This week I had the honor of joining a couple hundred free software enthusiasts at UbuCon Latin America. I’d really been looking forward to it, even if I was a bit apprehensive about the language barrier, and the fact that mine was the only English talk on the schedule. But those fears melted away as the day began on Friday morning and I found myself loosely able to follow along with sessions with the help of slides, context and my weak understanding of Spanish (listening is much easier than speaking!).
The morning began by meeting a couple folks from Canonical and a fellow community member at the hotel lobby and getting a cab over to the venue. Upon arrival, we were brought into the conference speaker lounge to settle in before the event. Our badges had already been printed and were right there for us, and bottles of water available for us, it was quite the pleasant welcome.
José Antonio Rey kicked off the event at 10AM with a welcome, basic administrative notes about the venue, a series of thanks and schedule overview. Video (the audio in the beginning sounds like aliens descending, but it gets better by the end).
Immediately following him was a keynote by Pablo Rubianes, a contributor from Uruguay who I’ve known and worked with in the Ubuntu community for several years. As a member of the LoCo Council, he had a unique view into development and construction of LoCo (Local/Community) teams, which he shared in this talk. He talked some about how LoCos are organized, gave an overview of the types of events many of them do, like Ubuntu Hours, Global Jams and events in collaboration with other communities. I particularly enjoyed the photos he shared in his presentation. He left a lot of time for questions, which was needed as many people in the audience had questions about various aspects of LoCo teams. Also, I enjoyed the playful and good humored relationship they have with the title “LoCo” given the translation of the word into Spanish. Video.
My keynote was next, Building a Career in Free and Open Source Software (slides, English and Spanish). Based on audience reaction, I’m hopeful that a majority of the audience understood English well enough to follow along. For anyone who couldn’t, I hope there was value found in my bi-lingual slides. I had some great feedback following my talk both in person and on Twitter. Video (in English!).
For all the pre-conference jokes about a “cafeteria lunch” I was super impressed with my lunch yesterday. Chicken and spiced rice, some kind of potato-based side and a dessert of Chicha Morada pudding… which is what I called it until I learned the real name, Mazamorra Morada, a purple corn pudding that tastes like the drink I named it after. Yum!
After lunch we heard from Naudy Villaroel who spoke about the value of making sure people of all kinds are included in technology, regardless of disability. He gave an overview of several accessibility applications available in Ubuntu and beyond, including the Orca screen reader, the Enable Viacam (eViacam) tool for controlling the mouse through movements on camera and Dasher which allows for small movements to control words that are displayed through algorithms that anticipate words and letters the operator will want to use, and makes it easy to form them. He then went on to talk about other sites and tools that could be used. Video.
Following Naudy’s talk, was one by Yannick Warnier, president of Chamilo, which produces open source educational software. His talk was a tour of how online platforms, both open source and hosted (MOOC-style) have evolved over the past couple decades. He concluded by speculating far into the future as to how online learning platforms will continue to evolve and how important education will continue to be. Video. The first day concluded with a duo of talks from JuanJo Ciarlante, the first about free software on clouds (video… and ran over so continued in next link…) and a second that covered some basics around using Python to do data crunching, including some of the concepts around Map Reduce type jobs and Python-based libraries to accomplish it (video, which includes the conclusion of the cloud talk, the last half is about Python).
The evening was spent with several of my fellow speakers at La Bistecca. I certainly can’t say I haven’t been eating well while I’ve been here!
I also recommend reading Jose’s post about the first day, giving you a glimpse into the work he’s done to organize the conference here: UbuConLA 2015: The other side of things. Day 1.
And with that, we were on to day 2!
The day began at 10AM with a talk about Snappy by Sergio Schvezov. I was happy to have read a blog post by Ollie Ries earlier in the week that walked through all the Snappy/core/phone related names that have been floating around, but this talk went over several of the definitions again so I’m sure the audience was appreciative to get them straightened out. He brought along a BeagleBone and Ubuntu tablet that he did some demos on as he deployed Ubuntu Core and introduced Snapcraft for making Snappy packages. Video.
Following his talk was one by Luis Michael Ibarra in a talk about the Linux container hypervisor, LXD. I learned that LXD was an evolution of lxc-tools, and in his talk he dug through the filesystem and system processes themselves to show how the containers he was launching worked. Unfortunately his talk was longer than his slot, so he didn’t get through all his carefully prepared slides, so hopefully they’ll be published soon. Video.
Just prior to lunch, we enjoyed a talk by Sebastián Ferrari about Juju where he went through the background of Juju, what it’s for and where it fits into the deployment and orchestration world. He gave demos of usage and the web interface for it on both Amazon and Google Compute Engine. He also provided an introduction to the Juju Charm Store where charms for various applications are shared and shared the JuJu documentation for folks looking to get started with Juju. Video.
After lunch the first talk was by Neyder Achahuanco who talked about building Computer Science curriculum for students using tools available in Ubuntu. He demonstrated Scratch, Juegos de Blockly (Spanish version of Blockly Games), code.org (which is in many languages, see bottom right of the site) and MIT App Inventor. Video).
Break, with Ubuntu and Kubuntu stickers!
As the afternoon continued, Pedro Muñoz del RÃo spoke on using Ubuntu for a platform for data analysis. Video. the Talks concluded with Alex Aragon who gave an introduction to 3d animation with Blender where he played the delightful Monkaa film. He then talked about features and went through various settings. Video.
Gracias to all the organizers, attendees and folks who made me feel welcome. I had a wonderful time! And as we left, I snagged a selfie with the flags flying outside the University. For what? Jose picked them out upon learning which countries people would be flying in from, the stars and stripes were flying for me!
More photos from UbuConLA here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157656475304230