Note: 2025 speakers will posted in the coming months. Stay tuned.
Zack McCauley
UpgradeBuddy: Be a buddy, not a bother
UpgradeBuddy is a system designed to help notify your users of changes. Operating on the same idea as Nudge, UpgradeBuddy works when the system updates, smartly showing the required messages designed by the admins. Powered by AWS’s Code Pipeline and Cloudfront, delivering helpful messages has never been easier.
Bio: Zack McCauley is a macOS Client Platform Engineer with over a decade of experience in the field. Currently working at Amazon, Zack has contributed significantly to the management and optimization of macOS devices at scale.
With a deep understanding of Mobile Device Management (MDM), Zack has successfully implemented strategies to streamline operations and enhance productivity. Proficiency in developing Python scripts tailored for macOS environments has enabled new automations, simplifying complex tasks and enabling efficient workflows.
While focusing on the technical aspects of macOS management, Zack always keeps the user experience at the forefront, emphasizing the importance of seamless and intuitive interaction between macOS devices and their users.
Rebecca Latimer
Getting People to Actually Use Managed Software Center
Munki is a wonderful tool and Managed Software Center is a great replacement for the App Store, but how do you get people to actually use it? This is a quick talk on the things we have done to increase awareness of MSC and gently nudge people into using it!
Bio: Rebecca Latimer works as a Senior IT Endpoint Engineer at Thumbtack. She has been working in IT for almost 10 years and has spoken at events like the PSU Mac Admins conference, JNUC, and Brainstorm. She blogs occasionally, posts on Slack constantly, and loves working from home with a cuddly dog.
Harrison Ravazzolo
Leveraging osquery data from Fleet for device health using low code solutions and gitops workflows
Osquery managed by Fleet provides an unlimited number of ways to ask questions about your devices. But are you leveraging this data to make authentication decisions into your corporate environment? Using a Platform as a Service (PaaS), such as Okta Workflows or Tines, we can deploy a system that ties together these services to help harden the login flow.
Tying in a collaboration tool like Slack allows you to update your end users along the way, reduce friction and move closer to making the most secure authentication path, the path of least resistance.
Throwing in all the buzzwords: “Zero Trust”, “Device Trust”, “Device Health”, “Conditional Access”, “BeyondCorp”, “Trusted Access” for the sake of SEO fame. With all those buzzwords out of the way, let’s figure out how we can use gitops workflows within low code tooling to aid in adoption and auditability of changes made to configuration.
Bio: Harrison is a Lead Platform & Identity Engineer at Australia-based Deputy. He’s passionate about improving IT automation and approaching problems and solutions through a lens of security. Before entering tech in 2019, he was a sourdough bread baker in San Francisco.
Graham Gilbert
Building Diverse Client Engineering Teams
As Client Engineers, we often find ourselves managing devices for a diverse, global user base. But does our team composition reflect this diversity?
In this talk, we’ll explore the benefits of having teams that reflect a wide array of backgrounds and perspectives. We’ll provide practical steps that can be taken at all career levels, whether you’re an individual contributor or a manager. We will cover how to nurture skill development for aspiring Client Engineers, tips to attract a more diverse pool of applicants to engineering roles, and ways to help these individuals maximize their potential as Client Engineers.
Graham has been actively working on enhancing diversity within his team and the larger Airbnb BizTech organization over the past few years. This talk will share insights from his experience both as an individual contributor and as a manager and will leave you with some practical steps to take to improve the diversity of the MacAdmins community.
Bio: A serial releaser of open source macOS administration tools, Graham is the author of Sal, a modular reporting tool for endpoints, Crypt, a FileVault 2 key escrow solution and MDMDirector, an opinionated MDM orchestration tool. He is a board member of the Mac Admins Open Source non-profit, and is working on building out the Mac Admins Foundation mentorship program.
Graham is passionate about, and very occasionally writes at grahamgilbert.com on the subjects of endpoint management at scale, user focused security and building the next generation of Client Engineers.
In his day job, Graham leads the Client Engineering team at Airbnb as a Senior Tech Lead Manager. He has a slight obsession with automating all of the things.
Mykola Grymalyuk
Electron Security: Making your Mac a worse place?
Many Mac power users complain of Electron’s size and performance issues for a glorified chrome window, but does keeping Electron apps on your Mac make it insecure?
We’ll look at how some Electron configurations in widely used apps can make it easier for attackers to stay hidden and abuse both your trust, and the OS’.
Then we’ll explore RIPEDA’s open-source tool, Lectricus, on how we use it to help discover potential security vulnerabilities in Electron applications, and how you can use it to audit your own fleet of Macs (and Windows/Linux machines too!).
Bio: Mykola Grymalyuk is a Security and Development Technician at RIPEDA Consulting, focusing on offensive application security research in Mac Admin environments. He additionally leads the open-source project, OpenCore Legacy Patcher, working to get long neglected Macs running the latest releases of macOS for a few more years of life.
Bart Reardon
Getting the most from swiftDialog
Use swiftDialog for more than dialogs.
Bio: Bart has worked for CSIRO IT for 22 years in Canberra, Australia.
Since 2011 he has worked for the desktop infrastructure team that manages Windows, Linux and Mac SOE’s and is currently tech lead on the Linux and Mac SOE projects, servicing ~1200 macOS and ~500 Linux desktop workstations. He Currently develops swiftDialog and the swift port of Outset and in the past has contributed to the Munki codebase.
Bryson Tyrrell
Supercharged CI/CD with GitHub and AWS
GitHub and AWS are a prevailing combination out there. You and your teams write code and configuration, commit to GitHub, and usually send it on to your AWS accounts for deployment.
We want to ensure the code we send out into the world is meeting our quality bars, is tested, and prevent bugs from reaching production as much as possible. GitHub and AWS provide a wide array of tools and services to achieve this.
This talk will take us through an example CI/CD pipeline all the way from committing code on the workstation, the pull request process leveraging GitHub Actions, and securely deploying to the cloud with AWS CodePipeline.
Bio: Bryson Tyrrell is a Systems Development Engineer with a background in Apple Device management, Jamf Pro systems administration, and AWS. In days of yore he spoke widely, and exhaustingly, on topics around the Jamf Pro API, webhooks, and serverless application development. An avid LEGO aficionado, he resides with his family in Jamf’s backyard of the Minneapolis, Minnesota area.