So first, thanks to Beth Lynn, Vance Kochenderfer, Susan Rose Dudenhoefer, and the other volunteers who brought the event together this year on a tight deadline. I’m so grateful I thought to include the conference on my quarterly event requests in spite of it not being announced yet!

I’ll also mention that I keep calling it “Ohio LinuxFest” but they rebranded as “OLF Conference” to reflect “Open Libre Free” and their goal to include operating systems beyond Linux, mea culpa!

The event itself was a lot of fun. It was smaller than in years past, as they went with one track. They mentioned at closing that doing it in December is too late in the year, and along with the short runway for the conference likely impacted attendance. Still, if I had to guess I’d say there were a couple hundred people there.

I saw a lot of familiar faces. My friend Scott came out from Pittsburgh, and though we still chat regularly in a group cobbled together from our Ubuntu Pennsylvania days, we hadn’t seen each other in person in years. It was really cool to catch up, and to laugh about kid stories, since we’ve both became parents since we last saw each other. I also got to spend a bunch of time with Amber Graner, who I also got to know very well during our time in the Ubuntu project. We’ve stayed in touch, so we’re still pretty close, but this was the first time in a while that we had more than 20 minutes to catch up. And new people! I got to chat with a student who was attending an open source conference for his first time, and met several folks who have been working in open source for decades. It really was a great mix of folks.

I really enjoyed the opening keynote from Don Vosburg on Passion and Pragmatism. He tugged on a familiar thread in the open source world around the fact that a lot of folks got into open source software “for fun” or the passion of it, but most of us eventually had to get professional jobs that may have tested our fundamental commitment to open source. Or other things that have arisen in our lives that require us to make a choice. I’ve definitely had to walk a line throughout my career, but consider myself quite lucky to have found myself a series of good positions that have allowed me to follow my passion and make a living.

My talk was just after the keynote, and I was very happy that most people stayed! It’s a re-working of a talk I gave last year, but I notably added an architecture and made some adjustments to my slides about software testing. I was amused to learn that my closing keynote back in 2018 was about doing software testing on your open source project, and that this could be seen as an expansion of that. I joked at the beginning that I was very glad everyone listened to me last time, and now that they all have software testing, it was time to add non-x86_64 hardware architectures into that testing matrix. The slides are available here: Will_your_open_source_project_run_on_a_mainframe_Or_a_watch_OLF_2025.pdf (1.2M)

Thanks to Scott for taking a picture during my talk!

Catherine Devlin’s “Graph Data for Heroes II: Rise of the Bot” was an interesting one. A large chunk of it had her scraping web data, and as I was live-posting about it on Mastodon and Bluesky I was speculating about how web scraping is one tech that hasn’t gotten a whole lot better in 25 years, then mused that it was actually a good use for AI/ML technologies. Indeed, that’s where her talk went!

Scattered throughout the conference foyer were a few tables from supporters and sponsors, and I was delighted to see a series of ChromeBooks that had been repurposed to use various Linux distributions. I was delighted to see that Xubuntu made the cut, and when I walked over to check it out I was presented with our shiny new website. Lovely!

In the afternoon I enjoyed seeing Steven Pritchard’s “The Great Open Source Rug-Pull” where he talked about open source software license changes, which have caused a lot of disruption and contention in the open source world these past few years. And although I had heard of Hacker Public Radio before, it wasn’t until murph’s talk on the topic, along with a bunch of great tips, that I got a serious look into what it was and how the episodes are crowd sourced. These folks are doing great work.

Amber Graner concluded the day with the closing keynote “Bless Their Hearts: Open Source, AI, and Southern Survival Skills.” She took us on a personal, funny journey through some of the characters and situations in the open source world. I particularly loved at the end where she shared a list of things she wished people had told her when she started contributing to open source. I’ll be keeping some of these things in mind as I continue working with students who need more than just the basic misconceptions about contributing corrected so they can effectively contribute.

The end of the event crept up quickly! The group hosted a small closing after party in the hotel lobby with pizza and my favorite, cake!

In what is perhaps one of my shortest conference trips, I flew out at 5AM the next morning to get home by midday on Sunday. It left me pretty tired, but it was worth it.

To celebrate, I wanted to bring our success story and opportunity for projects to GitHub Universe this year. I was lucky that it was taking place in San Francisco, so there were no travel costs for me, and doubly lucky that the IBM team sponsoring the booth was willing to have me join them. It was a great experience working with the organizers and my fellow booth staff, we had representation from various parts of IBM so it was easy to direct attendees to someone helpful based on what they were interested in. For my part, I wish I had brought along a bigger sign saying something like “I give free stuff to OSS projects!” so the hobbyist contributors weren’t scared off by the more enterprise nature of IBM. Maybe next time. I was able to have some great conversations though, and could show off the work we’re doing with a screencast of the on-boarding process that I prepared on my tablet.

And I wasn’t the only mainframer there! Folks from Broadcom had a booth where they were showing off their Code4Z products that integrate into a standard VS Code environment.

