Today was day 1 of the linux.conf.au conference in Geelong. The first two days are organized as "MiniConfs", where rooms have a general topic and presentations are scheduled by the MiniConf organizer instead of the LCA programme committee. In the morning I primarily attended the documentation/technical writing MiniConf. I was slightly surprised by how many of the presenters were from Red Hat, but I'm not surprised that they write a lot of documentation. In the morning, I liked the "On working from home" talk, and some of the tips that different remotees shared. I particularly enjoyed the one where someone set a 3 hour expiry on their ssh keyring so they would be reminded to eat lunch while trying to log into a server.
In the afternoon I attended "Assorted Security Topics in Open Cloud: Overview of Advanced Threats, 2015's Significant Vulnerabilities and Lessons, and Advancements in OpenStack Trusted Computing and Hadoop Encryption", and I have to say that I didn't really follow most of the talk; I don't think I was the right audience for it. After that I went back to the documentation MiniConf and listened to the amusing "My beautiful jacket" talk.
After afternoon tea (a totally awesome concept by the way), I went over to the bio MiniConf for "Building and deploying the Genomics Virtual Laboratory on the cloud(s)", not really sure what to expect. It turned out to be a pretty good technical talk, and some of the technology they had built looked really interesting, including their cloudbridge library. And we finished with one of the best named talks, "Sequencing your poo with a USB stick". As someone who doesn't really enjoy biology or understand most of it aside from what I learned in high school, I thourougly enjoyed this presentation. The presenter explained most of the concepts, and was an extremely engaging speaker.