One of the things I’ve learned in my five years at IBM is that the enterprise nature of the company means that our IBM-branded events are incredibly important to our ecosystem, and people are really excited to attend them, me included. Brand events are something I’ve definitely seen in my two decades in the tech industry, but working with an open source focus for that entire time I never really experienced it. I still prefer my open source events, but given the growth of my expertise and interest in the latest innovations from IBM Z and Quantum, the IBM-focused events offer a view into this ecosystem that’s unmatched elsewhere.
It’s also an exciting time to meet up with colleagues who I’ve only worked with remotely.
This included a bunch of community members who I’ve worked with in the open source world, or swapped fun stories with on social media over the years.
I also got to see Mainframer Barbie! Clad in her Open Mainframe Project t-shirt and an IBM Champions jacket.
But on to the technology! During one of the kickoff talks on Tuesday, Tina Tarquinio took to the stage with an IBM Telum II wafer. Wow! As you may recall, I attended Hot Chips at the end of August where the Telum II was announced, so I was really eager to get a close up look myself. As soon as Tina concluded her talk, I made a bee line for her before she had a chance to carefully pack it away. It began a running theme of the week of getting my photo with hardware.
My next dose of new hardware was getting to hold an IBM Crypto Express card, which isn’t much to look at because the cool stuff is inside, but it also demonstrates the size of one of these that gets slotted into one of the drawers in the mainframe. Definitely not what I traditionally thought of when someone says the’re adding a PCI card to a system.
A big chunk of my time at the event was doing booth duty, and I also took a few trips around the expo hall to see what was happening at other booths. I was delighted to see that the storage team had brought in a whole IBM Diamondback Tape Library! And they had it running! It was pretty cool.
A booth featuring IBM UX Research brought along a special guest that I had been clued in would be there: A red IBM Selectric typewriter.
They had attendees select from a series of prompts to them write up on the typewriter. From the printed word, they’d run it through OCR and have AI do sentiment analysis on it. It was a really eye-catching and tactile melding of old and new technology that I was totally there for.
We all know how fascinated I have been with the life-size IBM Z Lego build, and if you don’t, I wrote about it last year: All about the life-size IBM z16 LEGO® brick model! Well, IBM Quantum team decided to follow in our footsteps with their own Lego build! The latest models have a trio of components that each support their respective Quantum Processing Units (QPU), so what they did was rather clever, they had one Lego model built, and then mirrors put in to simulate three.
Even though much of my time on booth duty, I did have time to see a few sessions throughout the week. One that stood out for me was related to a Kubernetes deployment on IBM LinuxONE mainframes because of how much open source software was called out in the presentation as they walked attendees through their hybrid cloud solution. I also attended Sarah Julia Kriesch’s presentation on our Open Mainframe Project Linux Distributions Working Group. As usual, she expertly guided attendees through the value and benefits of bringing several distributions together with the shared purpose of supporting the s390x architecture.
I could say 100 more things about my experience, the conversations I had, and the people I met, but I only have limited space and time to write this. So I’ll just say that it was an excellent event and I’m really grateful I was able to participate again this year.