---
layout: post
title: 'SeaGL speaker Q&A: Gareth J. Greenaway'
status: publish
type: post
published: true
categories: news
tags: '2015'
---

Speaker Gareth J. Greenaway talks SaltStack and ChatOps:

Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your
background?

Absolutely! I'm Gareth J. Greenaway, I'm a semi-native Southern Californian.
Semi-native because while I've lived in SoCal most of my life I was born in
Auckland, New Zealand. I've been a member of the free & open source community
for just over 20 years. The two major contributions I've been able to bring
to the FOSS community are being one of the co-founders and organizers of the
Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) and the 2+ years I've been actively
contributing to the SaltStack project.

Q: Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an
idea of what we might expect?

I'm going to be talking about SaltStack and how it can fit into the ChatOps
movement. Chatops, like DevOps, is a very subject term and means something
different to everyone. I'm a fan and a believer of the definition that
originally came out of Github, putting the tools in the middle of the
conversation. Because of the way SaltStack was designed, it's extremely
flexible and extendable. It lends itself to fit nicely into this paradigm.
The talk will, hopefully, illustrate a lot of these concepts to the attendees.

Q: Is this your first visit to SeaGL? If so, what are your expectations? If
not, can you give us your impressions of the event?

This will be my second year attending and speaking at SeaGL. As an event
organizer it's always a unique experience attending events that you're not
responsible for. It's definitely a good experience being able to watch the
organizers run around like crazy making sure everything goes off how it show,
especially knowing what it takes to do so. Knowing all this, I was impressed
with SeaGL as a show ad the organizers. It made my nostalgic for the past
SCALE events and I'm excited to see how SeaGL continues to grow in the coming
years.
