Open source by the sea
Once again, La Térmica opened its doors to host this year’s OpenSouthCode in Málaga, Spain. The beautiful and sprawling complex is nestled just a short walk away from one of the most picturesque beaches in all of the Costa del Sol. The event has been a staple here since 2016 and attracts a few hundred attendees from all over the city and Andalusia. The attendance at OpenSouthCode is quite diverse and comprised of software developers, IT professionals, students and kiddos (aspiring technologists) all sharing a common love for open source software.
Canonical colloquies
This year’s speaking schedule featured two Canonicalers who gave very different yet equally compelling talks:
Photo courtesy of OpenSouthCode
Miriam España Acebal’s “I submitted a bug to Ubuntu, what else?” sought to answer a very common question that we see in the community. Here was what she had to say about her session and overall conference experience:
“I was a speaker at OpenSouthCode 2024, in the Saturday session, with a talk titled “I submitted a bug to Ubuntu, what else?” [1][2][3].
Being a very community-oriented conference, my idea was to convey that we care about problems in our Ubuntu series, but that not all the time is the perfect time to fix a particular bug (introducing here the Ubuntu schedule for a release and the types of bugs and Ubuntu processes to handle them), showing also the efforts needed and how a user can participate in fixing (and validating!) the proposed bug. I gave a little insight into what a debian package looks like on the inside and shared some resources for those who would like to get started with packaging, too.
The audience was interested in how time-consuming it is for an experienced packager to fix a bug, and I had a few hallway questions about maintaining the Ubuntu series from a security standpoint, allowing me to talk about the concepts of Pro and ESM.
All in all, it was a very pleasant experience in a great environment with a very good atmosphere, where everyone, speakers and attendees, are very close and can interact easily. I can’t forget a couple of faces approaching the Canonical booth reflecting surprise: “you are here and you are Ubuntu!”
[1] https://www.opensouthcode.org/conferences/opensouthcode2024/program/proposals/767
[2] https://youtu.be/nnHiK6ijxwc?si=5G4acdayC1PdcIQV
[3] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/opensouthcode_ubuntu-community-launchpad-activity-7210251276255715328-wcn4”
Photo courtesy of OpenSouthCode
Alberto Carretero dove into the inner workings of Git to help developers avoid version control chaos in his aptly named “Git gud” session. Upon reflecting on the event, here is what he had to say:
“My general impression of the conference is that the attendees were mostly local and most of them were involved with the open source community, rather than it being more of a companies’ event.
Several of the attendees were in fact involved with several local projects, such as hosting local Mastodon/Fediverse instances, communities around open source technologies, etc.
Regarding my talk “Git gud, how Git works internally”, it was a deep dive into the internals of Git to develop an simpler intuition of what Git is doing (see the summary here). It went pretty good even though it was much more technical than most of the others talks I attended.”
The booth dialogues
Between the talk sessions, attendees would flock to the main corridor to charge their batteries with a cup of coffee and stop by the half dozen booths stationed along the tiled walls. In the middle of the pack was the Ubuntu booth adorned with a colorful display of alluring stickers, pens and other tempting swag. In the two days that I spent chatting with the few hundred attendees, I came away with a few important takeaways:
- People were very happy to see Canonical and Ubuntu represented at a smaller community event. It reinforces the critical importance of supporting open source at the local, grassroots level.
- The Ubuntu Desktop has been and continues to serve as a gateway to the Linux and open source world for so many. The work around WSL and the effort to bring Ubuntu to new hardware platforms like RISC-V and Apple Silicon has made it even easier to learn, use and contribute to Ubuntu.
- People were excited to learn more about the other projects and solutions that Canonical offers including LXD, MAAS, JuJu and MicroK8S. For some, it was their first time hearing about some of these incredible tools.
- Everyone loves Ubuntu flavours and everyone has a personal favorite. I can say with a high degree of confidence that there will be a marked increase of laptops with Ubuntu flavour stickers floating around Spain going forward.
I also spent some time discussing the upcoming Ubuntu Summit, career opportunities at Canonical and letting folks know how they can get involved in the community.
Closing thoughts
To wrap it all up, this year’s OpenSouthCode was a great success, largely due to the excellent organizing team who dedicated their time to put it all together. It is these types of community focused events that form the fabric of the open source world. Kudos to the speakers and to all those who stopped by the booth to learn about our community and share their Ubuntu stories.
To learn more about OpenSouthCode, check out their website. You can also catch the recorded sessions from the event on this OpenSouthCode24 playlist on Youtube.