It was a great event for me to be at to show off mainframe goodies to a distributed tech world that’s less accustomed to them. I was even able to clue in a few IBMers to the business we’re doing over in IBM Z land.

Personally, it was a wonderful event to be at to catch up with folks I haven’t seen in a while from across my tenure in open source.

I think my two biggest takeaways from the conference were 1. Wow, AI. and 2. How different conferences are when the talks aren’t necessarily the centerpiece.

Most of us in tech have a very different immediate relationship with AI than people in the general public. For us it’s less about results from ChatGPT and AI-created images, and more about what AI that knows how can code will do to transform the tech industry and what’s possible. We all knew that basic Python coding tasks would start to be replaced by AI, but we’re actually seeing that in practice now. No longer just autocomplete, we can vibe code a whole application.

One of the keynotes showed the presenter finding an old Bluetooth-enabled Furby in a closet and using an AI coding assistant to update an old open source software library so he could use it in 2025. The story here was that as a silly fun thing, he probably wouldn’t have ever had time to tinker with it, but now it’s easy. I’m not saying anything new here, and I do understand the difference between vibe coding a Furby and writing a production application, but in the near term it clearly will make some of the more mundane tasks easier to pass off to AI. I really would like one to automatically keep up on Node.js dependencies for me, it’s the most dreadfully tedious task.

All of this is to say that at the conferences I attended this year, I saw a real maturity turning point in the AIs-that-can-code realm. And GitHub is a big player here because of how integrated their code tooling already is in so many organizations, and throughout open source software communities.

Phew.

As for my second point, the talks not being the centerpiece. I’d say there’s still the spine of what holds the conference together, but there were fascinating experiences scattered throughout the event, both from vendors and from GitHub. The vendor booths was woven throughout all the buildings, and there was often a seamless transition between GitHub activities and vendors. One moment you’re designing your own Octocat sticker, and the next you’re getting a coffee while chatting at the IBM booth.

I enjoyed the building activities, our options were a GitHub light or a GitHub Copilot Lego model, and I went for the Lego. It was a nice little relaxing break from conference chaos.

The venue of Fort Mason was also lovely, and they had regular shuttles from downtown San Francisco which made the hurdle of transportation a more surmountable one. Both mornings I had an easy journey on BART to a shuttle that left from Embarcadero station. Once there, the gorgeous San Francisco weather we enjoyed offered the perfect backdrop. If I needed some air, I could walk down a pier and get a glimpse of the Golden Gate Bridge. They also cleverly placed a giant GitHub sign so that you could see beautiful Alcatraz Island through it.

They served good food and we had lots of places to sit and enjoy it. And after one tour through the main keynote building where I played a game to get a juice, I had no problem finding a shady spot to sit down and do a half hour of urgent work that I had to knock out.

The electronic badges were also a lot of fun. You had the option of getting one during registration, and they were little devices powered by an ARM SBC. As “hackable” badges you could play with them as-is, but also make some changes to the code included on them to do things like show your GitHub stats and they had a whole area with laptops that would allow you to do this (good thing, I can’t plug anything USB into my work laptop!). Once mounted on your device, they have a whole website of activities and other tools you can add to them. Cool. The scavenger hunt was also fun. I found they held a charge for about 10 hours, depending on use, so while I charged my overnight and took it off the charger at 7AM to head to the city, it barely made it to 5PM. I brought my digital badge home and it’s sitting here by my desk, maybe I’ll vibe code some new stuff for it, haha!

I’m certain that having such a fun and engaging space is all designed for encouraging brand loyalty. People have a great experience at these events in addition to learning things. I have always had mixed feelings about GitHub, and I still do, but some of the high points are definitely around usability, in spite of being built around Git, a tool that’s notoriously difficult to use! And usability includes feeling comfortable, which GitHub Universe did beautifully this year.

For my part, I repeated the IBM LinuxONE AI Arcade that we did at the Red Hat Summit back in the spring, with a few adjustments. Our footprint was smaller (2 laptops instead of 4) and I made some tweaks. The biggest change was that during the sandbox (expo) opening Block Party on Monday evening I did a “Doom takeover” of the whole setup and let people play Freedoom, VNC-streamed directly from one of our IBM LinuxONE virtual machines. It was a huge hit. So much so that for the rest of the week we had folks dropping by the booth to ask if I still had it up, and a few commands later, I did! Using Windows laptops for all of this was certainly a new experience, so I was grateful that I thought to test it on a Windows 11 laptop we keep around for such things before the event. Did you know stock PowerShell on Windows 11 comes with SSH? Cool. But overall, aside from being fun to answer the question of “but does it run Doom?” with a demonstration, we all know that piping something over VNC isn’t that technically challenging, it’s the amusement and feeling it grants, and the fact that it’s coming from IBM, not some hip new startup where you may be more inclined expect it.

What else is cool? Quantum computers. They had an 80% scale model near the entrance to the Sandbox this year and it got near constant attention. It took until Wednesday until I was able to find a quiet moment to get a good picture with it. I’ve been reading about quantum computers since I first picked up an article about them in Discover Magazine back in the 1990s, so seeing them come together at IBM and be actively deployed to facilities around the world has been a thrilling experience.

