meetings

We meet at 6:30pm on the second Tuesday of each month at the Farmington Community Library.

Topics this month include:

The Go Programming Language

You might have heard about Go the programming language as the laguage developed at Google, but probably haven’t looked much further than Wikipedia for what the Go Language is all about. You might not have known that it was initially developed at Google by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike and Ken Thompson, is based loosely on C but with many features of modern languages like garbage collection and some dynamic typing capabilities. You also may not know that many projects such as Docker and Canonical’s own Juju project are using Go. Mark Ramm-Christensen will talk about the Go programming language and highlight Canonical’s usage and involvement with Go. If you’ve ever heard Mark Ramm-Christensen speak you’ll know this promises to be an event you won’t want to miss.

Mark Ramm-Christensen is the Engineering Manager for Canonical, and a long-time contributor to not only MUG but the open-source community as a whole.

Plus we’ll have our usual features (Jobs Looking For People, People Looking for Jobs, news and events), and much much more.

Slides for the presentation.

Register Here

We meet at 6:30pm on the second Tuesday of each month at the Farmington Community Library.

Topics include:

PGP / GPG Encryption

 With the recent privacy concerns Tony Bemus wants to let everyone know about GnuPG and how to use GPG to securely communicate and protect your files. He will talk about the history of PGP and GPG, the web of trust, the Hows and Whys of file encryption, and secure communication through email encryption and signatures.

Slides for the presentation are available here:

http://bemushosting.com/present/PGP-GPG_Pen14.html

Shell Programming

Scott Moser is a technical lead on the Ubuntu Server and Cloud team at Canonical. He works on cloud-like things such as cloud-init, Ubuntu cloud images, OpenStack and cirrOS. He has more experience with programming in ‘sh’ than you probably care to hear about.

The talk on shell scripting^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^programming will discuss ways to make your shell scripts less brittle, and more performant. And will also try to convince you that shell still has its place.Plus we’ll have our usual features (Jobs Looking For People, People Looking for Jobs, news and events), and much much more.

Hope to see you there!

We meet at 6:30pm on the second Tuesday of each month at the Farmington Community Library.

Topics for this meeting include:

 Growing an Open Source Project

“If you build it, they will come” except not really. Rick describes the highs and lows of running an open source project over four years. From the awesomeness of the patch from an outsider to the feeble attempts at landing one small commit a day he’ll bring an in the trenches view on building a community, doing what you love, and the advantages of having your own pet project out there in the wild.

Rick is the creator of Bookie, an open source bookmark management web application in his spare time, and employee of Canonical doing more OSS development during his office time.

The State of Linux Gaming, 2014 edition

In 2010 Craig discussed the current state of Linux Gaming. Time passes and the Linux Gaming environment is a far different place. Craig will give a brief overview of what caused the dramatic change in the Linux Gaming environment and demo some of the more interesting games available for Linux. Come find out what the Penguin is playing today.

Plus we’ll have our usual features (Jobs Looking For People, People Looking for Jobs, news and events), and much much more.

Hope to see you there!

There’s no denying Facebook is the largest website in the Internet, with more than 1 billion people accessing its services every month. Behind the user interface is one of the most robust and sophisticated infrastructures in the world, with several thousands of servers distributed in multiple data centers in strategic places.

Marlon will show us how Facebook can support a huge amount of traffic every day, working with an availability close to 100% and a very low response time. The presentation will show how traffic is managed at this scale, with simple and effective mechanisms.

Back in 1996 Marlon worked with Linux servers and network infrastructure (when the first Internet Service Providers started showing up in Brazil, his home country). Since then he’s specialized in corporate networks, security and IP telephony. In 2012 Marlon started working for Facebook, as a Production Engineer in the Traffic team.

We’ll also have our normal MUG meeting features: Jobs Looking For People, People Looking for Jobs, news and events, and much much more.

Hope to see you there!

We meet at 6:30pm on the second Tuesday of each month at the Farmington Community Library.

Our topics this month include:

Kanban

Some days developing applications feels like drinking from the fire-hose. New features coming in from design, bugs from users, mounting technical debt, and folks wandering the halls wondering about the status for their particular piece. How do you manage it all? Kanban is a lean process that can overlay over your existing processes and roles. It includes common-sense ideas, such as limiting the amount of work users can do, and breaking tasks down into one day deliverables Rick Harding will talk about Kanban and how he uses it not only to manage the work for a team of developers in Canonical, but also for use with his own development.

Rick Harding is a team lead for the Juju UI Engineering team at Canonical and developer of the open source bookmarking application Bookie. He’s been a team lead for about 10 minutes but has been using Kanban as a developer for over two years.

Pygame

Pygame is a game development and media layer for Python. It started off as a layer between Python and the Simple Direct Media-layer library but has capabilities that have grown beyond simply mimicking the SDL library interface. In this quick overview Craig Maloney will demonstrate the basic concepts of Pygame and do a live (hah) coding demo of a simple game.

Craig Maloney is one of the MUG board members. He fancies himself a game developer / designer and has the shelf of unread books to prove it.

