Grafana & Friends London: Aircraft Tracking and Making Your First OSS Contribution

​We’re back for our autumn meetup edition, and this time we’re taking Grafana beyond the usual dashboards to track aircraft overhead in real time (and more).
Join us for an evening of surprising ideas, live data, and a talk you will not want to miss!

​Speakers:

• ​Simon Prickett, Senior Developer Advocate at Grafana Labs

• ​Martin Costello, Staff Software Engineer at Grafana Labs

​18:00 - 18:30: Arrivals and food 🍕
18:30 - 20:10 Main talks

1. ​Aircraft Tracking with Grafana and Redis by Simon Prickett

​Most people think of Grafana as the go to solution for monitoring Kubernetes clusters, databases, and application metrics. In this talk, I'll use it for something completely different: tracking aircraft flying overhead in real time using a Raspberry Pi, a software-defined radio, and publicly broadcast ADS-B signals. Starting with an empty database, we'll pull data out of the air during the session and see what we can learn about the local airspace. What could possibly go wrong?

1. ​Making Your First Open Source Contribution by Martin Costello
   A lot of people are enthusiastic to contribute to an open source project, but can feel intimidated and overwhelmed by where to start and how to propose a change. In this talk I'll offer tips from 13 years of experience contributing to open source projects on what makes a good first contribution (spoilers: not just a new feature!) and how to structure your first PR to maximise the chances of it being accepted, particularly in this new age of AI agents. Maybe this could be the first step on your open source journey?

​20:10-20:30 - lightning talk slot.
This could be you - contact us if you'd like to speak about a Grafana use case, or show us your dashboard.

​### 📸 Important Information

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