And I know you’ll say the AI stuff currently taking over everything in the world is overblown, and it is, but there are some real use cases for it. IBM clients across industry and research have already come up with dozens of uses for AI/ML, just been waiting for the tech to catch up. As a result, IBM research has invested heavily for YEARS in AI hardware, which first came to market in an AI accelerator in the IBM Telum chip inside the IBM z16 and LinuxONE 4 a few years ago.

This year the Telum II came out in the z17 and LinuxONE Emperor 5, but the additional IBM Spyre AI Accelerator card using the same technology also hit the market. This SOC with 32 individual accelerator cores has definitely been the belle of the ball, with clients asking all week when they can get their hands on one (thankfully, it was swiftly announced that it would go Generally Available at the end of October). Theft jokes abounded once people learned that we had a non-working prototype inside of the IBM z17 plexiglass at our booth, and when I went to visit the new IBM Power 11 server at the Power booth I found they had a prototype you could HOLD at their booth! That’s where I got my photo with it. You see, these work in the Power systems as well.

Back at the IBM booth I got to hold a Telum II dual-chip module (DCM) which is always a delight. They also had display versions of the chips from the z15, z16 (Telum), and the new z16 (Telum II) which was neat to see side by side. I need to remind my friends who I spoke with a few months back about assembling a “petting zoo” of decommissioned hardware to bring to events, I love holding these things. Lots of nerdy technologists do, and when else would we get the chance for something like a mainframe component? Even if you have a mainframe, you really shouldn’t go poking around inside it.

Ferrari is also cool. IBM worked with Scuderia Ferrari on an AI-powered app (and more!), and if the keynote interview was any indication, both organizations are quite excited about it. Plus, we got to have what I’ve been told is one of the F1 cars from last year right there in the sandbox. It was beautiful. I bought a hat.

Also also cool? Lego. You know I love Lego, but a lot of other adults are waking up to the passion and it’s definitely boiling over in the tech industry with a lot of folks being more open about their collections in recent years. This has definitely leaked out into tech conferences I’ve been at these past few years. Booths offering custom minifig building, others doing custom Lego sets for attendees. It was super cute to see a Lego model of the Sandbox where the team there was collecting feedback of the event, both verbally and by having people vote with Lego.

And of course, when the IBM z16 came out we build a full-size model, which I wrote about here back in 2023. How do we follow that? I was absolutely delighted that this time around they focused on the IBM Telum II processor, by making a huge scaled-up model of it. Hanging next to the plexi, this model was based off of how the actual processor looks, but with whimsical details like frogs, robots, and airplanes to amusingly demonstrate various parts. I plan on writing more about this later, and my partner in writing this may have some surprises in store for something you can do at home too. Stay tuned!

Perhaps my favorite part of the event, and indeed a highlight of my year, was being invited to join PJ Catalano and Camillo Sassano to unbox a mainframe live on the expo hall floor. Normally such an unboxing is done quietly before the event so that people can see it in the final form, but PJ’s idea of a live unboxing built excitement. We had pre-event teasers, there were cool lights pointed at the crate during the opening party with signs to come back the next day, and it all resulted in well over 150 people trying to secure a great spot to watch it being unboxed.

It was my first time participating in uncrating a mainframe, so Camillo walked me through it live right there as PJ explained each step and why each component of the crate was in place. It was fascinating to see if all come apart and learn about how purpose-built the whole thing was. The crate door is not just a door, it’s the ramp! The mini flip up section on the top was so it could be built to fit inside a standard truck. And so much more. Once we gently rolled it out of the crate, we got it on the carpet and started putting the doors on. The doors can be put on either side, so on one side we put an IBM Z door, and on the other we put the LinuxONE door. Choose your mainframe! Or get a photo with both!

I hear the events team is putting together a full video of the unboxing from all the cameras they set up, but for now I was happy to be the first one to get to hug it for Hug Your Mainframe Day. Naturally, I hugged the LinuxONE side. After me, the whole rest of the event there was a steady stream of people getting their pictures with it, and hugging it. The IBM shop on-site even had t-shirts celebrating hugging mainframes, which was super fun (of course I got one).

At the end of the event, we didn’t do a formal packing up, but thankfully enough folks were still around to get the job done.

Throughout the event there were also a lot of pure fun things. A huge rainbow slide that Mae and I partook in a slide down. Lots of video games, including the ability to play Mario Kart on the keynote stage screen when it wasn’t otherwise engaged. There were spots for getting photos, one for silly photos and another across the expo hall for headshots. For an event with long days and so much serious content literally spread throughout the expo hall in the form of tech talks and sessions, it was nice that we had the ability to unwind and recharge before going on to the next thing. The event also featured an evening at Universal Islands of Adventure, where we really got to unwind! I was able to ride on Hagrid’s Magical Creatures Motorbike Adventure and the unforgettable Jurassic World VelociCoaster. I spent a good chunk of my late 20s and early 30s unable to go on such rides, which I also now realize was the height of when I suffered from migraines as an adult. Huh. Something was going on in my brain for a good decade there, but it seems like I’m in a better place now. While these rides are still thrilling and trigger a tinge motion sickness for me, it’s no more than the normal amount now, and the fun balances it out.

