Ortelius Blog
Topics include Supply Chain Security, Vulnerability Management, Neat Tricks, and Contributor insights.
Ortelius Holiday Gathering December 2025
Celebrating our Amazing Community of Committers
Wednesday, December 17th, 2025 8:30-11:00 MT (10:30-1:00 ET)
Join us for the Ortelius Open-Source Contributor Holiday Gathering on Wednesday, December 17, 2025 at 8:30 AM MT. We’ll kick things off with our infamous beer-and-donuts intro (because why choose?) and celebrate our community’s achievements with a special badge recognition for contributors. Come raise a mug, grab a donut, and toast the people who shipped code, docs, and ideas all year long—see you there!
Keynote - CAP, and the Open Infrastructure Era, an Interview with Eric Brewer
Eric Brewer is one of the most influential thinkers in modern computing. As the creator of the CAP Theorem, his work reshaped how distributed systems balance consistency, availability, and fault tolerance, laying the foundation for today’s cloud and microservice architectures.
At Google, Eric leads infrastructure innovation at planetary scale, guiding teams that design and operate some of the world’s most reliable, high-performance systems. His research and leadership have helped define how global networks, data centers, and cloud platforms support billions of users, all while advancing open-source software as the foundation of scalable innovation.
Before joining Google, Eric co-founded Inktomi Corporation, one of the first internet infrastructure companies powering web search and content delivery. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a governing board member of the OpenSSF, and continues to mentor the next generation of engineers as Professor Emeritus at UC Berkeley.
Today, Eric’s work bridges open systems, cloud reliability, and public good, from advancing open-source infrastructure to improving digital access in developing regions. His vision continues to inspire engineers and innovators who build the internet’s most trusted platforms.
Tech Talks
9:50 - 10:20: Sacha Wharton - Platform Engineering in Easy Steps
Platform engineering is the discipline of designing and building the internal developer platforms that streamline how software is delivered, deployed, and maintained. Sacha Wharton will help us understand how it provides developers with a self-service layer that abstracts away infrastructure complexity while enforcing best practices for security, scalability, and reliability.
10:20 - 10:50: Brian Dawson- MCP setup for Local Development
Building a local MCP (Model Context Protocol) server development environment enables developers to quickly create, test, and extend AI-powered tools and integrations in a controlled and repeatable way. The setup typically begins with configuring the MCP runtime locally—using Docker or a Python virtual environment—to emulate how the MCP server communicates with clients like ChatGPT. In this session, Brian Dawson will introduce his MCP Dev Environment Setup Tool, designed to help contributors get up and running quickly and confidently.
10:50-11:00
Closing and wrap up.