• Why it's important to get kids into public speaking

  Although she's only 16 years old, Keila Banks is already a veteran presenter at technology conferences. Her courage to get on stage in front of adults, beginning at the very young age of 11, to talk about open source technology has opened a world of opportunities for her.

  In her Lightning Talk at the 16th annual Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE), Keila shares some of her amazing experiences, from the television studio to the White House, resulting from her conference presentations about open source, coding, and involving youth in technology.

  Watch Keila's Lightning Talk to learn more about how to leverage conference presentations to advance your career.

• Firefox 60 and JAWS 2018 back in good browsing conditions together

  When Firefox Quantum was first released in November of 2017, it temporarily regressed users of the JAWS screen reader. I’m happy to report that both Firefox and JAWS once again deliver a first class browsing experience together!

• These Weeks in Dev-Tools, issue 4

  Welcome to the 4th issue of these weeks in dev-tools! We've re-organised the
  teams a little bit and have been working hard towards the 2018 edition release.

  These Weeks in Dev-Tools will keep you up to date with all the exciting dev
  tools news. We plan to have a new issue every few weeks. If you have any news
  you'd like us to report, please comment on the tracking issue.

  If you're interested in Rust's developer tools and want to contribute or ask
  questions, come chat to us on Gitter.

• How citizens become scientists with open hardware

  "Every person's piece of individual information put together gives you a cloud of real knowledge."

  Eymund Diegel, a research coordinator for Gowanus Canal Conservancy, shares this tidbit during the first clip of the new Open Source Stories documentary, "The Science of Collective Discovery." He's setting out in a canoe on an inner-city canal that is polluted and struggling to get the help it needs.

  That's the theme of citizen science it seems: people and places in need who are not getting the help and resources they deserve taking matters into their own hands. Why are they not getting the help they need in the first place? The reason is shockingly simple yet a typical problem: Where's the evidence?

When open source first hit the market, for many it was indistinguishable from The Free Software Movement. The key appeal was, indeed, that open source software was free – primarily because of the unchecked redistribution rights, where licences didn’t restrict any party from selling or giving away the software.

It's hard to beat the business case for open source: teams of motivated individuals working with intent to solve problems with software. But how do organisations attract and retain open source talent?

Increasingly, these engineers are turning up for the gig, and a good salary is no longer their only consideration.

They're also building their CVs on GitHub, which is more meaningful than their formal work experience, said Werner Knoblich, Red Hat's senior vice president and general manager for Europe, Middle East and Africa, at the company's summit in San Francisco this week.

• KubeCon's Europe 2018 Event Highlights Kubernetes' Progress, Expansion

• SecureDrop development sprint in PyCon 2018

  SecureDrop will take part in PyCon US development sprints (from 14th to 17th May). This will be first time for the SecureDrop project to present in the sprints.

  If you never heard of the project before, SecureDrop is an open source whistleblower submission system that media organizations can install to securely accept documents from anonymous sources. Currently, dozens of news organizations including The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Associated Press, USA Today, and more, use SecureDrop to preserve the anonymous tipline in an era of mass surveillance. SecureDrop is installed on-premises in the news organizations, and journalists and source both use a web application to interact with the system. It was originally coded by the late Aaron Swartz and is now managed by Freedom of the Press Foundation.

• Highlights from the OpenStack project teams gathering

  A few weeks back in Dublin, Ireland, OpenStack engineers gathered from dozens of countries and companies to discuss the next release of OpenStack. This is always my favorite OpenStack event, because I get to do interviews with the various teams, to talk about what they did in the just-released version (Queens, in this case) and what they have planned for the next one (Rocky).

• PostgreSQL visits LSFMM

  The recent fsync() woes experienced by PostgreSQL led to a session on the first day (April 23) of the 2018 Linux Storage, Filesystem, and Memory-Management Summit (LSFMM). Those problems also led to a second-day session with PostgreSQL developer Andres Freund who gave an overview of how PostgreSQL does I/O and where that ran aground on some assumptions that had been made. The session led to a fair amount of discussion with the filesystem-track developers; real solutions seem to be in the offing.

  PostgreSQL is process-based; there are no threads used, Freund said. It does write-ahead logging (WAL) for durability and replication. That means it logs data before it is marked dirty and the log is flushed before the dirty data is written. Checkpointing is done in the background with writes that are throttled as needed. In general, all data I/O is buffered, though the WAL can use direct I/O.

• Containers and license compliance

  Containers are, of course, all the rage these days; in fact, during his 2018 Legal and Licensing Workshop (LLW) talk, Dirk Hohndel said with a grin that he hears "containers may take off". But, while containers are easy to set up and use, license compliance for containers is "incredibly hard". He has been spending "way too much time" thinking about container compliance recently and, beyond the standard "let's go shopping" solution to hard problems, has come up with some ideas. Hohndel is a longtime member of the FOSS community who is now the chief open source officer at VMware—a company that ships some container images.

  He said that he would be using Docker in his examples, but he is not picking on Docker, it is just a well-known container management system. His talk is targeting those that want to ship an actual container image, rather than simply a Dockerfile that a customer would build into an image. He has heard of some trying to avoid "distributing" free and open-source software that way, but is rather skeptical of that approach.