At the beginning of this post I mentioned that IBM has been doing cool stuff since the company began, which leads me to my last notable mention: the booth from the IBM Corporate Archives. I’m a fan of history, including the history of computing, so I have bias here, but I honestly believe in telling the continuous story of innovation at IBM. The booth featured a couple working vintage machines, including one that was hooked up to a large dot matrix printer and attendees could print out short messages on.

They also had a glass case display that changed daily featuring various pamphlets and memorabilia from various initiatives and notable releases over the years. The moon landing! The launch if the IBM System/360! All kinds of cool stuff. And what I considered the star of the exhibit and which welcomed attendees as they walked to the booth, an IBM System/360 Model 40 Operator’s Console. Love it.

I have really enjoyed seeing how this conference has evolved over the past three years to be bigger and better each year, and truly more fun and geeky. It’s a lot of work, but I can’t wait to see what they have and I get to participate in next year.

The Castro Valley Fall Festival took place on September 6th and 7th. The first day the boys got to visit a petting zoo, but the day was cut a bit short by a kiddo stomach ache.

We went back for day two so we could walk through the whole festival, and the boys enjoyed going on a bungee bouncing thing.

Last week I was able to sneak out for an evening to go see Hamilton at our local theater. The 10th anniversary release was really fun to see, even if I didn’t quite anticipate spending 3 hours on it. It included an introduction with interviews from the original cast reflecting on the experience and anniversary, and also included a 10 minute intermission. It all took me back to where I was 10 years ago, and just how much I loved the whole Hamilton experience as I fell in love with the soundtrack, and finally saw the show live in San Francisco.

The boys have continued swim classes, which are going well but they changed pools on us recently, which means we don’t have the fun opportunity to see an Amtrak train zooming through on a perfectly timed journey to the pool now. Fortunately, on our last Sunday at the last pool we got to see it, and the pool they moved us to is actually a lot nicer and isn’t much further away.

Day to day there’s been a lot of playing with our new cat, Zara, and doing little tasks around the house. The other day Adam helped me vacuum out the van so we could install a new all-weather mat in the back. MJ and I have been going through some paperwork to continue our organization project and clear out some of our storage areas.

I’ve also been trying, unsuccessfully, to resurrect one of our old servers. We have a couple small systems that we used for backups and media when we lived in San Francisco, but over time the raid arrays on those spinning disks died and the systems failed. I figured that bringing them back up would just be a matter of replacing the disks and doing some reconfiguration, but it’s been dreadful. VGA output appeared to have failed on one of the mother boards, so I moved everything over to the other system and then I was getting inconsistent booting even after I sorted out UEFI. I finally got it booted and the RAID5 array built, rebooted it, and VGA this system isn’t working, even in POST. Argh. Why? I guess it’s my fault trying to bring back old x86 systems. Even if it had worked, it wouldn’t be satisfying like getting my RISC-V SBC going a few months ago. Right now it’s just a disappointing time sink. I might try a few more things, but I’m close to giving up and starting again with new hardware and a more modern disk configuration.

And while I’m talking about old hardware, I hauled out my never-used Mycroft Mark I device recently. That’s been causing me a lot of headaches too, but at least there’s more novelty to it. I’ll write up a full blog post about it if I ever do get it running with something interesting. Right now I might be facing some hardware issues AND a system that’s simply too old to run some of the home assistant software that lives in the forks designed for it. I guess I’ll see how it goes. Computers, man.

I left off about a year ago when I succeeded in getting an older version of Debian on it, but attempts to get the tooling to install a more broadly supported version of U-Boot to the SPI flash were unsuccessful. Then I got pulled away to other things, effectively just bringing my VF2 around to events as a prop for my multiarch talks – which it did beautifully! I even had one conference attendee buy one to play with while sitting in the audience of my talk. Cool.

I was delighted to learn how much progress had been made since I last looked. Canonical has published more formalized documentation: Install Ubuntu on the StarFive VisionFive 2 in the place of what had been a rather cluttered wiki page. So I got all hooked up and began my latest attempt.

My first step was to grab the pre-installed server image. I got that installed, but struggled a little with persistence once I unplugged the USB UART adapter and rebooted. I then decided just to move forward with the Install U-Boot to the SPI flash instructions. I struggled a bit here for two reasons:

1. The documentation today leads off with having you download the livecd, but you actually want the pre-installed server image to flash U-Boot, the livecd step doesn’t come until later. Admittedly, the instructions do say this, but I wasn’t reading carefully enough and was more focused on the steps.
2. I couldn’t get the 24.10 pre-installed image to work for flashing U-Boot, but once I went back to the 24.04 pre-installed image it worked.

And then I had to fly across the country. We’re spending a couple weeks around spring break here at our vacation house in Philadelphia, but the good thing about SBCs is that they’re incredibly portable and I just tossed my gear into my backpack and brought it along.

