Today was the last day of the OpenStack Design Summit. It wrapped up with a change of pace this time around, each project had their own contributor meetup which was used to continue hashing out ideas and getting some work done. I think this was a really brilliant move. I was pretty tired by the time Friday rolled around (one of the reasons the later Ubuntu Developer Summits were shrunk to 4 days), so I’m not sure how useful I would have been in more discussion-driven sessions. The contributor meetup allowed us to chat about things we didn’t have time to run sessions on, or do in-person follow-ups to sessions we did have. We also had nice in-person time to collaborate on some things so that some of our projects got to a semi-working state before we all go home and take a vacation (my vacation starts next Thursday).
I spent my day meeting up with with people to talk about our new translations tools and did the first couple drafts of the infrastructure specification to get that project started. Given the timeline, I anticipate that my real work on that won’t really begin until after I return from Jamaica on November 21st, but that seemed to sync up with the timeline of others on the team who are either taking some time off post-summit or have some dependencies blocking their action items.
There was also time spent on talking about the Infrastructure User Manual as a follow up to the session earlier in the week. We decided to host a 48 hour virtual sprint on the first couple days of December in order to collaborate on fleshing out the rest of the document (announcement here). As we all know, I love documentation, so I’m glad to see this coming together. I was also able to have a chat with a contributor later in the day who is also looking forward to seeing it finished so he can build upon it as the foundation for more project-specific developer documentation.
Also, the topic of third party testing came up during one of my chats and was overheard by someone nearby – which is how we learned there were at least three teams talking about creating a more automatic mechanism for determining the health of the third party testing systems. That’s approximately two teams too many. Kurt Taylor was able to get us all on an email thread together so I’m happy to say that a specification for that project should be coming together too.
Late in the afternoon James E. Blair did a demo for developers of gertty. I wrote about the tool back in September (here) and I’m a big fan of CLI-based code review, so it was fun to see others excited and asking questions about it.
As things wound down, I realized that this was probably the best OpenStack summit I’ve attended. The occasional snafu aside (like the over-crowded lunch on Thursday – I ate elsewhere), for a conference with over 4,600 attendees it felt well-managed. The Design Summit itself had a format I was really pleased with, as in addition to having the Friday work day, Tuesday was devoted to much-needed cross-project summit sessions. As OpenStack grows and matures, I’m really happy to see everyone working to fine tune the summits like this to keep pace.
Tonight I joined several of my OpenStack colleagues for an early dinner, retiring early to my room so I could re-pack my suitcase (and hope it’s not over 50lbs) and get some work done before my flight tomorrow morning. As exhausting as this trip was, it sure flew by fast and I am quite sad to be leaving Paris! Alas, my sister in law’s wedding in Philadelphia on Sunday awaits and I’m looking forward to it (and finally seeing my husband again after almost 2 weeks).