Four Years of MacAdmins
Back in February of this year I was able to present at MacAD.UK in London (I attended in 2017; had a blast both times). This marked my eight appearance at a conference as a speaker since joining Jamf in 2012 as the second member of their fledgling IT department. To be fair, four of those appearances were at JNUC. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
In about month, I’ll be making my fourth appearance, third speaking, at the MacAdmins Conference at Penn State. I have loved this conference every year I’ve attended, and credit is due to the organizers who accumulate a great roster of speakers with a range of content subjects. You’re never without something to listen to.
My first time speaking her, in 2016, I gave what would end up being my most widely viewed presentation to date: Craft Your Own GUIs with Python and Tkinter. The video on YouTube has garnered an insane 82K+ views. I’ll attribute much of that to the subject’s appeal outside of Mac admin circles.
On the second round in 2017 I went a bit further. I attempted, to mixed results, a half day workshop on building Jamf Pro Integrations along with another presentation: How Docker Compose Changed My Life. The workshop had a number of challenges that were all lessons I took to heart for the future: I had drastically underestimated the time needed for my content (we didn’t finish), the notice about prerequisite experience was lost from the sched.com listing, and I had no helpers to assist with questions cause us to pause frequently as I went around the room.
This year I’ll be doing another double feature, but no workshop. Two presentations at the 2018 conference!
Bryson’s doing a Jamf preso?
It’s true. Not counting JNUC, I will be delivering my first official Jamf presentation at a conference. Our gracious Marketing department offered our sponsor slot to me and even allowed me to pick whatever I wanted for the subject!
My choice is something near and dear to me: the recently announced Jamf Marketplace. Why is this near and dear? Creating integrations with Jamf Pro has been a passion of mine, and the Marketplace is a step towards a beautiful future where admins and developers can publish their work for all to share in. I’m very excited for this one.
Session Link: Get Your Tools in Front of Thousands with the Jamf Marketplace
Talking Serverless and AWS
My personal session (not affiliated with Jamf) is all about the new focus in my professional life: serverless application architectures in AWS. That alone can be a pretty broad subject. My presentation will focus on Lambda: the AWS service for running code without servers.
There is a lot of potential for Lambda within your org if you have an AWS account, or would be allowed to create one (you’d be shocked at what you can achieve within the free tier – which I’ll touch on). Beyond the tried and true cron job, you can implement all sorts of crazy even driven workflows with custom processing handled by Lambda functions you’ve written in your preferred language (which is Python, right?).
I’ll be doing a deep dive into subject. We’ll cover the basics of Lambda, how IAM permissions work and how to apply them, the best practices of defining and deploying using CloudFormation (what I call template-first development), and hopefully more if time allows. It’s an area I’ve become very passionate about and I’m looking so forward to being able to present on this to the Mac admin community.
Session Link: Diving into AWS Lambda: An Intro to Serverless for Admins
I hope to see you next month! If you don’t find me wandering the halls between sessions, please reach out on Slack, or peek into Legends. It’s a favorite.
If you’re interested in the presentations I’ve done over the years at various conferences, you can find that list with YouTube links here.
Bryson Tyrrell 