What

Since this is the sixth year we’re hosting the Testing and Automation dev room, here are some ideas of what we would like to see, and what worked in prior years, they’re just ideas though! Check out the 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017 schedules for inspiration.

Testing in the real, open source world

• War stories/strategies for testing large scale or complex projects
• Tools that extend the ability to test low-level code
• Projects that are introducing new/interesting ways of testing “systems”

Cool Tools (good candidates for lightning talks)

• Explain/demo how your open source tool made developing quality software better
• Combining projects/plugins/tools to build amazing things “Not enough people in the open source community know how to use $X, but here’s a tutorial on how to use $X to make your project better.”

Where

FOSDEM is hosted at Universite libre de Bruxelles in Brussels, Belgium. The Testing and Automation dev room is likely slated for Building H, room 2213, which seats ~100.

When

• CFP Submission Deadline: 23:59 UTC, 26 November 2017
• Schedule Announced: 15 December 2017
• Presentations: 3 February 2018

How

Please submit one (or more) 30-40 minute talk proposal(s) OR one (or more) 10 minute lightning talk proposal(s) by 23:59 UTC on November 26th 2017. We will notify all those submitting proposals about their acceptance by December 15th 2017.

To submit a talk proposal (you can submit multiple proposals if you’d like) with Pentabarf, the FOSDEM paper submission system. Be sure to select Testing and Automation otherwise we won’t see it!

You can create an account, or use an existing account if you already have one.

Please note: FOSDEM is a FLOSS community event, by and for the community, please ensure your topic is appropriate (i.e. this isn’t the right forum for commercial product presentations)

Who

• R. Tyler Croy - Jenkins hacker
• Mark Waite - Jenkins/Git hacker

I did the math in my head yesterday and this year will be the fifth year that I’ve attended FOSDEM: 2005, 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015. This will be my fourth year helping organize a Jenkins stand, my third year organizing the Testing and Automation devroom and my first year organizing a Ruby devroom.

Between the schedules for the Testing/Automation and the Ruby devroom, I am thrilled with the amount of great content that I’ve been able to help bring to FOSDEM. But that just covers two rooms, between the main tracks and 40 devrooms, words cannot describe the sheer volume of great content and great people who will be present.

If you’re not able to make it to FOSDEM, video.fosdem.org has most of last year’s talks and will have archived recordings of the 2015 talks as well.

If you can make it to FOSDEM, come say hello!

With low temperatures throughout the northern hemisphere, one might be tempted to steal away to a warmer climate for a few weeks. A reasonable thought, by no doubt reasonable people. Brazil, Australia, Iran, all decent options with decent “winter” weather. That’s not for me however, I’ll be taking what my friend Thomson would call the “comedy option”: Europe. Just as I did last year, I will be returning to Europe for the month of February.

The make-up of the trip will be slightly different than last year’s, wherein I spent the majority of the trip working from Berlin. This year I will be starting my trip with a weekend in Brussels for FOSDEM ‘14 where I will be running the Testing/Automation devroom with Jeff Weiss.

Following FOSDEM ‘14, I plan on swinging up to Gent for Cfg Mgmt Camp to make fun of my peers in the Ops community for a couple days.

After I leave Belgium, things get a little fuzzy and less defined unfortunately. While I will be spending about two weeks at the Lookout office in London, I’m not yet certain which days I’ll be there.

I will however be finishing my trip on a strong note, attending Mobile World Congress, Feb 24-27th in Barcelona. This year’s MWC will be great, not only because I’ll be in attendance but also due to Lookout’s CEO John Hering giving a keynote.

If you’re in any of the following cities, and interested in meeting up, let me know via email and I can let you know when I’ve figured out a more definite schedule:

• Brussels (Belgium)
• Gent (Belgium)
• Berlin (Germany)
• Dresden (Germany)
• London (UK)
• Barcelona (Spain)

I’m looking forward to doing as much as I can, and meeting up with as many peoplke as possible without succumbing to frostbite or cirrhosis of the liver.

See you in Yurp!

I will be arriving in Frankfurt on the 29th of January and spending a few days in Köln (Cologne). Naturally I will be in Brussels for FOSDEM for a couple days, but after that, I will be heading to Berlin for a few weeks.

I’ve already spent a good amount of time in Germany, so I won’t be on the “tourist track”, having seen most of the sights in Berlin already.

So I will be working from Berlin, and my weekends and evenings will be open to as many meetups/hackathons as I can find. Even if you don’t want to hang out (it’s okay, I understand), but know of some good events in Berlin that are worth checking out, please send me an email (tyler@linux.com) and let me know!

What the hell is Yurp?

Having spent a large amount of my time in the southern US, “Yurp” is how far too many southern people pronounce “Europe”, including those in my own family. That’s why I’m going to Yurp.

