[kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday, 7pm: Open edX, Ansible (Oct 2021)

Paul Nijjar paul_nijjar at yahoo.ca
Sat Oct 2 15:52:07 EDT 2021


Well, here we are. We may still be cloistered in our home offices for
now, but things are opening up. The University of Waterloo (and
probably many other institutions) have announced they are moving back
to in-person teaching starting in January. What a relief! For a year
and a half we have been attempting to teach courses using websites and
computers, and now we can throw that all away and never use computers
again. But in the meantime we are still online, and that means we are
using Learning Management Systems (aka LMSes). It turns out that the
University of Waterloo has a perfectly cromulent LMS -- BrightSpace,
aka LEARN, aka the learning management system from D2L (nee
Desire2Learn), developed right here in Waterloo Region. But even
though I am involved with teaching a course at UW, and even though the
D2L product is the official learning management system, our course
uses an alternative LMS called Open edX, developed by our rivals at
MIT and Harvard. Why are we committing such sedition?  And what does
FLOSS have to do about any of this? I shall attempt to explain before
the D2L police arrive to drag me away. 

Our other presentation will make you more employable. Last month Jason
Eckert gave us an overview of the containerization landscape, and this
month Jeff Smith will focus on Ansible, a tool for configuring servers
using code. Instead of logging into a misbehaving server and tweaking
it manually (with some fix you will inevitably forget) you can encode
those changes and make sure all affected servers get the fix. Do you
want to deploy 20k identical servers for your Kubernetes cluster? Use
Ansible to configure them and press go. Jeff will tell us about the
Ansible ecosystem and give us some fun demos. 

In other news, the KPL is reviving its introductory course on Python
Programming for Adults. This four week series runs Thursdays at
6:30pm, starting on October 14. To sign up, visit
https://kplca.evanced.info/signup/eventdetails?eventid=47404

As always, we are looking for presentations. We are currently booking
for December and later. Get in touch!

Finally, I do not even know whether this is worth mentioning, but
the first KWLUG meeting happened in October 2001. (You can read some
of that history here: https://kwlug.org/history .) This means it is
our 20th anniversary, and I guess it means that several of our
founding members must have started attending when they were nine years
old. KWLUG is a strange organization in that it does not officially
exist. It is a collective delusion powered by the generous
contributions of its self-declared membership, and the generous
sponsors who have donated web hosting, meeting space, and other
resources over the years. Thanks to all of you. 

We are again meeting on our online home (donated by the generous
people at DataCity, natch):

https://webconference.kwlug.org/room/kwlug

The meeting starts at 7pm.

- Paul
-- 
Events: https://feeds.off-topic.kwlug.org 
Housing: https://unionsd.coop
Blog: http://pnijjar.freeshell.org




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