Blue banners and penguin mascots decorated the Pasadena Convention Center on Saturday, Mar. 8, when Poly computer science students attended the 22nd annual Southern California Linux Expo. The event, also known as SCaLE, is the largest community-run open-source software conference in North America.
SCaLE includes a multitude of professional speakers focusing on a variety of open-source systems, which refer to software that is freely available for anyone to use, edit or distribute. Poly junior August Cho had the opportunity to present at SCaLE as part of the Next Generation program, which allows high school students to share their work relating to computer science in a conference setting. His presentation, entitled “Making Linux from Scratch,” detailed his experience attempting to download and create his own version of a Linux operating system. The lecture was both humorous and informative, explaining the successes and difficulties that come with installing even the “bare minimum” of resources needed to create a working open-source operating system.
Upper School Science teacher Richard White has organized this field trip to SCaLE for the past seven years, and about half of those years students have applied and had the opportunity to present through the Next Generation program. This gives students not only the opportunity to present their work in a professional setting but also a chance to share their passions with like-minded individuals.
“It’s just a convention center filled with a bunch of people who do the same things that I’ve been doing for a long time—people who are interested in computers in the same way as me,” shared Cho.
Other than attending presentations, students also got to meet representatives from various organizations and learn about how they implement open-source software into real-world applications such as data collection, digital security and STEM education.
“I enjoyed the experience of meeting a lot of people, working with computers and implementing different types of data through open source [software],” shared sophomore attendee William Son.
Many student attendees were particularly interested in the keynote presentation “Robots Building Robots” by Solomon Hykes, which demonstrated the impact that artificial intelligence is beginning to have in the way we program software. He is the co-founder and CEO of Dagger.io, a platform that lets users interact with a large language model to write code, debug and perform other functions on their computers.
“I found it [Dagger] to be something that I actually could learn myself, so it’s very practical and inspirational,” shared sophomore Kelland Hong.
Overall, SCaLE allowed students to explore and expand on their computer science knowledge through various presentations, activities, demonstrations and more. White, who also ran the facial recognition and generative art booths at SCaLE, shared, “I probably wouldn’t recommend it [SCaLE] for everybody, but if you’re a little bit nerdy and you want to see some other nerds or see some cool tech stuff, then it’s a lot of fun.”
