • An atomic unit of text taken from a larger collection called a corpus
  • text -> subwords tokens -> vectorization
  • Transformer architecture
  • Word embeddings capture semantic closeness of words
• Scaling up to billions of tokens
  • Train the relationships between tokens based on all the text
• The value of tokens and token economics and the actors in the token wars
  • Are the a public good?
  • No the are rivalrous either excludable or non-excludable
  • LLMs in 2024 were trained on 4 orders of magnitude data than 5 years ago.
  • Estimated 60-160 trillion tokens on the public web and some LLMs are trained on close to all of those
  • Synthetic Data especially low quality slop is polluting the Internet
  • Scrapers pick this up and train on it, concern about Model Collapse ( like a photocopy of a photocopy). Reduces the diversity of what it will produce.
• Key actors in the token wars
• Individual content creators
  • Included in corpus without permission
• Platforms with user-generated content
  • Seeking to get paid for their content ( eg Reddit deal with OpenAI )
• Archival Institutions
  • Australian National Film and Sound Archive: Maintain Trust, Transparancy, Create Public Value
• Private Companies
  • Anthropic: Model Context Protocol
• The AI Companies
  • Have used fair-use. Although some countries don’t have those
  • Companies blocking the common crawl
• Governments
  • Having trouble balancing interests
• Token Tactics – Protecting your token treasure
  • Data poisoning
  • Blocking bots and scrapers
• Data Sovereignty
• Futures
  • Hunt for more tokens
  • Better ways to block/prevent
  • Better understanding of the alateral damage of the resource conflicts

The Storage Shift by Steven Ellis

• Storage Data is critical for business
• Requirements are always growing
• Organisations already have existing solutions and relationships
• Three Dimensions of data
• Participants ( dev, ops, product ) all have different requirements and views
• Where did you first store your data?
  • As spinning drives have gotten smaller the capacity has increased
  • Now people have small local storage and storage is not directly attached
• Storage platforms / API driven storage
  • Block vs Files vs Object
• Options for Kubernetes storage.
  • CSI operates on all levels
  • Able to create an destroy storage at kubernetes speed rather than waiting for storage admin (or even cloud storage API)
• Workload Examples
  • Kubevirt and Kubernetes centric but applicable elsewhere
• What about prosumer
  • Be careful with clouds except as backups
  • zfs and btrfs
  • Stephen uses TrueNas
  • 3 copies of all data. RAID isn’t a backup

What happened in production?! Instrumenting with OpenTelemetry by David Bell

• A sample problem
  • Microservice based system
  • What happened in Production?
  • Errors up high, response time went bad
• What about the logs?
  • 200s and then 500s . What does that mean?
• Kept happening at 2pm every day. Sometimes bad, sometimes worse
• O11y and OpenTelemetry
  • Find the internal state of a system just by asking questions
• What about metrics
  • Pre-aggregated, No “connective tissue”, Can’t drill down
  • Answering known questions, good for alarms, graphs and dashboards
  • known-knowns and known-unknowns
• What about Logs?
  • unstructured strings
  • Many logs lines per piece of work. Maybe with a request-id but not often
  • no schema or index So can be quite slow to parse
  • structured logs sometimes work
  • expensive to store yourself or pay to have stored
  • But we should still log – audit logging and security logging
• Tracing is good
  • separate tooling from logs and metrics
  • often limited fields
  • often limited traces to even look at ( just the bad ones)
• OpenTelemetry
  • covers metrics, logs and traces
  • wide language support and auto-instrumentation out of the box
  • Easy to get started
  • wrappers and external hooks
  • distributed tracing
• Otel Traces
  • Traces are Directed Acyclic Graphs ( DAGs) of Spans
  • Spans are sort of structured logs with required firlds
  • Spans contain many attributes
  • Attributes can have high cadinality
  • Spans have high dimensionality
• Otel isn’t for everything
  • Don’t put you secret data
  • Maybe not business logic
  • no guarantee on delivery ( sometimes traces get lost )
  • No for secuity/audit loggin
• Sampling can be useful
  • head-based sampling ( based on head at start )
  • rule-based/tail-based grabs all and keeps some that are interesting
• Setup ( for python ) – no code changes
  • install a couple of packages. One to gather, one to send
  • send in some env variables
  • Change docker run command to wrap your existing code
• Setup (code changes )
  • Import packages
  • Shove attributes into a span in code (see example code in talk)
• Demo of App (using Honeycomb)

Please don’t forget my parents! – Digital Exclusion is happening, so you all better know about it by Sae Ra Germaine

• Various Background Stuff
• Her Parents retired to rural property near outer suburb of Melbourne
• Two phone lines
• Mobile reception only available standing outside of the house
• Wireless point-to-point wireless. Approx 1Mb/s but vulnerable to animals chewing through it
• NBN
  • Originally was going to be Fiber to the premises.
  • Then got cheaper and fiber-to-the-curb or fiber-to-the-node and copper rest of the way
  • Today 98% on NBN but not everybody well connected
  • Parents land line got cut off regular due to errors
  • Then 3G got cut-off. 4G at parents place doesn’t really work
• Digital Divide
  • Everything is now all online ( jobs, doctors, social services )
  • Satellite based Internet a lot more expensive than comparable options in cities
  • During covid lockdowns they were over 5km from various services which was a problem with movement restrictions
• Libraries had to pivot during lockdows
  • wifi hotspots outside, accepting deliveries
  • Mobile libraries provide access to government services
  • Various other stuff on libraries

