Hear Me Out: Mythbusting Documentation at Nextcloud Conference

I am so proud to be invited to #Nextcloud Conference and give my talk on Mythbusting #Documentation in Berlin next week. Awesome. Here’s the announcement: 

Nextcloud conference: Markus Feilner – Nextcloud … : 

Markus believes that things break when corporate interest and advertisement break into new systems. To him, “A better internet” would be something like the 21st century tech, back to what the internet meant in the nineties. “For the conservative right-wing politicians, the internet seems to be a lawless zone, where they don’t have to bother about constitutional rights and privacy. If we build a new one, which I am convinced we will, the next gen internet aka plaNet will be like that. Well, at least if we manage to save our planet first.”

My first Editorial at Heise … it’s Dynamite!

Inseln, Phisher und Dynamit | iX | Heise Magazine … :

An einem der vielen südlichsten Punkte Europas findet sich eine kleine, unbedeutende Insel namens Gavdos, wenige Fährstunden südlich von Kreta, 250 Kilometer von der afrikanischen Küste entfernt und damit Griechenlands südliches Ende. Auf ihr leben nur eine zweistellige Anzahl von permanenten Bewohnern, Fremde verirren sich nicht oft hierher. Die meisten Einwohner leben vom Fisch­fang, bauen ein wenig Wein, Obst, Gemüse und Getreide an, halten Schafe und Ziegen. Touristen kennen Gavdos in der Regel nur von Vassilis’ Radiostation „Gavdos FM“, die beim Wandern in den schluchtenreichen Weißen Bergen Südwestkretas der letzte Draht zur Außenwelt bleibt. Das Logo von Gavdos FM – Che Guevara im Piratenlook – sagt viel über die Einwohner der abgelegenen Insel.

“Mythbusting Documentation” – Markus Feilner beim Frühjahrsfachgespräch 2019 der GUUG

Im Programm der Gnu-Unix-User-Konferenz für diesen Donnerstag steht “What’s wrong with documentation?” und “Wie Dokumentation funktioniert” bei meinem Vortrag. Ich denke, der  beste deutsche Titel  für meinen Klassiker “Mythbusting Documentation” ist irgendwas a la “Dokumentation – eine lange Geschichte voller Missverständnisse und Mythen”.

Der Vortrag hat als Inhalt Vorurteile und Mythen über “Die Doku”, demgegenüber die Wahrheit, eine Stellenbeschreibung des perfekten Technical Writer und ein paar Worte zur “Agilen” Dokumentation.

<snip>:

Dieser Vortrag zeigt die häufigsten Mythen, Missverständnisse und Fehleinschätzungen über Software Dokumentation. “Jeder kann das schreiben” oder “Jeder Entwickler sollte Endkundendoku verfassen” gehören da genauso dazu wie “Gute Software braucht keine Doku” oder “Dokumentation ist ja nicht wirklich technisch” oder “Ihr müsst auch endlich agile werden mit Euerer Doku und Eueren Workflows”. Meist kursieren diese Annahmen im technischen Management und unter Entwicklern. Doch wer die Menschen fragt, die beim Anwender, dem Kunden oder Benutzer vor Ort sind, der erhält ein ganz anderes Bild. Warum viele Kunden immer noch Doku ausdrucken, welche Erwartungen sie an einen Dokumentationsspezialisten haben und warum das Profil des perfekten Writers deutlich mehr Anforderungen stellt als das eines Entwicklers oder Projektmanagers, genau das erklärt dieser Vortrag. 

</snip>

Update: Here’s the PDF of my talk, as I plan it for later this afternoon – it’s the German version of the talk I gave at SUSE Labs last year.

Markus Feilner’s OpenVPN Trainings at Linuxhotel

Update 2019: After many years of wonderful trainings, I won’t be available at Linux Hotel anymore. Sad, but understandable. My new employer, Heise, is offering trainings and conferences, too, and thus we may see each other there one day… Here’s the old text. Thank you Ingo, Martin, and all the others at this great Essen venue!

Since 2010 Markus Feilner has been sharing his Open VPN know-how in the wonderful location of the Linuxhotel in Villa Vogelsang in Essen, Germany. The wonderful hotel and training center are situated in a green and fresh park on a cliff above the Ruhr river. Its exclusive amenities range from sauna and spa to excellent food and extraordinary ideas for the evenings. (Watch the video beneath this post!)

Usually, Markus’ Open VPN training lasts for three days and covers basics, administration and advanced features of Open VPN in hands-on sessions. Whereas the first day is full of basic concepts and theory, day 2 and 3 will give participants hours of guided work with setup and exploring the abundance of Open VPN servers and clients, including deep dives into individually agreed on features.

Contact us or the Linux Hotel directly for requests about the class specified here: https://www.linuxhotel.de/kurs/openvpn/. Giving trainings at Linxhotel has always been a great pleasure, also because there are a lot of interesting and highly skilled parallel classes going on at the venue, the participants and trainers of which you will meet at lunch, breakfast, dinner, in the park or at the evening events. Linuxhotel is my favorite venue for any kind of training.

A praise of Folly: Security Theater – The mostly unknown OSI Layer 8 and above

Early in February 2018 I was happy to give my Security Theater speech at FOSDEM, in Brussels. They booked me after Howard Chu and right before the closing keynote – awesome, and there were a few thousand geeks in the audience – I guess that was the largest crowd I ever spoke to, and it was big fun – have a look at the video. Before that event, I had enjoyed meeting politicians from the European parliament and had given an interview to the Radio Berlin Brandenburg about the darknet.

Here (https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/security_theatre/) is where you find all material about this talk. Theres  the slides, the video and a big thank you goes out to Julia Reda’s for making the video for the FOSDEM Hackers. On top, I was asked for an interview about my presentation way before FOSDEM, here’s the link.

Do good things and talk about it – Lessons learnt in 20 years of Open Source PR

This is a talk that I first gave as a workshop, together with my wonderfully skilled and experienced colleagues Jake Edge (LWN) and Deb Nicholson (OIN) during the 12. KDE Akademy in Tallinn, Estonia in 2012. Where then we did it as a full-day workshop, this video is from QtCon 2016, and it’s more a presentation of 1:00 hour. This is one of my favourite presentations and the one booked the most – I did it at SUSECON, openSUSE conference and SUSE Labs, too and for a variety of other hosts.

This talk will tell, teach and train open source community members, company leaders, developers and open source project leads how to deal with the press.

Hosting Open! 2016 Blockchain panel

Transparent geblockt

Just found these pictures from hosting a panel on Blockchain at the Open Source Business Alliance’s 2016 Open IT! Konferenz,  moderating the OSBAR Award ceremony and the corresponding article on blockchain in enterprise (written for the OSBA/MFG) called “transparently blocked”, unfortunately only available in German: Transparent geblockt :

Am 7. Dezember [2016] treffen sich Experten aus Industrie, Wissenschaft und IT, um bei der OPEN! 2016 zu (er)klären, ob die Blockchain Hype oder ein echter Game-Changer ist, welche Rolle Verschlüsselung und Peer-to-Peer-Netzwerke dabei spielen und warum immer mehr Branchen der Meinung sind, die Kette aus verschlüsselten Informations-Blöcken lasse sich für neue und alte Geschäftsmodelle gewinnbringend einsetzen.

More Pictures from the conference can be found here.