Southern California Linux Expo 2025

2025-03-29

I went to a conference a few weeks ago! It was my first tech conference of the year - Scale22X, the 22nd Annual Southern California Linux Expo - in Pasadena.

I took so many notes over that weekend, and I had big plans to write up a detailed overview of everything I learned and wanted to recommend ... but then time passed and I never got a chance to compose it into a neat package, so that initial enthusiasm has sort of dissipated.

The schedule was really packed. In my opinion, there were just too many overlapping tracks for the amount of time and number of people there. I mean, just look at this schedule:

https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale/22x/schedule/friday

So! I am going to give you a list of videos for talks that I either a) saw and found really useful or b) wish I had been able to make time for.

** Many of these do not have videos uploaded yet. Where there are videos, I'll provide links to them; otherwise I'll link back to the description pages on the ScaleX site.

Friday, March 7

• Turning Incidents into Insights, Not Insults (Heather Osborn)
• Building a Network of Open Source Program Offices at the University of California (Stephanie Lieggi, Tim Dennis)
• Anatomy of Table-Level Locks in PostgreSQL (Gulcin YildirimJelinek, Andrew Farries)
• How did it come to this? Untangling SA, Dev(*)Ops, SRE, and PE (Ben Rockwood)
• How LA Metro is using Open Data to prepare for the 2028 Olympics and Paralympics (Monica Waggoner)
• Bringing Joy to Kubernetes Deployments (Murriel Perez McCabe, Elizabeth Ponce)
• Technopolitics: Public Digital Infrastructure for Democracy with Decidim (Guillaume Saunier)
• Mastering Incident Communication (kat gaines)
• Adding API Security to your DevSecOps Toolbelt (Scott Bly)
• Panel: Public tech stacks that work for all (Chach Sikes, Nina Kin)

Saturday, March 8

• How to do Everything in a Terminal (Jared Bernard)
• Advanced SRE: Networking (Patrick Shuff)
• The best of both worlds: building R / Python pipelines for biomedical LLM semantic search apps (Thomas Charlon)
• Mentorship as an Onramp to Open Source Contributions (Tyler Menezes, Kendall Nelson, Emily Lovell, Kevin Wang)
• Building Community and Social Capital on the Internet (Alexander Moral)

Sunday, March 9

• What happens when hardware puts software freedom first? We built a router to find out (Denver Gingerich)
• Copyleft and the GPL: Finding the Path Forward to Defend our Software Right to Repair (Bradley Kuhn)
• An Opinionated Proposal to Improve Internet TLS Certificate Management: Burn It All Down (Joe Thompson)
• Closing Keynote with Leslie Lamport

New videos were still being posted a few days ago, so I'm sure there are more to come. In the meantime, I recommend checking out the current playlist. There were so many good talks, you'll find something to pique your interest.