I had a great time attending the Southern California Linux Expo a couple of weekends ago in Pasadena.

SCaLE 23x provided a strong opportunity to connect with industry professionals, meet others in the open-source community, and engage with a wide range of technical talks and workshops. A major focus for me was gaining more hands-on exposure to modern Linux tooling and containerized workflows.

One of the highlights was a container workshop where we built and ran containers using Podman. Working directly with container tooling in a structured environment helped reinforce key concepts around isolation, image management, and reproducible development environments.

Events like this highlight how collaborative and fast-moving the Linux ecosystem is. The discussions with speakers and peers, along with the technical sessions, provided valuable perspective that I plan to carry forward into my work in systems and software engineering.

I’m looking forward to staying connected with the people I met and continuing to build on what I learned, as well as returning to SCaLE in the future.