As an added bonus we are giving away five books from our friends at Pearson:

• A Practical Guide to Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (7th Edition) (2 copies)
• Ubuntu Unleashed 2014 Edition covering 13.10 and 14.04 (9th edition) (2 copies)
• The Technical and Social History of Software Engineering (1 copy)

You must be present (and be a paid up member) to win.

Speaking of membership we will be taking nominations for the 2014-2015 Board elections. Any member may nominate themselves or another member. Elections will be held at the April Meeting.

(And speaking of the April meeting we’ll have Marlon Dutra from some up-and-coming  start-up called Facebook come to talk about how they manage their production servers and infrastructure.)

And if that weren’t enough, we’ll also have our normal MUG meeting features: Jobs Looking For People, People Looking for Jobs, news and events, and much much more.

We meet at 6:30pm on the second Tuesday of each month at the Farmington Community Library.

Our topics this month include:

LXC – LinuX Containers

It’s safe to say that today’s cloud computing wouldn’t be nearly as prevalent without virtual environments. But virtual machines that emulate hardware (VirtualBox, VMware, QEMU, etc.) can be resource intensive and slow to provision. LXC (LinuX Containers) is an operating system-level virtualization solution that allows for running multiple isolated Linux systems (containers) on a single control host. It allows for flexible and rapid provisioning without requiring additional resources to emulate hardware. Scott Moser is a member of Canonical and has been working extensively with LXC as LXC forms one of the local deployment strategies for testing Juju. But LXC can be used for so much more. In this presentation Scott will talk about how to get started with LXC containers, their uses, and what applications they have in the development and deployment process.

Scott Moser is currently the Ubuntu Server Technical Lead at Canonical
Ltd.

LXC Video
LXC Slides (source)

AngularJS

Building rich, JavaScript-heavy web applications can be a frustrating experience — HTML is great for static documents, but once we start including JavaScript the complexity of code can quickly spiral out of control. AngularJS, an open-source JavaScript framework from Google, eases the process of developing JavaScript-intensive web applications by extending HTML to allow for expressive, testable abstractions. In this 30 minute presentation we’ll review the “whats” and “whys” of the framework, and build a rich web application demonstrating the power of AngularJS.

Will Fuqua is currently a member of the Michigan!/usr/group board.

AngularJS Video
AngularJS Slides (source)

Plus we’ll have an eBook giveaway courtesy of O’Reilly Media and our usual fare of fun and thought-provoking discussion!

Hope to see you there!

Regular MUG Meeting

IPV6

We meet at 6:30pm on the second Tuesday of each month at the Farmington Community Library.

Raspberry Pi Giveaway DOOR PRIZE: We will be giving away one Raspberry Pi computer to one lucky participant. The contest is open to current paid-up members, and you must be present to win.

Our topics the meeting include:

LaTeX

LaTeX is the venerable document preparation system built on top of the TeX typesetting program. It’s incredibly powerful for creating any document from simple memos to textbooks and published papers. It can also be used to create presentations. But all this power can be daunting for the begining user. But never fear as we’ve enlisted the help of two presentations to help get you using this amazing system. Jim McQuillan will cover some of the basics of how to use LaTeX as part of a template-based workflow for medical billing while Will Fuqua will demonstrate tips and tricks for getting started by showing several documents you can create. Plus they’ll show off some GUI tools just in case you need a gentler introduction. If you’ve ever thought there was a better way to lay out and format documents outside of a word processor this is a talk you won’t want to miss.

Videos available here:

• Jim McQuillan on LaTeX
• Will Fuqua on LaTeX

Book Swap

Bring your old and gently used books to trade and swap with other folks. Take a book or leave a book, or do both. You don’t need to bring anything to take something home. All we ask is if you bring something that it finds a home by the end of the night. We’ll have more details at the meeting.

And we’ll also have our normal MUG meeting features: Jobs Looking For People, People Looking for Jobs, news and events, and much much more.

We meet at 6:30pm on the second Tuesday of each month at the Farmington Community Library.

OpenBSD

OpenBSD is known for incredible security, but that’s not what it’s really about and that’s not what the project exists for. Lucas will present on OpenBSD’s history, its technology, and what drives the community. You’ll learn not only what makes OpenBSD unique, but why you should keep an eye on it even if you would never dream of switching away from your current operating system.

Michael W. Lucas is a network engineer, systems administrator, martial artist, and critically-acclaimed author. He was on the Internet before the Web existed, and now works for an independent telecommunications wholesaler in Michigan. His recent books include “Absolute OpenBSD, 2nd edition,” “DNSSEC Mastery,” “SSH Mastery,” “Network Flow analysis,” and the forthcoming “Sudo Mastery.”

Clojure

Clojure is a functional language that runs on the JVM, in the browser, and on the .NET runtime. It provides a clean and syntactically-minimal Lisp dialect, without hiding with the powerful features of the platforms upon which it runs. In this talk we’ll explore the basics of Clojure and see why it’s a compelling choice for industrial-strength application development.

Will Fuqua is a current MUG board member.