GitHub heads to SCaLE 20X in Pasadena

The Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE), North America’s largest community-run open-source conference, runs March 9–12, 2023 in Pasadena. GitHub will be on the expo floor, and the team invites attendees to stop by the booth for conversations about GitHub Actions, plus demos and stickers for GitHub Codespaces and GitHub Copilot.

Two GitHub staffers are also presenting at the conference. Rizel (@blackgirlbytes) will cover techniques for getting more out of GitHub Copilot in her session, and Margaret (@margaret-tucker) will discuss how developers can participate in public policy. Both talks are part of a larger speaker lineup drawn from across the open-source community, and registration remains open for the event.

Beyond GitHub’s own sessions, a few other talks stand out on the schedule.

Introduction to Vitess, sharding framework for MySQL

Friday, March 10, 2023 – 15:00 to 16:00

Vitess is a framework built on top of MySQL to enable horizontal scaling. Originally designed at Google to handle YouTube’s growth, it was later contributed to the Cloud Native Compute Foundation (CNCF), where it now holds “graduated project” status.

We accidentally created a Serverless Application

Saturday, March 11, 2023 – 15:00 to 16:00

This talk explores the challenge of creating workshops and disposable environments for developer education. The speaker’s team, working within IBM’s cloud (which is designed for long-term production workloads rather than ephemeral test setups), discovered they had inadvertently built a full serverless stack while trying to improve their infrastructure workflow.

Cloudy with a Chance of Success: 7 Tips and Tricks for Surviving Your First Cloud Engineering Experience

Sunday, March 12, 2023 – 11:30 am PT to 12:30 pm PT

Speaker Camilla Berretta offers practical advice for those starting out in cloud engineering. Key takeaways include:

  • Start from first principles: build a solid grasp of CI/CD fundamentals.
  • Stay organized when faced with a complex new toolchain.
  • Refine your developer loop to accelerate coding and debugging.
  • Find a knowledgeable, approachable mentor inside or outside your team.
  • Seek open source tools for local testing that reduce the need for deployment.
  • Shadow deployment processes to understand the steps involved.
  • Log every blocker you encounter and how you resolved it to deepen your own learning.

The full conference schedule and speaker list are available on the SCaLE site. See you there.