On April 7, 1964 the IBM System 360 was launched, with much fanfare from (and risk to) IBM. I’ve recently been reading the biography on Tom Watson Jr. (The Greatest Capitalist Who Ever Lived) and it was fascinating to read about what led up to this launch, specifically that even 10 years prior to it, […]
Archive for the ‘work’ Category
Food, friends, and offices in Raleigh
November 13th, 2023 by pleia2
Last month I flew out to Raleigh for All Things Open and CLS 2023. It turned out to be a trip packed with not just the conference, but two separate unrelated work opportunities. Still, I made sure to take advantage of being in a place with good food and friends I hadn’t seen in person […]
IBM TechXchange 2023 in Las Vegas
October 9th, 2023 by pleia2
A few days ago I wrote about the Open Mainframe Summit 2023, which took place on community day of the IBM TechXchange conference, but I also had the rest of that conference to enjoy! The first week I was with IBM I went to IBM TechU. Given the technical nature, the new IBM TechXchange conference […]
Open Mainframe Summit 2023
October 4th, 2023 by pleia2
Back in September of 2022 the first major in-person Open Mainframe Summit was held, I wrote about it here: Open Mainframe Summit 2022. After a year, it was a delight to get back together this year for an Open Mainframe Summit in Las Vegas with project participants and see how much progress had been made […]
I 3D-printed an IBM LinuxONE!
September 21st, 2021 by pleia2
Several months ago I 3D printed an IBM z15 pencil holder. I used a design that had been floating around, so it wasn’t perfect, but it was a nice little model. I ended up following up with a design team inside of IBM and got a more perfect version that they were OK with me […]
Tired, Star Wars 5k, sours, and my SPARC
June 4th, 2021 by pleia2
Our new au pair is here! I’m beginning this post with that because welcoming a new person into our family is a big deal, and the help she’s already provided in just her first few weeks here has been an incredible relief. On May 5th I was chasing Adam at the playground and managed to […]
I 3D-printed an IBM z15 model!
May 17th, 2021 by pleia2
Back in April as I was catching up with work following my maternity leave, I discovered the existence of some internal IBM 3D printer files for IBM z15 pencil holders. I was immediately intrigued, and quickly found a 3D printer company that would print one for me. As a quick aside, I learned about 3D […]
The Big Iron Hippo
May 10th, 2021 by pleia2
It’s been about a year since I last wrote about an Ubuntu release on IBM Z (colloquially known as “mainframes” and nicknamed “Big Iron”). In my first year at IBM my focus really was Linux on Z, along with other open source software like KVM and how that provides support for common tools via libvirt […]
Passover and return to work
April 11th, 2021 by pleia2
Last year we celebrated Passover at home, and via Zoom. This was in the first month of the shelter in place orders due to the pandemic and we all thought we’d have to stay home for a few months until it was over. How naive we were! This week we celebrated our second Passover at […]
Four months of virtual events
July 22nd, 2020 by pleia2
It’s been over four months since I attended my last in-person conference, and last week marks the last conference I had on my schedule, but which was cancelled. In these four months I’ve seriously attended probably a dozen online meetups, seriously participated in four virtual conferences, and gave four talks. As a whole, I am […]