I’m quite excited about the dev room, and look forward to reviewing and selecting the talks.

Hope to see you there :)

After some initial frustrations with LibreOffice Impress, I decided to take a slightly unorthodox route in creating my presentation slides. Unfortunately this route means that I do not have any accompanying notes to offer you alongside the slide deck.

Image courtesy of Nigel Kersten

If a video becomes available, i’ll make sure to post that, but as it stands now, I’m not 100% sure what I said!

Slides (PDF) (rotate the slides in your PDF viewer)

Here’s a photo of one of my originals, which I had to bring with me just in case. That’s real printer paper with real felt-tip pen, yeah.

Image courtesy of Nigel Kersten

Giving the talk was a blast, the whole event was fantastic, I can’t recommend it enough. I look forward to coming back to Brussels next year for FOSDEM, and I hope to see you there!

This past weekend at FOSDEM, I was fortunate enough to attend a few sessions in the “Smalltalk devroom”, which from my understanding made its debut appearance at this year’s conference. I’ll save my thoughts on Amber.js for another time, but in this post I wanted to talk about the Smalltalk Workshop which was held at the end of the day.

One of my major stumbling blocks with Smalltalk has been general unfamiliarity with the development environment, the workshop was the perfect opportunity to resolve some of this. The structure was to pair one experienced Smalltalker with one noob, and for both to work through a pre-planned exercise with an existing image and application set up.

Haxx haxx haxx (Photo courtesy of Adriaan van Os)

While my partner (Norbert) and I did not complete all the exercises, we did spend a good amount of time discussing and working through the “Smalltalk way”, or at least Norbert’s Smalltalk way, of solving particular problems, refactoring and method structure.

One of the things that struck me as we worked through the exercises was how small the ideal method body is for most things in Smalltalk. I don’t think there was a single method that was longer than 10 lines, except for some test methods which certainly had a bad code smell.

Below is a sample of one of the longest methods I wrote in the entire workshop:

vote: aVote for: aUser
  author ~= aUser ifTrue: [
    self votes
      detect: [ :vote | vote author = aUser and: [ vote direction = aVote direction]]
      ifNone: [ self votes add: aVote ]]

I’m quite happy with the way things turned out, while I didn’t anything I didn’t know already about Seaside, I did learn a lot about using the development environment effectively and test-driven development “the Smalltalk way” which as it turns out is quite impressive.

I’m looking forward to learning more about the ways of the Pharo, maybe next year I’ll count as one of the experienced Smalltalkers.

My talk will be Sunday at 13:00 in Room K.3.601.

If you’re looking for a meaty technical discussion about Puppet this talk will likely not be for you.

I’m aiming to tell a story more than anything about how our use of Puppet came to be and has evolved in building out open source project infrastructure.

I hope my talk ends up as light-hearted and entertaining as I’m trying to make it, in the off chance it doesn’t, feel free to heckle and throw fruit.

I’ve been to FOSDEM once before, but as a timid young lad who barely spoke to anybody. I distinctly recall walking down a hallway past Theo de Raadt thinking “ZOMG IT’S THEO” then in the most sauve fashion, I turned around and walked back down the hallway in the opposite direction making sure I got a good look at Theo.

What a damn nerd.

This year will be something special in that I will be speaking in the Configuration Management Devroom on the subject: “Open Source Infrastructure - Running the Jenkins project with Puppet and more.

If you’re not familiar with the structure of FOSDEM, there are a two main tracks which are held in amphitheaters which can hold hundreds of people at a time. The only one of these I remember from my last visit was watching a talk by Alan Cox, to give you an idea of the scale of those sessions.

Concurrent to the main tracks there are a number of topic-oriented “devrooms” where developers of common interests (Mono, MySQL, Open source virtualization, etc) congregate for talks, panels, etc.

My talk is structured as a hybrid technical/case study talk, the abstract of which is below:

In early 2011 the Jenkins project became the Jenkins project, leaving behind an organically grown but Oracle (formerly Sun) operated infrastructure. An open source project with thousands of users had to grow an infrastructure practically overnight, initially doing things “the wrong way” by hand crafting machines. That was until a costly mistake forced us to reconsider and migrate to managing our infrastructure with Puppet from a publicly available shared Git repository.

Besides Puppet, the Jenkins project also uses a number of other tools to help manage access control on GitHub, parts of JIRA, etc, all carrying on the very transparent and welcoming tradition the project prides itself on.

In this talk I will discuss the ups and downs of switching an established infrastructure to Puppet, all within the public eye and with volunteer time and energy.

If you’re in Europe next February, I highly recommend making the pilgramage to FOSDEM, and be sure to come up and say “hi!” I promise I don’t bite.