Thanks to Emil Renner Berthing (esmil) on the Ubuntu Matrix server for providing me with enough guidance to figure out where I had gone wrong above, and got me on my way just a few days after we arrived in Philly.

With the newer U-Boot installed, I was able to use the Ubuntu 24.04 livecd image on a micro SD Card to install Ubuntu 24.04 on an NVMe drive! That’s another new change since I last looked at installation, using my little NVMe drive as a target was a lot simpler than it would have been a year ago. In fact, it was rather anticlimactic, hah!

And with that, I was fully logged in to my new system.

elizabeth@r2kt:~$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
hart : 2
isa : rv64imafdc_zicntr_zicsr_zifencei_zihpm_zba_zbb
mmu : sv39
uarch : sifive,u74-mc
mvendorid : 0x489
marchid : 0x8000000000000007
mimpid : 0x4210427
hart isa : rv64imafdc_zicntr_zicsr_zifencei_zihpm_zba_zbb

It has 4 cores, so here’s the full output: vf2-cpus.txt

What will I do with this little single board computer? I don’t know yet. I joked with my husband that I’d “install Debian on it and forget about it like everything else” but I really would like to get past that. I have my little multiarch demo CI project in the wings, and I’ll probably loop it into that.

Since we were in Philly, I had a look over at my long-neglected Raspberry Pi 1B that I have here. When we first moved in, I used it as an ssh tunnel to get to this network from California. It was great for that! But now we have a more sophisticated network setup between the houses with a VLAN that connects them, so the ssh tunnel is unnecessary. In fact, my poor Raspberry Pi fell off the WiFi network when we switched to 802.1X just over a year ago and I never got around to getting it back on the network. I connected it to a keyboard and monitor and started some investigation. Honestly, I’m surprised the little guy was still running, but it’s doing fine!

And it had been chugging along running Rasbian based on Debian 9. Well, that’s worth an upgrade. But not just an upgrade, I didn’t want to stress the device and SD card, so I figured flashing it with the latest version of Raspberry Pi OS was the right way to go. It turns out, it’s been a long time since I’ve done a Raspberry Pi install.

I grabbed the Raspberry Pi Imager and went on my way. It’s really nice. I went with the Raspberry Pi OS Lite install since it’s the RP1, I didn’t want a GUI. The imager asked the usual installation questions, loaded up my SSH key, and I was ready to load it up in my Pi.

The only thing I need to finish sorting out is networking. The old USB WiFi adapter I have it in doesn’t initialize until after it’s booted up, so wpa_supplicant on boot can’t negotiate with the access point. I’ll have to play around with it. And what will I use this for once I do, now that it’s not an SSH tunnel? I’m not sure yet.

I realize this blog post isn’t very deep or technical, but I guess that’s the point. We’ve come a long way in recent years in support for non-x86 architectures, so installation has gotten a lot easier across several of them. If you’re new to playing around with architectures, I’d say it’s a really good time to start. You can hit the ground running with some wins, and then play around as you go with various things you want to help get working. It’s a lot of fun, and the years I spent playing around with Debian on Sparc back in the day definitely laid the groundwork for the job I have at IBM working on mainframes. You never know where a bit of technical curiosity will get you.

Monday morning kicked off by going over to the Secure Open Source Software (SOSS) Community Day for the morning. I particularly enjoyed the keynote from Kate Stewart about the state of Software Bill of Materials (SBOMs). I remember when discussion of SBOMs in the open source world started picking up, also with Kate being a spokesperson for them, and at the time reflected upon how useful they’d be if they ever caught on. It feels like the increased focus on security due to some high profile vulnerabilities is what accelerated the interest and need for them and having a full keynote devoted to them at a security event seems to have confirmed my suspicions. It was great to get an overview of the types of SBOMs that exist (binary vs. source, where they are in phase of development/deployment), but also to learn how many governments have started mandating SBOMs to track what software they’re using. They’ve really hit their stride, and also launched SPDX 3.0, the latest in their iterations of “an open standard capable of representing systems with software components in as SBOMs.”

Monday afternoon took me over to CHAOSScon. I learned from their latest Community Health Analytics in Open Source Software (CHAOSS) project overview that they have a OSPO Metrics Working Group, which may be right up my alley these days. CHAOSS is one of those projects that I remember being launched and always wanted to be involved with, but never managed to make time for. I am concerned that’s still the case, but it was nice to check in with the community so I can more effectively determine whether it’s something I can finally carve out time for. We did an interactive workshop where we shared some thoughts and ideas, and then concluded with updates from a few of their projects, including the announcement of GrimoireLab 1.0 and an update from Augur.

I followed my friends (old and new!) to a CHOASScon after event at a nearby bar where I got to chat with a woman I met whose company was exploring their open source stack and thinking about building out an OSPO. It was nice having that conversation, as well as catching up with a bunch of folks.

