The Wonderful World of POSSCON

First off, I have to say that I truly enjoyed going to POSSCON.  I learned a lot during those two days about the influence of open source software and it's involvement in the world.  I want to share with you some notes from some of the presentations that I attended as well as the mini interviews I did with the three people listed in my blog post from March 25th.  So sit back, relax, and enjoy the highlights from POSSCON :) .

Day 1

The day dawned with the promise of gaining insight into the open source world and tinged with excitement (although this might have been due to all the coffee consumed by the class on the way to Columbia).  I had gone through the schedule online the day before and planned which presentations to go to, and what days the presenters I wanted to interview would be there.  I made sure to note those sessions on my schedule because I felt that it would be a good idea to attend their sessions before speaking with them.  Once we got to the convention center and checked in, we went around to the different companies who had booths set up to see what they were all about/network/apply for jobs.  The conference started off with a welcome given by the organizers and mayor of Columbia, and a keynote presentation ("Open Source - Now and in the Future") given by Larry Agustin, CEO of SugarRCM  In his presentation, Augustin listed three key trends that are driving technology investment today:

1. Mobile - This is enabled by open source software.  Here we were shown a graph detailing the increase in various mobile operating systems platforms.  The fastest growing OS?  Android.  Yes, you read that correctly.  Android is increasing becoming the platform of choice in the smart phone world, mainly because app creation is a much easier process where you can create the app you want and put it in the Android app market.
2. Social - Social media (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc) is increasing the demand for open source, especially Twitter.  We'll come back to that later.
3. Cloud - It's built on open source software (which drove licensing) and is running mostly on Linux, an open source operating system.

After the keynote, I headed off with some of me classmates to Dr. Bowring's presentation "Here We Come, Ready or Not: Undergraduate Software Engineering Practicum in Open Source".  Dr. Bowring talked about the idea behind the class (wanting us to have some real world experience before graduation), some of the past and present projects, and went through the course syllabus.  He allowed us to answer some of the questions asked as a way to show the student perspective and how we feel about the class.  I'll admit I didn't take notes during this session, but that's because I'm in the class and know what it's all about.  And those of you who have been on this adventure with me, so do you :) .

From there I was off to the first presentation given by one of the speakers I'd chosen, Mark Litz.  Litz is Senior Manager of the Systems, Database & Computer Operations of the South Carolina Department of Corrections.

"Opening" Up the Prisons: How Open Source Solutions improve IT services and control costs at the SC Department of Corrections
Litz started by explaining his job, the number of "clients" (referring to the inmates) who access computers, and the budget.  The budget for the DOC prisons is $400 million.  How much does the IT department there get? $3.3 million, and of that amount about $1.5 million goes towards the upkeep of outdated technology.  It's a sad thing to hear, but completely understandable when you have 22,500 inmates to look after.  Litz went into a little overview of the software, and presented two open source budget solutions: cost averse and cost control.  The first is not a plan that the government likes (mainly because there wouldn't be a vendor to blame), one which implements only FOSS with direct replacement of licensed software and support from an online community.  The latter option would include the purchase of support contracts and licensed FOSS versions, implement support/license on production servers only, and would have development test and QA servers run pure FOSS solutions on the older Intel-based servers.
I was able to catch up with him later that day, and ask him a couple of questions.
Q: How did you get started with working for the Department of Corrections?
Litz: "I had just graduated from the University of South Carolina and started with DOC as a programmer.  As I was working there the systems managers started giving me more tasks to work on, and I built trust with them as I completed more and more of them, and I worked my worked my way up."
Q: I know you do some travelling with your job to go to conferences like this one, but do you work here at the main office or go to one of the institutions in another part of the state to solve a problem with the system?
Litz: "I work here at the DOC headquarters here in Columbia and help solve problems remotely using the network we have set up."


Lunch came next, and for my "Birds of a Feather" session I chose to go to the one given by Jon "Maddog" Hall with Linux International.  I think this was one of the best decisions I made the whole time I was at POSSCON.  Maddog is an interesting fellow, and it was an entertaining lunch to say the least.  He told a few anecdotes and basically let us take control of the session by asking whatever questions we wanted.


