
Free Beer Sessions
The Free Beer Sessions brings open source enthusiasts and users together.
Where open source enthusiasts come together and discuss industry trends, network with peers, and learn cool stuff, and the beer is free.
About Us
The Free Beer Sessions brings open source enthusiasts and users together to discuss industry trends, network with peers, and learn cool stuff. And yes, the beer is ABSOLUTELY free.
Meet Obsidian and learn more about us
In the true spirit of Open Source, Obsidian proudly sponsors Free Beer Sessions to promote the Open Source community dialogue, information sharing and to provide a networking opportunity.
Obsidian is the name that has become synonymous with providing peace of mind when it comes to Open Source Software (OSS) requirements.With two decades of knowledge and experience in the OSS realm Obsidian understands how open source can be utilised, modified and succesfully implemented in today’s business world. Regardless of your company’s core focus, OSS can play a valuable role in reducing long-term IT expenditure and increasing efficiency, all the while ensuring complete control and ownership of your valuable data. Whether it is identifying the most appropriate places in your business to implement OSS solutions, or assisting with those mission critical implementations and back-up services, Obsidian can help you.
It is Obsidian’s mission to provide OSS and its accompanying services (including the Linux operating system) to the African continent.
As a partner to businesses and the consumer community, Obsidian provides consulting on how open source can benefit anybody from home users, through small and medium sized businesses, to large corporations. Obsidian can help anybody to optimise their existing IT investments through the proper use of OSS.
Professional support for OSS systems and applications remains a point of concern for many IT decision makers. Obsidian has been providing professional telephonic, remote and on-site support on contract and per-incident basis for more than a decade. During this period, Obsidian has implemented and maintained OSS in business areas ranging from the infrastructural level to back-end solutions, as well as custom developed solutions.
As one of the first OSS solution providers in South Africa, Obsidian has forged strong partnerships with some of the IT industry’s top players. These partnerships offer Obsidian access to a wealth of knowledge that is vital in providing the very best open source solutions to our clients.
Key to Obsidian’s success over the past decade has been the emphasis we place on having skilled internal resources available. Extending this opportunity to our clients flows directly from a deep understanding of the value of training and knowledge transfer.
As important as having highly skilled technical resources at your disposal, is having end-users that are properly trained. With this in mind, Obsidian also provides end-user training on popular open source applications, with a strong focus on cross platform applications. For more information visit us at www.obsidian.co.za.
Past Speakers

Riedwaan Bassadien
Topics:
- 02 October 2014: Open source and microsoft

Brenda Mey
Topics:
- 01 November 2018: TBC

Karl Fischer
Topics:
- 01 November 2018: Karl's Camp Fire
- 02 March 2017: TBC
- 29 May 2014: Partly cloudy
- 31 October 2013: Andriod, now and tomorrow
- 30 April 2020: Legendary Speakers
- 30 April 2020: Lockdown Catchup

Paul Thompson
Topics:
- 30 June 2015: Achieving zero downtime

Philip Booysen
Topics:
- 12 May 2016: A Story of Enhancement featuring Raspberry Pi
- 01 January 2013: Combining open source software, open source hardware like arduino, your idea and collaborative intelligence

Eddie Dunckley
Topics:
- 12 May 2016: A new way to do Web applications

Tim Haak
Topics:
- 12 November 2015: Talking About the Whale in the Room - Docker

Ben Rudall
Topics:
- 12 November 2015: Starting A Spark for Hadoop

Charles Ash
Topics:
- 13 October 2016: War of the websites

Doug Hoseck
Topics:
- 13 October 2016: War of the websites

Grant Bingham
Topics:
- 13 October 2016: Big data in AWS using Hadoop & ELK

Candice Herodotou (Née Mesk)
Topics:
- 14 June 2018: DevOps Culture: Are you ready?

Quintin de Kok
Topics:
- 14 June 2018: Scaling Up and Out with Open Source at Netstar

Willie Engebrecht
Topics:
- 16 November 2017: A Sexy Apache NiFi Demo

Joe Drumgoole
Topics:
- 16 November 2017: Event Sourcing

Adam Piskorski
Topics:
- 19 September 2018: A PySpective

Robert Graham
Topics:
- 02 March 2017: TBC

Jonathan Carter
Topics:
- 02 March 2017: TBC

Graeme Lockley
Topics:
- 20 February 2014: Open source magic in the financial sector

Len Weincier
Topics:
- 20 February 2014: There is never enough time (trying to understand why we fail and software gets worse)

Richard Banks
Topics:
- 25 February 2016: The PHP Renaissance

Keutlwile Leso
Topics:
- 27 August 2015: The Secret Source: Govern, strategise, and architect before you open

Mark Clarke
Topics:
- 27 August 2015: The Internet of Things and Security

Guillaume Belrose
Topics:
- 27 August 2015: DevOps made simple with Ansible

Monique Afonso
Topics:
- 29 May 2014: Open leave, open salaries - open everything!

Manoj Chiba
Topics:
- 31 August 2017: Effect of Big Data on Business- the fundamental tactical and strategic shift

Gavin McDougall
Topics:
- 31 August 2017: Once upon a time a young man experienced Linux for the first time.... and what happened next

Donovan Austin
Topics:
- 31 October 2013: Implementation of Openstack / Ceph infrastructure at IS

Gavin McDougall
Topics:
- 31 October 2013: Implementation of Openstack / Ceph infrastructure at IS

Dave Rampersad
Topics:
- 08 March 2018: The intelligence of AI: using AI in business & security.

Thomas Lee
Topics:
- 08 March 2018: OpenStack Demystified

Muggie van Staden
Topics:
- 01 January 2013: The bee keeper - a description of professional open source business models

Garren Smith
Topics:
- 01 January 2013: The use of open source software tools to power your start-up

Guy Taylor
Topics:
- 01 January 2013: How technology is changing journalism

Jason Norwood-Young
Topics:
- 01 January 2013: Practical infrastructure scaling for millions of users in the cloud

Johan Lamprecht
Topics:
- 01 January 2013: The history, security and legalities behind local news (nntp) indexing services ~ the local pirate bay

Klaus Bergmann
Topics:
- 01 January 2013: The history, status and outlook of linux on the mainframe

Lee Taylor
Topics:
- 01 January 2013: Cubieboard introduction, bigger brother of the raspberry pi.

Merritt Krakowitzer
Topics:
- 01 January 2013: Datacenter automation with puppet

Nicolaas Coetzee
Topics:
- 01 January 2013: Fnb's experience with deploying open source solutions

Peet Gouws
Topics:
- 01 January 2013: Discovery's experience with deploying open source solutions

Paul Furber
Topics:
- 01 January 2013: The rise of the small but great linux machines

Nicolaas Coetzee
Topics:
- 01 January 2013: Fnb's experience with deploying open source solutions

Philip Stander
Topics:
- 01 January 2013: The use of open source technologies in demanding middleware environments

Pria Chetty
Topics:
- 01 January 2013: Solving for x: why the intellectual property in software question keeps us guessing?

Rob Enslin
Topics:
- 01 January 2013: Designing products that work. But first we need to test them with users.

Schalk Heunis
Topics:
- 01 January 2013: Combining open source software, open source hardware like arduino, your idea and collaborative intelligence.

Stefan Lesicnik
Topics:
- 01 January 2013: Open source trends affecting SA and what can be expected in the coming year