Linux Conf Australia (LCA) is one of my favorite conferences in the year. It’s full of strong technical content, interesting people, stimulating ideas, and overall a very relaxing and energizing event. One of the hallmarks of LCA is that it is volunteer-run and keynotes are invited, not purchased. Each time I’ve gone to LCA, I’ve come back home excited about what’s going on in the FOSS community.

I’ve been fortunate to attend the past three LCA conferences. This year, in Auckland New Zealand, I spoke on my experiences in building and leading open-source community projects. I’m quite used to giving technical talks (mostly on OpenStack Swift, of course), but this talk was new for me. Instead of focusing on the technical particulars of a feature we implemented in Swift, I shared my perspective on how we, as a community, actually built the feature–the tools, processes, and coordination that we used to get people around the world organized to work together.

There were quite a few other fascinating talks at the conference. Below are some of the other great talks I attended while in Auckland.

Introduction to Humanitarian Response: I had no idea there was so much required of the response efforts we see on the news when disaster strikes. This is a fascinating look at the huge challenges in humanitarian response and where free software can help.

Tales from the Trenches: Battling Browser Bugs for “Fun” and (Non-)Profit: Roan Kattouwc, the developer of Wikimedia’s visual editor, shares his experience in developing a web application that works across all modern browsers for one of the world’s most-visited websites.

Keynote from Eben Moglen: An inspiring and challenging call to arms for free software

Coccinelle: A program matching and transformation tool: building a tool to automatically find and fix different classes of bugs in the Linux kernel. This was a very technical and complex talk, but pretty amazing as to what’s possible. (Is there a Python version?)

Hacking 3D Printers: 3D printers started and intended to be for “hacking” (in the most noble sense of the word). This talk is all about modifying 3D printers to do new and different things.

Checking Your Privilege: A How-To for Hard Things: A passionate and well-articulated call to the community to be more inclusive

Open Source Protocols and Architectures to Fix the Internet of Things: The “Internet of Things” is one of the current buzzwords, but as an industry we’re still struggling with making connected “smart” devices useful and actually smart. Alasdair’s talk addresses these issues and proposes some solutions.

Deploying OpenStack Using Containers: A great take on containers as a reliable and dependable replacement for distort packages. I enjoyed this because of the ops focus over the “rah rah! go containers!” hype that is everywhere.

Of course, there were a ton of other great talks too. I’m still watching some of the ones I missed (astronomy miniconf, security challenges, flying drones, building new programming languages…). All of the LCA 2015 videos are available at https://www.youtube.com/user/linuxconfau2015