The next session I attended was given by the second speaker I'd chosen, Carol Smith, about Google Summer of Code.  GSOC is a program designed to encourage college students to participate in open source software development ("flip bits, not burgers").  The students send in an application and project proposal, which Google passes on to the participating companies.  These companies choose which students they want working for them over the summer.  (For more information, go to their website here.)
I spoke to Carol Smith after the session was over and asked her a couple of questions....
Q: You have a degree in photo journalism. How did you get in involved with Google?
Smith: "A friend recommended that I apply for a job there.  I started as an administrative assistant and got involved with some other programs there, and the woman who ran GSOC left so I took the position."
Q: What's your favorite thing about working for Google?
Smith: "That I feel appreciated and not like I'm replaceable.  I'm not treated like I'm just another cog in the workings of the company."


I finished off my day by attending a demo for GitHub, where they showed how they use their own software to run the software.  This session was given by Ben Bleikamp who is a designer at GitHub.  Bleikamp went through the various features of the site and software tools.

Day 2

On the second day of POSSCON, POSSCON gave to me....a keynote given by Scott McNealy!!  A man so well known for his contributions in computer science that even my parents - who know next to nothing computer science-y, by the way - know who he is.  Wow. Needless to say I was very excited about this.  So excited that unfortunately I forgot to take notes during his talk.  Yes, I know.  How very silly and forgetful of me.


I didn't go to as many sessions on the second day as the first, mostly because I only had one interview left and his session was the only one I had definitely planned on attending at that point.  I also had a pair programming assignment in another class and was trying to communicate with my partner for a good portion of the day.  


I started the second day of sessions (after the keynote) by going to "Open Security: How DHS is deploying open source software to address national cyber security challenges", given by Douglas Maughan, Ph.D., Director of the Department of Homeland Security's Science & Technology Division, Cyber Security Division.  I learned that a lot of the software used by the Department of Defense is open source and basically wouldn't exist if we took away open source software.  Dr. Maughan talked about the HOST program (Homeland Open Security Technology).  HOST investigates open security methods, models, and technologies.  He also announced a new portal coming out soon from DHS, opencybersecurity.org.


After the DHS session came lunch and a BOF session on PHP.  I really wanted to go to this one because I would like to go into web development when I graduate and want to learn PHP, so I figured this would be a good way to learn a little bit about it.  However, I was disappointed to learn that the session was a way to find locals interested in forming a PHP user group.  I went to the session with one of my classmates, and since we can't travel to Columbia and back every month for the meetings (along with several other people who don't live in that area and came to the session), they decided to set up a Google group so we can stay in contact and learn some stuff that way.  They wrote down several topics that people wanted to know more about, but never discussed them.


I perked right up after that by going to see the last person on my list, Chris Aniszczyk, give his presentation "Open Source and Twitter: The Technology that Powers a Tweet".  I've been using Twitter since last summer and I had no idea that it was almost completely built on open source software. That blew my mind!  They have a developer's website that uses Drupal where you can create your own Twitter app and they prefer to open source almost all of the stuff involved in Twitter..  There's also Blueprint which is Twitter's internal tools, and Finagle which is the network stack for Java Virtual Machine from Twitter.
I caught up with Aniszczyk after the session was over and asked him a couple of questions.
Q: How did you get started working at Twitter?
Aniszczyk: "I was working at Red Hat at the time, and a friend of mine recommended me during a meeting at Twitter.  I got a phone call from the company and they asked me to come work there.  I originally said no, but we worked things out with Twitter and I eventually left Red Hat and started working here."
Q: We see a lot of social media sites (like Facebook and Google+) adding features to their news feed that resemble or mimic the Twitter feed.  How do you see Twitter impacting social media?
Aniszczyk: "By keeping it simple.  Our goal is to keep it simple for users and to work with countries to make sending tweets like sending an SMS message."