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FOSDEM is one of my favorite events because I get to catch up with friends from across the FOSS communities and meet so many amazing contributors who use and support open source. It’s inspiring to see so many people excited about building software, hardware, and everything in between together. That energy motivates me in my own open source work. This year, I was also glad to attend two FOSDEM fringe events, CHAOSSCon-EU and CentOS Connect, where I got to sit on panels. ...

On my quest to knock down the sprawl of extra servers at work, I’ve managed to get down to two main services that need to be migrated to SaaS vendors. In my previous post about systems, I mentioned how I’d fallen into a trap of discussing with AI/LLMs about the positives of self hosting over leveraging solutions we had from vendors. The two main things I wanted to accomplish out of this was: ...

In compliance, particularly in financial services compliance teams, managing the book of regulations and the controls in place to ensure compliance is important. A regulator is an entity that creates laws, rules, and guidance for how businesses should be conducted. Many common regulators are ones most of us know, like your legislator, or ministries that create rules for the marketplace. The European Commission is an example of a regulator that sets out rules in the EU. ...

Just putting this out into the universe. Frappe OIDC (OpenID Connect) mapping for Amazon Cognito. Client ID: Amazon provided Client Secret: Amazon provided Base URL: https://{userpoolid}.auth.{region}.amazoncognito.com/oauth2 Authorize URL: /authorize Redirect URL: /api/method/frappe.integrations.oauth2_logins.custom/{doc name for social key} Access Token URL: /token API Endpoint: /userInfo Auth URL Data: {“scope”:“openid email”, “response_type”: “code”} As a note, Auth URL Data is a JSON array that gets parsed into the Authorize URL. So if you want to expand your scopes, just append more to the scope key in the JSON. ...

In the last few weeks of the year, I’ve been re-examining how I use AI tools both personally and professionally. The benefit of being able to go a step further in doing things, faster, without understanding the hows and whys, or worse, the false sense of confidence that I could achieve with AI, has really started to concern me. One part of that is that it gives me the confidence to use technology in ways I wouldn’t normally reach for, both personally and professionally. An example of that is the amount of self-hosting I’ve been doing. I’m someone who prefers the right tool for the job, even when it doesn’t align with the architecture or the broader landscape of the long-term plan. In my role at work, I have more direct control over the direction of our strategy for how we do business, both in theory and in practice. However, AI has given me too much assurance that the decision to buy was right. ...

Recently, I listened to a talk by someone I highly respect in the FOSS world, Brian “bex” Exelbierd, at OpenAlt. In his talk “Bring Wood for the Fire”, bex describes how communities come together around the fire to discuss and collaborate about ideas and share different perspectives. The campfire is used as a metaphor for a gathering or conference of an open source community, as a place where everyone can contribute to keeping the fire alive. Between speakers, organizers, and the attendees in the hallway tracks, those conversations give life to the event and bring everyone around the fire. ...

Sometimes the easiest anwser is the most janky anwser. In my journey to deploy Frappe’s Helpdesk solution, I hit an obscure problem with how Frappe handles Message IDs. Since SMTP providers today typically generate a Message ID themselves when a message goes out for their own bounce/complaint tracking, any application that uses it’s own generated Message ID won’t work correctly. And primarily where you’re deploying a help desk / ticketing solution, this will cause all kinds of heartache. ...

Recently, we adopted Frappe’s Helpdesk platform at my workplace to manage support tickets for our customer work. In doing so, I gained insight into how Frappe sends emails and, depending on your SMTP provider, the consequences of those emails and how they’re processed. Frappe’s built-in SMTP tool sends emails based on its built-in Email Queue DocType, which is where anywhere in the framework can store an outbound email. Periodically, this email queue is processed, and using your default SMTP provider, those emails are sent outbound. One of the interesting parts of this is Frappe builds a Message ID and stores it in the Email Queue (and eventually the Communication doctype later on). This means when you send a message with that header and Message ID, the end user should get it. In their mail client, when they reply to a message, it should then send an In-Reply-To header with that original Message ID. ...

The Fedora community’s guiding north star for Strategy 2028 is “By the end of 2028, double the number of contributors active every week,” which boils down to thinking about how we attract and support people who are making an effort to improve or grow Fedora, both as a Linux distribution and as a project. Many of the teams involved in Fedora on a day-to-day basis are technologists who focus on writing code and delivering high-quality software to end users. At the same time, there is a community of contributors who focus more on enabling, promoting, and building a better space for all. In how Fedora represents these two bodies, the Mindshare committee and the FESCo (Fedora Engineering Steering Committee) both hold the task of providing guidance to the SIGs/Teams/WGs/loosely organized flocks of contributors who are working to make Fedora better. ...

Just some thoughts on event boxes. In Fedora, I’ve seen many posts about having kits and easy ways for people to run events in the community spaces. I am also learning that in Amsterdam, there is less FOSS meetups than I expected so I’m trying to change that. Reading this post: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/fedora-community-blueprint-all-you-need-to-know/163038 I’ve learned that this also seems to be a common thing with the absence of Ambassadors. This list is just a collection of resources which might help and I am thinking about backporting into the CommOps docs. ...