SCaLE U

I heard a couple of jokes the other day:

Q: What’s better than going to the Southern California Linux Expo, one of the top Linux events in the country?
A: Attending classes I’m teaching at SCaLE U, a joint production of SCaLE and LOPSA.

Q: What’s worse than my contrived jokes?
A: Nothing. Just please don’t tell another one.

Okay, so I wasn’t born for stand-up. I promise, I’m a far better teacher than I am a comedian — but don’t take my word for it. Join LOPSA and me at SCaLE U on February 20th and see for yourself!

Last year, I taught a class on spam filtering at SCaLE, and it immediately made my list of favorite Linux events. First off, it’s in sunny Southern California in February, so it’s warm, at least to this son of Nebraska. Beyond that, there’s just a really fun vibe to it; everyone takes things just seriously enough.

This year, I get teach two classes: Internal Documentation for SysAdmins and Saving the World with Fedora Directory Server.

Documentation is one of my favorite classes to teach, and has been well received at past events including the Ohio Linux Fest and LOPSA’s Sysadmin Days even in Philadelphia. People like the class because it’s not like any other documentation class they’ve ever taken. I don’t teach how to not split infitives [sic], how the passive voice should be avoided [sic], or what a preterite is. My goal — which is far more concomitant with the goals of SysAdmins and their employers — is not to force people to “write grammatically,” but to write. Period. Using St. Pierre’s Hierarchy of Documentation Needs, which I shamelessly ripped off from the eminent psychologist Abraham Maslow, I get to give people real, applicable solutions to writing the documentation that provides business continuity, not silly rules about comma splices. It’s really fun to get done with this class and see people writing — people who, a few hours before, actually believed the lie they’d been told their whole life: that they “can’t write.” Throughout most of my (many) college years, I planned to continue on to grad school to become an English professor; maybe its that history rearing its head, but I get a huge charge out of teaching this class for precisely that reason.

Saving the World is sort of the flip side of that coin: I leave my cushy background in the Humanities behind and get to talk hard, nuts-and-bolts tech for a while. I’ve been in love with Fedora Directory Server since I first spent several weeks getting it to build on 64-bit Linux (and contributing the patches back so no one else would know that torture), and have translated that love into two open-source projects I maintain, Fedora DS Graph and the pre-alpha Fedora DS Utils. Although this class is hard tech, it’s also pragmatic: thus the title, Saving the World. My goal with Fedora DS is to save my world from the evils of the Late Night Monitoring Alert Beast, the Black Goat of a Thousand Static /etc/passwd Files, the Soul-Eating Gorgon with Different Passwords for Each Service, and all of their hideous brethren and sistren, and my goal with this class is to pass on to you the skills to slay these creatures and, with luck, still have time to drink a beer afterwards.

As if getting to teach two great classes at a great event weren’t enough, I get to teach opposite Jesse Trucks, one of LOPSA’s go-to guys for top notch tutorial instruction. You really can’t go wrong with any of the classes taught at SCaLE U, although obviously you’ll go less wrong with mine. 🙂

I’ll see you there!