One of the things I like most about the global open source community is its culture of constant collaboration. While much of that collaboration takes place electronically over GitHub or through other channels, there are also ample opportunities for us to meet in person, share best practices, and advance key projects. Fall has been a particularly busy time for our team, so I thought I’d share some highlights.

I had the opportunity to keynote the second annual CROSS Research Symposium and 2017 UCSC Systems Oktoberfest CROSS (Center for Research in Open Source Software) at the University of California Santa Cruz Baskin School of Engineering that turns open source software models into rich software projects. My keynote focused on how companies get engaged with open source software, and I discussed ways that we support universities and education in open source.

In the same week, I was also honored to keynote the SeaGL conference in Seattle, Washington. SeaGL is a volunteer-run event that is committed to spreading awareness about the Linux and the open-source GNU operating system.

We strongly believe that we will advance our open source program and our contributions back to the open source world by working together, which is why we participate in the Todo group. The Todo group is based on an open group of companies who collaborate and share best practices and tools, and discuss current open source practices. The Todo group meeting took place in San Francisco and I worked together with other peers from open source offices.

SDxE, The Software-Defined Enterprise Conference & Expo, was another event that we participated in, and Comcast Business was a signature sponsor. I shared some insights on business models in open source during a panel with industry professionals.

During the last week of September, a bunch of us headed to Strange Loop, an annual multi-disciplinary, technology and innovation conference, in St. Louis, Missouri. Strange Loop is an event that focuses in areas such as emerging languages, security, distributed systems, concurrency, and more. Comcast was proud to be a Platinum Sponsor of this year’s conference. We also led two informative sessions:

In this talk about software capacity management, Jon Moore, Chief Software Architect at Comcast, discussed a powerful concept from queuing theory known as Little’s Law to illustrate where software rate limiting can break down and why an alternative — concurrency control — can be a superior way of addressing this problem.

Automating Cloud Security and Incident Response (DevSecOps) Jearvon Dharrie, Sr. Software Engineer from Comcast, discussed creating a security framework for the enterprise by taking principles of automation from DevOps and applying it to security.

We were also delighted to sponsor the Papers We Love Conf (PWLConf), which was co-located with Strange Loop. Papers We Love is a repository of academic computer science papers and we truly value the connections that form from applying research to real-world industry problems.

Hard to believe there’s still a full month left in the fall and a jam-packed schedule of conferences ahead.