jmcquillan

Next Meeting – Tuesday, February 10, 2026, 6:30pm EDT.

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Responsible coding with AI
Our old friend Marlon Dutra, principal engineer with Meta will be here talking about how he uses AI in his coding and he’ll talk about what works and what to avoid.

Marlon has been at Meta for over 13 years and has over 30 years of industry experience in very large scale systems, global traffic routing and complex security / privacy infrastructure. Prolific tech lead, with long experience leading large multi-disciplinary teams to solve very complex business problems through excellent engineering.

Unfortunately, we won’t be able to record this meeting so if you want to catch it, Tuesday at 6:30 you’ll want to be online with us.

Also, we’ll be doing a short presentation on a Unix/Linux topic. This month we’ll be talking about the curl utility. It’s kind of the swiss-army knife of the internet.

Next Meeting – Tuesday, January 13, 2026, 6:30pm EDT.

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Internet and TV at 30,000ft
Have you been on a Jetblue flight and noticed how every seat on every airplane has inflight entertainment and wifi?

This month we’re going to talk about how that works. Last month, we had Jim McQuillan talking about IPv6 and this month, we get another McQuillan. Jim’s brother Ken is “Manager IFE&C Operations and Implementation” at JetBlue airlines. That means, he’s in charge of in flight Entertainment and Connectivity. It’s all his baby!

Ken will get into some of the details about how you can have super-fast internet while traveling at 500mph 6 miles up in the sky. There’s lots of cool stuff happening there.

Unfortunately, we won’t be able to stream it on Youtube so if you want to catch this meeting, and you know you do, you’ll need to catch it live by attending our Zoom meeting.

Also, we’ll be doing a short presentation on a Unix/Linux topic. This month we’ll be talking about the direnv extension for your shell.

Next Meeting – Tuesday, November 11th, 2025, 6:30pm EDT.

Slides from the presentation on GrapheneOS and LineageOS

Keeping Your Android Secure and Snappy: Exploring GrapheneOS and LineageOS

Join Roller Angel for a practical dive into alternative Android operating systems that can breathe new life into your devices and extend their longevity. Roller runs GrapheneOS on a Pixel 8 for hardened privacy and security, and LineageOS on an older Pixel 4 to keep it current and fast long after official updates ended.

This talk will cover what these community-driven Android projects are, how they differ from stock Android, and what’s involved in installing and maintaining them. You’ll learn how to choose the right ROM for your device, what security and performance trade-offs to expect, and how to regain control over your phone’s software updates and privacy.

Whether you’re looking to make your phone run faster, stay supported longer, or simply explore the open-source Android ecosystem, this session will give you the tools and confidence to get started.

Also, we’ll be doing a short presentation on a Unix/Linux topic. This month we’ll be talking about the readline library. It’s not really a command but it’s included in many of the utilities you use.

Next Meeting – Tuesday, October 14th, 2025, 6:30pm EDT.

Mesh VPNs: What are they? What they are not. Commercial offerings and Open source options for running a mesh VPN. High level overview of how they work and why you might use them at home or work.

Join us as Joe Ryan and Justin Triplett tell us all about it.

Also, we’ll be doing a short presentation on a Unix/Linux topic. This month it’ll be the fg and bg job control commands

Next Meeting – Tuesday, August 12th, 2025, 6:30pm EDT.

Sharan gave an excellent talk at the August MUG meeting. Unfortunately we had a bit of a technical issue. He lost power near the end. He’ll come back at a later meeting and finish up the presentation and take questions then.

Here’s his Slide Show

And, here’s the Youtube Video

This month, Sharan Kalwani will be talking about his own direct experiences in High Performance Computing (used to be called Supercomputing in the days of yore).
We produce and consume an awful lot of data (have to keep them CPUs busy!). So over the decades many techniques and implantations grew – which later became the basis for several commercial/enterprise and also foundational tech for cloud based services.
He would like to share the history of high speed file systems and do a quick review of present day storage.

