Report from attending the OpenAlt 2017 conference

Even during the OpenAlt 2017 conference, Jan 'Ivir' Mareš asked me to write an article based on my attendance. At first I thought it was pointless, because every expert already knows about such a high-quality event. But then I remembered how a RedHat employee didn't know what conference it was, even though RedHat is a company that's a main partner of this conference, and so I realized that writing the article was necessary. At the same time, the article also serves as a reminder and documentation of the event for me.

Motivation for creating the talk

Long before the OpenAlt conference date, Franta 'xkucf03' Kučera kept reminding me to once again prepare a talk for my favourite conference - OpenAlt. And so in 2017 I again took part in the OpenAlt conference as a speaker. Last time I gave a talk on the Banana Pi R1 single-board computer.

History of the conference

The OpenAlt conference traditionally takes place in Brno at the Faculty of Information Technology of the Brno University of Technology, VUT FIT. The OpenAlt conference was created by merging the LinuxAlt conference, whose main organizer was the civic association Liberix, and the Openmobility conference, organized by the Openmobility association, where I was one of the founding members.

People

The speakers at the conference are mostly independent experts and professionals, mainly on the topic of open source, open hardware, and open data. For me it's always an opportunity to learn news and details about technologies I don't work with every day. I also always get to meet my acquaintances at the conference after a long time, including ones I mostly know from online communication rather than over a beer or on a bike ride. So I got to chat with Petr Stehlík about wireless modules and the ESP8266, etc., with Petr Krčmář, Pavel Kovář, Martin Kolman, the already-mentioned Honza and Franta, 'Vespa' and others.

At one booth, where they were presenting data processing on top of Open Street Map, I got to meet and get to know in person the author of MTB maps, Martin Tesař. Together we then worked out the display of his map data in my project GPS log viewer.

Organizing the Open Alt conference

In 2017 the OpenAlt conference took place on November 4-5.
The organization was, as always, top-notch, no wonder given that it was handled by the members and supporters of the OpenAlt association, who are all very proactive.

Accommodation was, as always, provided at Hotel Vista.
Morning dawn over Brno:

A quality breakfast is the foundation for delivering quality performance for any professional, whether they're a athlete, an IT developer, a miner, or a speaker:

Since I'm a responsible early riser, Honza and I arrived at the conference before it started, when the venue was still being set up for the event. We needed to put up directional arrows and promotional flyers:

So we got to work putting up posters and navigation arrows:

We prepared name badges for all the speakers:

Everything ready, we're waiting for the visitors:

Talks I attended

The Hacking Team talk was very interesting; it wasn't recorded, but an article based on the talk is on the root.cz server: article based on the Hacking Team talk The talk was excellent - extremely well researched and presented in a very witty way.

SmartCard

I attended the talk on the topic of SmartCards. This talk brought back memories from the time when I worked with the OpenCard type of SmartCard, which can be programmed in Java.

IQRF

I attended the talk on IQRF, which was pitched at a suitably technical level for the highly specialized audience that attends the OpenAlt conference.

Open-source IoT hardware

Petr Stehlík showed and described various hardware he has in his home workshop, with which you can comfortably develop various projects. Often the kind of modern projects that are nowadays labeled IoT.

Laser shooting range

Once again there was a booth with a laser shooting range, using pistols printed on a 3D printer. At this booth I was able to discuss my questions. Thanks to that, once I have the time, I'll be able to easily finish the pistol I started building in collaboration with GeekLab.
There were also new types of rifles on display:

Peripherals

During the evening discussion over a beer, nobody pulled out the legendary OpenMoko Neo FreeRunner. But I did take photos of some interesting mobile peripherals:

My talk

Since I'd been rehabilitating at a spa before the event, I had plenty of time to think through the topic and concept of the talk. The actual writing of the talk was then just a matter of being able to find the time and write it. (To create the talk I used the LaTeX technology)
I arrived at this edition with the talk "Btrfs, or: turn on your computer and have it backed up", which, as the name suggests, is about the Btrfs filesystem. This filesystem turns out to be excellently usable for backups too.

My video invitation to the OpenAlt 2017 conference:

Recording of my talk on Btrfs and backups:

More about the OpenAlt 2017 conference

There were many talks, and since I couldn't cover all of them even if I wanted to, I'll refer readers to the program of the OpenAlt 2017 conference and the video recordings of the talks from the OpenAlt 2017 conference

On Twitter, posts from the event can be found under the hashtag #openalt.