Tuesday moved us beyond Community Day and officially kicked off the Open Source Summit, where we were welcomed to a series of keynotes that jumped right in with the topic of AI and work that’s going into enterprise-readiness with the launch of the Open Platform for Enterprise AI (OPEA). It was also nice to see quantum readiness mentioned. A keynote on Valkey, a Redis successor, also caught my attention, as there was a recent proposal to drop s390x support from it (thankfully a quick chat at their booth hopefully resolved this, hooray for conferences!).

Beyond the keynotes, it was generally a good day for talks. Kara Sowles of GitHub gave a great talk on open source funding (hint: there’s not nearly enough of it) and I went to a talk by my former colleague, Javier Perez, on some trends in open source software gathered from a survey that was concluded last year. Joe Winchester delighted with a talk on “Software in Space: Lessons Every Developer Can Learn From” where he took several examples of failures (or near failures) in space missions and drew parallels as to what software developers could learn. I think we all geeked out a bit over space science in that one.

Then for lunch I met up with Maemalynn Meanor of The Open Mainframe Project so I’d have a pal at the Women and Non-Binary Lunch, which is always a pleasure to attend.

Tuesday evening I made it over to a Open Source Summit [unofficial] AI Meetup After Hours which had a series of short talks from folks in the community to present their work, and what ultimately led to discussing ways they could collaborate, which was great to see. One of the things that came up was that even within the Linux Foundation community there is duplication of effort happening as everyone sees the same problems inside their own projects, meetups like this help break down those barriers.

Wednesday morning keynotes began with a “fireside chat” with Linus Torvalds, where he notably (for me) talked about RISC-V and concerns that they’d duplicate mistakes of past architectures when it came to software. When I stopped by the RISC-V booth later in the day it was clear that hit a nerve, and inspired some action in that community to make sure then don’t. He also seems to have come to the logical conclusion that the AI wave is not really worth the hype, but there is something there that we’d be wise to keep up with. Speaking of which, another keynote touched upon the rise of code being generated by AI tooling, and the need for securing our communities against manipulation that can happen to the source code bases that the AI is drawing from, underlining again that we need to bring trust and validation directly to open source projects.

After lunch I gave my talk on “How Our Mainframe-Focused Working Group Solved Our Linux Distribution Maintainer Isolation Problem” where, just like SCALE, I found myself with a small but deeply engaged audience. I also learned that while a handful of people in the room where focused on the topic, most of the questions were specifically related to mainframes, which I was also happy to answer! It was nice validation that there is appetite for the topic at events, and maybe I’ll re-focus on the technology at the next event I propose for, rather than going for a more social talk. Still, I was very happy I gave it, and some great contacts seem to have been made both for myself and for some audience members who got chatting afterwards.

Thursday was when the realization that I was on day eight of travel finally hit me and I started feeling a bit tired and I switched to mostly spending time in the expo hall meeting with people rather than trying to focus on sessions. Throughout my expo hall adventures I got to meet up with some friends from the Ubuntu community, a contact who I’d only spoken with online from OpenPOWER, and dozens of people I’ve known through various times in my career, who I’ve always been able to geek out with, regardless of my current focus – including mainframes!

Still, I caught the keynotes which were, once again, a bit AI-heavy. It’s important though, I know the tech industry is saturated with AI at the moment, but one of the things the Linux Foundation has the opportunity to be a steward of is the responsible development and use of it, so I’m grateful to see that coming together. Thursday was also delightfully broken up by the ability to pet some animals. I chose the rabbits.

The Open Source Summit is the largest open source events I attend, so I was really grateful to be back after the pandemic hiatus. I had a plan for the week, and accomplished most of what I planned on, but was constantly surprised at other opportunities that sprung up when I met with people. As valuable as the regional conferences are (and they ARE), this one is definitely the best conference of the year for core open source networking.

But first, I made a stop at the IBM office in Austin where I met up with my colleagues Daniel and Chris. I met Daniel at a taco truck where I had a much-needed post-flight lunch, and then he gave me a tour of the office. I even managed to find a random, roaming IBM Selectric II typewriter!

Then I got to enjoy happy hour out with several other folks from the office before returning back to my hotel for the night.

The first day of the conference I mostly spent meeting people and in the expo hall chatting with folks from Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux. They both have builds for s390x, so it was really nice to finally meet the folks I’ve worked with online, and talk with them in person about their current utilization and changes in needs. And that evening I was able to grab dinner and ice cream with my contact at Rocky Linux.

The second day was the one that was filled with talks. The event kicked off with a keynote from Anita Zhang about her career, and how unexpected choices at various stages led to the success she’s found today. From there I went directly to a talk by Matt Mullins of the Connections Museum Seattle titled “The oldest Linux peripheral” where he talked about a panel switch from 1923 that’s now hooked up to a Linux box to manage operations. It was a really cool talk, and looks to be a fascinating museum with a lot of old telecommunications equipment. The hours they’re open don’t line up with my upcoming visit to Seattle, but maybe next time, I know it’s something MJ would love to see.

