Matthew Johnson is an OSU alumnus who now works at Tesla as a senior software engineer. He is a veteran of the U.S Marine Corps Infantry and served as a law enforcement officer. At Oregon State University, he worked for the Open Source Lab and received a scholarship from CBT Nuggets. He recently sat down with College of Engineering to talk about his experience working at Tesla.
Are you a student at Oregon State University who likes working with open source software? If so, then we have a job for you! We currently have two student systems engineer positions open which includes working with open source projects, gaining mentorship from professional staff, and interacting directly with clients.
Check out our employment page to see what you gain when you work with us!
Update Mar 7, 2019: We filled this position and are no longer looking for more applicants at this time.
TDS Telecommunications, a telephone and Internet services provider has been supporting the OSL since 2005 by providing bandwidth and colocation hosting for the OSL’s mirrors. TDS recently made a large bandwidth donation valued at more than $1 million, making their cumulative support to the OSL top $5 million. Click here to read more about the story in the OSU newsroom.
The Open Source Lab has treated me well. I came here bright eyed and full of wonder, fascinated by the racks and racks of servers we had in the data center. Fascinated at the treasure trove of artifacts held in the back room from conventions passed, old CDs labeled “Fedora 10” or “Ubuntu 8”. That scrap of paper on the wall of an IRC log with Linus Torvalds.
On April 28th, 2018, the OSL participated in the Corvallis Maker Fair for the second year in a row. We hosted 2 booths, the first had demos of programs in Python and Scratch, and the second had a HAProxy cluster with diskless nodes, which was built and deployed by OSL student JJ Frederick.
Attendees learned about the basics of programming by modifying the source code of the demoed programs to see how it changed the programs, learned about DevOps basics and saw how easy it was to add their laptops to the cluster as a diskless node, and also gained an appreciation of open source software.
I took part in a Cyber Defense Competition hosted by the Department of Energy, and it was a fantastic experience! Our team worked hard to ensure that we had a fighting chance at the competition, and we had much needed help from our mentor.
The competition took place in a control center. One wall covered in flat screen TVs to create a huge monitor and the other was lined with windows into the room where the Red Team worked. There was a table for each of the 6 teams, and on each table was a small model of a natural gas extractor with two little houses around it. This little model simulated a power plant – the thing we would be defending against cyber attacks.
The Open Source Lab’s Cody Holliday recently competed on a team with five other students at the Department of Energy Cyber Defense Competition. Despite that this was their first time competing, they ranked first place in the regional competition, and fourth place nationally! Read more about the competition. If you would like to read about his experience, click here!
Way to go Cody!
CoreOS is a San Francisco based company that focuses on developing software for container management. Alex Polvi, the CEO of CoreOS and OSL alumnus, recently sold CoreOS to RedHat for $250 million. Congratulations, Alex! img src
The OSU Experience Site has published an online article about our students! In it they talk about the services we provide, our positive impact on the lives of our student workers, and the industries we work with.
About a decade ago, I was becoming disenchanted with my time in the computer industry. It wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t me anymore. After some serious soul searching, I decided to turn my hobby into my next career – but I knew that I needed formal education and training. After some careful research, I narrowed down my choices to two: UC Davis and Oregon State University. Both schools have top-tier records in my new field but it was the Open Source Lab that tipped the balance. After moving to Oregon I haven’t once looked back. | After establishing residency and completing my associate degrees (all three) at PCC, I finally moved to Corvallis. I sent Lance my resume in February of 2013 and was hired the following month as a student software developer. The staff was welcoming and the students were amazing and inspirational. I felt like I was right where I needed to be. I was surprised at how much pleasure I took from mentoring so I got involved with Google’s Summer of Code program which was a great experience. I even grew so attached to one of my projects that I still support it long after it transitioned to another lab. Yay PGD! | But all good things must come to an end. After finishing my undergrad work, I went on an internship and came back to start graduate school. I suspected then that I wouldn’t be able to have my cake and eat it too and that I would have to cut back on my commitments once my research got started, and my time at the OSL would probably be the first to go. This suspicion was reinforced after my daughter was born last January and again by the financial situation about which we all know. I decided to wait to resign until after the summer in case I was needed to help with the transition and now the summer is over. I want to thank all the students with whom I have worked at the OSL. You’re what makes the lab what it is: a finishing school for the finest students at Oregon State. I am proud to have worked with you as you launch your careers and I firmly believe that you will continue making the world a better place.
