About Us

Vanessa Pyne is an engineer at Daily where she works on a custom automated test framework for WebRTC calls and contributes to Pipecat, a Python framework for AI voice agents. She will always think LaserDiscs are cool.

Ian Painter is a self-taught programmer working as a consultant, building web applications. He joined the NOLA Devs crew in Spring of 2024, coming from a ~14 year career as a sound engineer for music and film. He once watched a UFO for 15 minutes.

Benjamin Eckel has over a decade of experience as a software engineer and is the co-founder of Dylibso. He previously led DX at Recurly and worked on integrations and edge observability at Datadog. Ben is the original founder of Below C Level.

Aaron Lee is a Software Engineer and SRE. He was an engineer at Rackspace and DigitalOcean before building a storage system at Planet Labs. Aaron is one of the original founders of Below C Level.

What is Systems Programming?

We mostly follow the Wikipedia definition, however, we are not interested in a strict interpretation. Instead, we want to follow the spirit of systems programming which is about curiosity of how our computers and underlying systems work.

Submitting a talk

Request a date in the #below-c-level channel in the Nola devs Slack workspace, and one of the organizers will reach out to you.

If you are new and willing to learn and talk about it, but aren’t sure what to do, we’d love for you to try something and come present your findings. Here are some ideas that could be fun:

  • Make your own simple programming language
  • Make a database
  • Make a small virtual machine
  • Make a simple OS
  • Make a computer from logic gates

The intended audience is a professional programmer with several years of experience in systems programming, regardless of language, framework, or operating system. Should your presentation rely on a feature, library, syntax, etc. that’s not well know outside of that specific community it will help our community if you explain it. If you have any questions we’re happy to provide guidance.