From there I went to a talk from Paul Novarese on “The Legacy of Log4Shell and the Future of DevSecOps” where he gave a bit of a tour of the open source security landscape, and shared statistics around the exponentially growing number of open source projects and versions available, along with the corresponding rise in CVE assignments and NIST Vulnerability Database analysis work. Some of his observations centered around the fact that these procedures were developed at a time when the open source ecosystem was a lot smaller, and the dependency chain was somewhat less abstracted (or at least, less complicated). He talked about SBOMs (Software Bill of Materials) that can help organizations get a handle on the supply chain, but analysis and fixes also have to keep up so you have data to search for in that SBOM as you look for vulnerable software.

I took lunch a little early so I could prepare for my talk, and ended up at Terry Black’s BBQ across the street from the venue.

My talk on “Why (and how) would you run Linux on the Mainframe?” went well! It was well-attended and I think about half the attendees had a passing familiarity with mainframes, but a lot of the audience was new to the topic, which is about what I’d expect at a Linux event these days. People had great questions and it was really fun to geek out about it for the rest of the event, even at the after party for the conference the questions and discussions continued over drinks.

From there I went to Kyle J. Davis’ talk “Container Optimized Linux: The best idea you’re probably not using.” He had worked with Bottlerocket, but Flatcar and Talos are also in the host container OS space, and while I vaguely knew they existed, this was the first time I sat down and dedicated a few minutes to hear someone talk about them. The slim model they have for these distributions makes a lot of sense, since you really do only need a tiny, secure, environment to actually run the containers on, and everything can be externally orchestrated. While not directly applicable to me right now (IBM has done a lot of work on our own secure container environments), it is something I’ll keep in mind if the opportunity arises.

The final talk I attended before lightning talks and closing was around the Fedora work with Asahi Linux to bring it to the ARM-based Apple macs. I don’t have a great interest in this hardware specifically, but I always enjoy hearing about other architecture porting work that’s happening, and it was interesting to see the challenges that they’re presented with, along with progress and solutions.

For dinner before the after party I ended up eating with folks I knew from the OpenStack, and broadly, the Fedora community, before we all walked over to the Gibson Street Bar. I was feeling a little tired at this point, but I ended up staying clear through until 10PM. I then took a short detour over to a mailbox to send off a post card for the boys before retiring to my hotel.

Today is Sunday and I’m off on my next adventure: Seattle for the Open Source Summit!

In order to celebrate hitting the milestone of 60 years since the release, IBM hosted internal events around the world. I happened to be in Philadelphia during the celebration day on Thursday, April 4th, and decided to make the trek up to the place where much of the research and development, and ultimately the launch, happened back then: Poughkeepsie, NY. I’d been to the office once before, back in 2019, but I was definitely overdue for another visit to the IBM mainframe homeland. This was a perfect opportunity.

I took an Amtrak up from Trenton, through New York City where I was treated to visiting the beautiful new Moynihan Train Hall at Penn Station.

From there I enjoyed the second leg of my journey that took me straight to Poughkeepsie, where I was met by the social media famous Pasquale “PJ” Catalano, who brought me to the office and introduced me to folks who worked on the test floor. Then I got to visit the test floor itself! He posts about it frequently on social media, what feels like a rare and remarkable glimpse inside an IBM facility, so I had a passing familiarity with various locations, but an in-person visit is something else entirely. 200+ mainframes humming away in various states of testing, it was like nowhere I’ve ever been!

It’s also a lovely datacenter. It’s obviously an active, used, test floor, but it’s well-organized and tidy, clearly the team has a level of discipline that many production data centers would envy. I think part of this comes from the culture at IBM in general, but I’m sure some of it is also hard-won from experience, if you fail to label something or are careless about routing, it will come back to haunt you, and waste a lot of time in the future.

I got to hold a memory chip and a heatsink for an IBM Telum for the first time!

Plus an actual dual-chip module holding a couple Telum chips (I had previously held just a Telum in a case back at TechXchange in September).

I got to check out a rack-mount z16 for the first time.

And to my delight I finally got to see the beautiful IBM LinuxONE doors!

Visiting the mainframes of today felt to be a truly fitting way to honor the 60 year legacy of the IBM System 360, but after getting to see some other mainframe goodies while PJ got some work done, we made our way to the cafeteria for the real party. The IBM Corporate Archives had put together a whole hallway of displays!

They even graciously honored PJ’s request to open up the IBM System 360 they had on display and let us get some pictures “inside” it. Bliss!

Let me tell you, I had a wonderful time geeking out with these folks. I’ve always loved history, and with my work in this space I’ve developed a true appreciation for how legendary IBM is, and this is the heart of it. I also fear I talked the ear off of one woman from the archives who had a typewriter skirt on, as I shared all about my collection. Next time I’m in Poughkeepsie I’m definitely going to ask to see their own typewriter and mechanical calculator collection.

From there we grabbed some lunch and then went to the celebration itself. I ran into several folks I didn’t know worked out of Poughkeepsie, so those were all delightful surprises. Career-wise I’ve definitely gained value in meeting up with colleagues in-person from time to time, as it really does help solidify those bonds that keep us working well together at a distance. I also finally got to meet our fearless leader in IBM Z and LinuxONE, Ross Mauri!

