foss

This has been a hard blog post to write, but to me it feels like it’s been a long time coming. For the better part of the past 5 years my job and open source contributions have revolved a lot around Puppet. I’ve been a member of the community for a long time, contributing to a range of different projects and giving a variety of talks at associated events like Puppet Camps, Configuration Management Camp and PuppetConf.

Every now and then I find myself in discussions with people around which tools we should use for what job. This comes up especially often in the context of FOSS with regards to communication platforms. Do we use IRC, Slack, Gitter? Also, are mailing lists still a thing? Should we have a Discourse instead? Fairly often the reaction of people will be “no you can’t use Slack, use FOSS tools for FOSS projects”.

FOSDEM is a wonderful event. But as with any event with geeks people will try to sniff your traffic, mess with GSM, grab your credentials and what not. The best way to stay safe? Don’t bring electronics with you or have them in flight mode (laptop included). No Bluetooth, no WiFi, no GSM/3G/tethering, nothing. If that doesn’t sound all that practical there’s a few things you can do. Spin up a Streisand server so you can VPN all the things.