Open source voice interfaces in 2025 by Kit Biggs

• Big changes in the last 12 months
• AI has zoomed past inflated expectations and is now in the trough of disillusionment
• Where are we with conversation user interfaces
• What are the steps/software needed for this?
• Get the sound
  • Digital microphones are good and do the first rough filtering
• Is somebody actually speaking?
  • xiao_respeaker – example software project
• Wake word recognisers
  • Commercial software work with a “wake word” ( Hey Siri )
  • Used to be hard to do, now easier
• Word recognition just looks for specific words
  • Getting better
• Contentious voice recognition
  • Also better
• Intent recognition
  • Usually hooked in with communication to outside world
• Feedback
  • Speech Synthesis is pretty much a solve problem
• Looking at software you can use. Not cloud based
• Wake Word
  • Picovoice Porcupine ( non commercial or licensed ) . 16 languages
  • OpenWakeWord
    • Great docs
    • Trains on Synthetic speech
    • More than good enough
• Speech to Text
  • OpenAI Whisper was leader
  • Lots of new ones. Look at Moonshine
• Text to Speech
  • Piper is the stand-out, actively developed
  • Others mostly good for english-only
  • Emotional synthesis is getting better
• Hardware
  • Raspberry Pi 4 or 5
    • 5 has ability to plugin an accelerator
  • Rockchip Arm64 with neural coprocessor
  • AI in A Box ( Radxa Rock 5A)
• Voice on a Microcontroller, the time has arrived
• ESP32 processor is the most common option – $10 each
  • Dev board plus microphone maybe for $20 or so
  • Can do the wakeword stuff and then stream audio to something with more spec
• How small can you go?
  • What can you do with a small board just by itself?
  • Speech recognition on micro-controller not there yet but phrase and wake word recognition works
• Glasses display looking almost there
  • Can have microphones
  • Avoid cameras to avoid privacy concerns

Keynote: Sustaining Open Source Software by Justin Warren

Good talk. Advise you have a watch it on Video. Good thoughts on the economics of Open Source

Sandboxing untrusted code with WebAssembly by Katie Bell

• Works for MongoDB. Webscale!
• Untrusted Code
• Example Shopify
  • Supports 3rd party apps
  • What happens when 3rd-party apps goes offline and is used by a lot of stores
  • What if slow and inserts itself into customer flow making experience bad
  • Decided to hosted 3rd party apps in their cloud to provide better reliability
  • Shopify decided to go with webassembly
• Some alternatives for sandboxing
  • Small VM like firecracker – 4MB memory, 125ms startup
  • Docker – Using Shared Kernel still
  • V8 Isolates – Used to isolating processes within a chrome tab. Cloudflare runs many workers in a process, startip 5ms
  • But not fair comparison. Lots of tradeoffs on how secure vs speed vs flexability
• Webassembly
  • Designed to compile big apps to run in a browser (eg photoshop)
  • Is a compile Target – .wasm binary
  • Originally designed to usually be called from javascript ( in browser )
  • Is a tiny simulated computer, very locked down, can’t interact with anything outside. Can just provide and call functions
  • When you build compiler will usually create a javascript wrapper to make it easier to use so you don’t have to call wasm directly.
• WASI
  • An API lets you run webassembly programs as regular programs
  • wasmtime – program to run .wasm directly
  • Keeps things sandboxed but can’t optionally provide with with a very limited set of stuff that must be explicitly provided
• Sandboxing Webassembly in the real world
  • Shopify use this. See their docs and definitions
  • Firefox and Graphite font shaping library
    • Compiled from native code into wasm to ensure memory safety rather than audit or re-write in rust
• Is it secure?
  • Sometimes. But WASI is built with holes intentionally so can have bugs
  • Wasmtime has a lot of work put into sandboxing though
  • Use multiple layers of security
• WASI standard is in progress ( webassembly itself is fairly stable )

80% faster, 70% less memory: building a new high-performance, low-cost Prometheus query engine by Joshua Hesketh, Charles Korn

• Works at Grafana Labs on Mimir database
• Explains time-series database. (Name+Labels)+time+number
• Talk covers the query app which turns promql requests into a result
• Memory used by the old software was bouncing, had to be over-provisioned which wastes money or sends back errror to use if runs out of memory.
• Prometheus Promql engine has little room for extensions
• Problem
  • Prom promql engines loads the entire series into memory before processing it further
  • Fix would require a new new rewrite.
  • Which they did
• MQE engine
  • Loads a bunch of samples and then streams to operator(s). Then repeats a bit at a time
  • Will fallback to Prometheus engine of function is not yet implimented
  • Very efficient on range queries
• He explained memory allocation strategy using pooling. I got a little lost
  • “That was a very oversimplified example”
• query-tee
  • Send queries to two different engines and ensure they return the same result for testing
  • Has test group for data that can run this over as well as live queries. Might to fizzy query testing in future
• Engine is available and can be switched in via command line
  • Does fall-back if things are not implemented
  • Implements the most common queries (above 90% of actual request)