#wherethecoolshithappens – or – Developer Lounge at SUSECON’17 Prague

[UPDATE 1]: The number of teams for the Lego Challenge has been reduced from five to three

This year at SUSECON we have a special treat for everyone, besides state of the art breakout sessions, the famous SUSE band, or the well known Demopalooza, among other things. Additionally this year we are going to have a super cool and nerdy Developer Lounge, open all day, packed with even more nerdy stuff and people showcasing where the cool shit happens (leveraging the #wherethecoolshithappens hashtag used frequently by SAP’s CTO Björn Görke)

The Developer Lounge is located right next to the regular SUSECON showfloor exhibition area, where (ATTENTION) you might only find -boring- business stuff. But not with the Developer Lounge, lucky us, where we have arranged the following:

Lego® Technic Challenge

Tue 15:50 – 16:10 & Wed 10:05 – 10:25 & Thu 10:05 – 10:25

Each day you can demonstrate your problem solving skills and transfer them from software development and abstract algorithms to a simple vehicle construction. A total of three teams, each consisting of one or two members, will have to assemble a Lego Technic vehicle without the manual (only using pictures on the packaging box).

The Ultimate Developer Quiz

Wed 12:45 – 13:45

Well, not much to say about this one, a pub quiz style developer quiz. Rules will be read out before the quiz – but beware, we are going to have prizes for places 1-3.

Also, I heard rumors of a scavenger hunt taking place as well – let’s see with what the quiz master will come up with to surprise us 😉

Lego® Excavator & SUSE HA Display

Tue 11:45 – 12:45 & Thu 12:45 – 13:45

We will showcase two huge LEGO excavators controlled by two Raspberry Pies running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. You will have a chance to play with those excavators using your mobile phone. Part of the showcase is a cluster of another two Raspberry Pi which are in the SUSE High Availability cluster setup and controls the whole showcase. Let’s disconnect the network and see what happens… HA in reality

SUSE Exhibition Kiosks

• Hell froze over – Running Linux on Windows 10
• openSUSE Kubic
• openSUSE Build Service
• the famous openSUSE distribution
• Documentation for Developers

Partner Exhibition Kiosks

We also have two SUSE partners exhibiting their developer related technologies in the Developer Lounge, namely: SAP and ARM Ltd. I’m hoping to see those partners publishing a blog with more information about their displays.

Developer related mini breakout sessions

From Idea to Article – Writing for Technical Magazines

Tue 19:00 – 19:30

Speaker: Dmitri Popov

Dmitri, also as a Journalist writing for Linux Magazine for many years now, will explain how to write good tech articles for tech magazines (where the latter usually pay for) – because there is a huge difference between writing “normal” documentation, a blog, or a tech article.

Helm – The Kubernetes Package Manager

Wed 14:00 – 14:30

Speaker: Nikhil Manchanda

Helm is a new Kubernetes project which allows users to streamline the installation and management of Kubernetes applications. SUSE’s new Container as a Service Platform will support installing Helm out-of-the-box allowing users to deploy and distribute their applications seamlessly. In this session we will:

• Provide an overview of the architecture of Helm and how it fits with the architecture of SUSE CaaS Platform
• Introduce the concept of ‘Helm Charts’ — a high-level mechanism to describe and package pre-configured Kubernetes resources.
• Show you how you can use Helm Charts to deploy upstream applications as well as package and distribute your own.

Documentation for Open Source Projects – Tools and Processes

Wed 16:45 – 17:15

Speakers: Stefan Knorr, Sven Seeberg

Stefan and Sven are both experienced technical writers and Linux enthusiasts. From their daily work they know that developers – from time to time – also will have to contribute to some kind of documentation. And there are tools you might find useful – e.g. the DocBook Authoring and Publishing Suite, a command line tool for any modern Linux system. Want to hear more? Come to the Developer Lounge theater!

PR for OSS – Do Good Things and Talk about Them

Thu 14:00 – 14:30

Speaker: Markus Feilner

Abstract: Markus as a Journalist would like to explain to developers how they can better promote their own open source projects / contributions