The Virtual Bash!
Details
We are happy to announce that we will be running a Virtual BASH over lunchtime, one week from today on Friday the 24th April. Loosely themed around making the most of, and contributing to, open source software. There will be a keynote from Marit van Dijk (@MaritvanDijk77) and talks from returning favourites (Jason Bell) and first time speakers (Jamie Thompson). Details below.
As this is a virtual event we’ve capped the number of attendees at infinite:) But please reserve the slot in your diaries. More details and the link will be published early next week, both here and on @devbash.
Keynote - Marit van Dijk
Collaborating on Open Source Software
How I Started contributing to Open Source and Why You Should Too
There are several reasons you might want to contribute to open source software. For me, it was that I wanted to learn in a more useful way than doing programming challenges. So I looked into how I could contribute to open source projects that I use myself. After contributing for almost two years, I notice that I have learned a lot from my contributions (which has been useful at work), as well as have made friends and have become part of a community.
In this talk I will share my experience with contributing to Cucumber, including an early mistake (merging something that wasn’t ready yet) and fixing it with the support of core maintainers, and still feeling welcome! You’ll learn how to find your project and contributions to start with, how to connect with the community to make sure your contributions are useful and the many different types of contributions you can make.
Contributing to open source is a way of giving back to the community. In addition, it is a way for you to learn, collaborate and become part of a community. Getting (constructive) feedback on a pull request and collaborating to make things even better is a great feeling!
The Lunchtime Tour of Kafka - Jase Bell
The author Peter Cook called him a "data genius", Jase Bell has been working in software development since 1988 with specific focus on retail data mining since 2000. He is the author of Machine Learning: Hands on for Developers and Technical Professionals for Wiley, the second edition was released in February this year. Now working in large scale data Kafka Devops, monitoring and development for Digitalis.io, he is still obsessed with how data drives the customer/retailer relationship. Jase now considered an elder of the Northern Ireland tech scene (because he's old).
In his session Jase will show you the general components of the Apache Kafka Ecosystem, from the basic operation of the Kafka cluster and the immutable message log, showing how producers and consumers work and then looking at stream processing with the Streaming API and data acquisition with Kafka Connect. Tweet heckling @jasonbelldata is mandatory, you can get started now.
Creating Kubernetes Autoscalers - Jamie Thompson
Jamie Thompson is a final year Computer Science student at Queen's University Belfast; with a year's previous experience at IBM. Jamie has worked on a number of projects which have been open sourced.
Open sourcing a project is a great way to promote it and build a user base. The Custom Pod Autoscaler Framework is an open source project for creating Kubernetes autoscalers. Existing Kubernetes autoscalers can be limited in functionality, more complexity requires a custom autoscaler - a time consuming and difficult task, requiring in-depth knowledge of Kubernetes. The Custom Pod Autoscaler Framework simplifies this, abstracting the Kubernetes complexity to allow quick autoscaler development in any language; an autoscaler can be reduced down to a single script.
How to join the meetup
Discussion during the session will take place on the Northern Ireland Tech and Design Slack - Sign up here if you aren’t already a member - https://nitech.herokuapp.com/ - Join the #devbash channel.
The Virtual Bash!