Back in 2019 I participated in my first Red Hat Summit. It was my second week working at IBM, and the whole thing was quite a whirlwind tour of exploring a vendor-specific event and getting to meet a whole bunch of people at IBM who I’d come to know a lot better in these past six years. I wrote about it here: Red Hat Summit 2019 in Boston.
This year, I was one of the key people who worked on planning our presence there. Quite a different experience!
IBM had two booths at the event, one with standard pedestals that had demos of various products, and then an IBM LinuxONE area that featured the plexiglass IBM LinuxONE 5 which had just been announced, and a quartet of laptops that my team was running. I spent several months working with various teams to come up with the best demos to showcase and tailor for the audience, but ultimately the best resources came from within our Ecosystem team and I was really excited to pull everything together. The cherry on top was our final name for the space: IBM LinuxONE AI Arcade
We had two hands-on activities, the first was our arcade where we had folks install three open source command-line games with three different mechanisms on Red Hat Enterprise Linux to drive home the “Linux is Linux” story. Unfortunately, the expo wifi wasn’t great, so Pong was a bit of a bust, but people seemed to have a lot of fun with vTetris.
Then we leveraged our AI/ML in Jupyter Labs that we’ve used for Datathons to give attendees a fully open source fraud detection demo. This was a bit more involved, but it’s very well-documented so even if they didn’t actually run the lab, we could walk them through the steps and diagrams on GitHub.
The plexiglass LinuxONE was the real draw into the booth though. People love checking out hardware. Several of us had shifts showing off the components, and I wasn’t shy about doing them, it was probably the most fun I had at the event. Not only is it a lot of fun to geek out about the hardware, it was the perfect segue into learning about what attendees had worked on hardware-wise, which lead to some fascinating trips down memory lane.
It was a real pleasure to work with the events team, but especially Alex Osadchyy, JJ Asghar, and Julianna Gingold who basically spent the whole event there in the expo with me running the arcade. I’m glad it all went so well, though next time I’ll definitely ask for more help, since they ended up being very long days for all of us. I’m still recovering!
People-wise, the summit is a great way to catch up with my friends in various open source communities I work in, so that was a lot of fun. I also got to visit with our mainframe grand bosses Ross Mauri and Tina Tarquinio from IBM who descended upon the summit, with Tina participating in a talk that I hear was very well-received.
And if you look very closely, you’ll notice that the earrings I’m wearing are made out of IBM System/360 Solid Logic Technology (SLT) covers. I made a couple pairs of earrings before I left by carefully melting them off their boards with a heat gun, then using jewelry epoxy and tiny screws to attach them to the earring hooks. Nerdy? Yes. Awesome? Also yes. I hope they don’t have lead in them. I’m also glad I finally got a couple pairs done in time for an event! I hope to finish a few more before TechXchange.
The other big outcome of the summit is a huge milestone in a GitHub Actions runner project that I’ve been working on for about a year and a half, we started on-boarding projects and could finally announce it! I’m grateful the timing worked out so well, the LinuxONE 5 launch was a great opportunity, and the summit even more so.
Wednesday night the summit event was a Red Sox game at Fenway Park! Amusingly, I had just been to one the Saturday before because I didn’t realize this would be part of the conference, but I’m perfectly delighted to have two baseball nights. Plus, it’s more fun with friends. I tagged along with a whole crew and we had a wonderful time, in spite of slightly gloomy weather.
I spent a couple hours wrapping up things at the summit on Thursday, and then it was time for a rainy journey back home to California on a woefully delayed flight out of Boston.