A seasoned scientific, technical and computing professional, Sharan has
spent over 30+ years’ experience in high performance computing,
engineering applications simulation, benchmarking, networking,
operations, technical support and project management.

He is a senior member of IEEE, ACM, SEMCO, ASEI. He has published a book
on the topic: “UNIX and TCP/IP network security”; and is now working on
his second text, about a new computer programming language. He also
serves as one of the writers/editors of the IEEE Southeastern Michigan
Sections monthly newsletter – Wavelengths. He has also served as Vice-
Chair of IEEE Sustech 2023, IEEE Sustech 2022, IEEE SusTech 2021 Global
Conferences and is on the organizing committee for Online Forum for
Climate Change Technologies 2023, 2024 and 2025.
He is the recipient of:
* 2018 IEEE MGA Achievement award and
* 2024 Engineering Society of Detroit (ESD) Anne O. Fletcher Award
for his various contributions towards technical activities.

On X he can be
found @skalwani or on his LinkedIn profile:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sharankalwani

Also, we’ll be doing a short presentation on a Unix/Linux topic. This month it’ll be the netstat command used for viewing information about network connections, routing tables, interface statistics and more.

Next Meeting – Tuesday, July 8th, 2025, 6:30pm EDT.

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Wolf will explain and live-demo the most impressive and useful features and design of the Helix editor.
Helix is an open source, text/terminal-based modal editor (in the spirit of Vim) you might run locally
or over SSH. In some ways it’s bare-bones. In other ways it is very much “batteries included”.

Some (positive) differences from Vim:

• select first, then act on the selection (sort of like Vim’s VISUAL mode, and exactly how every other editor in the world works).


• Multiple selections.


• Configured with TOML instead of with VimScript.


• Configuration file size differences are drastic.


• LSP aware and tree-sitter built in make syntax-highlighting, language-based text-objects, inline diagnostics, and higher-level operations on language constructs available with no plugins.

Helix has been around for a while, has an active development community, and the whole thing is written in Rust.

Like Vim, Helix isn’t for everyone; but there are some very compelling features. It’s worth trying, and Wolf will show you why.

Wolf has been coding for decades in many languages, at many companies, and on many projects.
He’s an expert in Git, Vim, Python, software design, algorithms, and general coding best-practices.
Some places he’s worked: Netscape/Mozilla, LucasArts, Apple, Trolltech, and Macromedia.
Python is his favorite language, but Rust is catching up fast.
At Mozilla, he was the C++ language lawyer in residence for nearly a decade.
He currently works at Dynamic Map Platform North America building Qt apps in Python that leverage PostgreSQL, Open Street Maps, and their own proprietary map data.
He is a cohost (along with Jim McQuillan) of a wildly popular technology podcast called “Runtime Arguments”, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Also, we’ll be doing a short presentation on a Unix/Linux topic.This month it’ll be the ln command for creating hard and soft links.

Next Meeting – Tuesday, June 10th, 2025, 6:30pm EDT.

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Joe Ryan will demonstrate how to build a home lab for $100. He will present a variety of options, tools,
and software that utilize low-cost hardware or items you may already have on hand. Pros and cons for
each option and why you might want to choose each will be discussed.

Also, we’ll be doing a short presentation on a Unix/Linux topic.This month it’ll be the top and related commands.

Next Meeting – Tuesday, May 13th, 2025, 6:30pm EDT.

This month, Jim McQuillan will be talking about his recent experience in moving from a Data center environment to the Cloud.

Come along for the journey as Jim describes the process including Docker, haproxy, NodeJS, Postgres and many other services.

He’ll answer questions including:

• Right-sizing the computing environment
• Running a database in the cloud
• Handling multiple customers on a single VM
• Choosing a cloud provider
• Cost comparison between the datacenter and the cloud. Spoiler alert! It can actually cost less in the cloud

Also, as we’ve been doing the last several months, we’ll be doing a short presentation on a Unix/Linux topic. This month it’ll be the diff command.