And then there was cake! After which I took some time to meet with a couple other colleagues, and concluded my day meeting with a long time friend who came down to visit from the IBM Quantum division. We had coffee and then he graciously dropped me back off at the train station for my 5:30 train back to Trenton.

In all, a long day but one that was incredibly satisfying. And I already have a list of people to talk to and things to see during my next visit, maybe some time over the summer?

This was the first large open source conference I’d been to in-person since 2020, so I had a wonderful time seeing familiar faces and catching up on several years of lost time. It was also a delight to meet so many new people. From the Community Leadership Summit, to curious college students at my mainframe talk, and volunteering at the Presto booth, I had many opportunities to interact with all sorts of folks who are new to the tech industry in general, and new to open source. It also made me feel a little old as I realized that I’ve been involved with open source communities for over two decades. Though I think parenthood and those new grey hairs peaking out at my temples are aiding with that too.

The conference kicked off on Sunday with a couple community events, and I attended the Community Leadership Summit. I’ve been to a few CLS events over the years, but it looks like the last one I was at was a CLSx event in 2017, co-located with Linux Conf AU. This event is un-conference-style with an introductory keynote about community topics, followed by development of the schedule for the day. My role in open source communities has shifted a lot since my last CLS, so it was interesting going to it this time with a very different “home” community. In some ways, the topics were less applicable to me, but some of them stood out. The first session I participated in discussed getting the next generation of contributors involved with communities, and that’s one my team at work spends a tremendous amount of time on, plus my own direct mentoring each summer. It was particularly nice having some folks who are the next generation in the room, so we didn’t fall into the trap of cliches and trying to figure out what they want instead of just asking them. Ultimately, it didn’t seem like the needs have changed significantly (don’t rush to set up that TikTok account), though there is a more mobile-first inclination and they are wisely more inclined to contribute to projects that make it clear and simple to get started.

The next session I went to was around social media use by communities in the post-Twitter era. This is a tough one for me. I made a real social media home on Twitter and the downfall as been a painful one. I’ve made a new home on Mastodon in the year since the change of ownership, but professionally the executives and companies I engage with are still on Twitter, and things like my local transit agency and parks are too, along with several funny/parody accounts that I follow. The first thing I realized from the discussion during this session was that it’s unlikely that this experience will be replicated anywhere. The “town square” that was Twitter seems to have an unusual cultural phenomenon, and with everyone scattering to different networks or groups quitting social media entirely, I ultimately don’t believe we’ll find everything we had there concentrated on another platform. Instead, we need to adapt and find new communities and networks, and change how we engage. It’s a sad realization, but one that set me free somewhat. I need to stop mourning what was lost and move on with full investment in new places. The session also caused me to stop putting effort into Bluesky. I haven’t found value in that network so far, and it’s just another for-profit company that I’m pouring my time into, why exactly? I figure if it takes off, I can always hop back on. For now, I’m being more thoughtful about precisely what I’m posting on Twitter versus Mastodon, with a focus on most of my work stuff going to Twitter with the exception of the very technical or “geeky” stuff, which goes to Mastodon, and I’ve scaled back the personal stuff I put on Twitter in favor of Mastodon, though I still do some. As for communities, I wish more open source communities made the leap to Mastodon, but what I’ve instead found is a lot of projects have simply given up on social media. When the APIs on Twitter died, they packed up and never came back anywhere. As a participant in a project that was reluctantly dragged into social media and once on it, automated everything, I understand that. Still, it was a fun way to engage that I’ll miss.

The last two sessions I went to at CLS were also interesting. The first was around how to use community metrics, and the dangers of using those metrics as a goal, rather than using them to make decisions about engagement efforts and strategies. There’s a fine line here that we stumbled over several times in the discussions, but I think a big chunk of it came from a disconnect between how Marketing and similar departments view engagement and how communities do. Ultimately it does seem like there are some metrics that can be used as goals, but not all of them, and they can’t be focused upon without further inspection and context with regard to the community. The final session had me join a former colleague from the OpenStack Infrastructure team as we discussed security in open source software. He provided an excellent tour of available resources and kept the floor open for questions and engagement, which I was grateful for because I had some very honest questions to ask that I trusted him to answer honestly (“How legit is $this_resource/group anyway? Should I spend time with them?”). It gave me some food for thought as I came back to the office the following week and had some discussions with my security-minded open source colleagues.

The evening wrapped up with an outdoor social at the conference venue, where I got to meet up with a few folks and then head back to my room early so I’d be well-rested for the first main conference day on Monday.

Monday began with a welcome from one of the most welcoming and kind people I know in open source, Todd Lewis, and then went into a keynote from the legendary Nithya Ruff. I loved Nithya’s keynote. She began by talking about happiness and how important it is for you to cultivate and grasp that for yourself. This was a segue into her main point about how your career is similar, but for me it resonated so strongly because the happiness question is one that has a hold on me right now. She’s absolutely right, whether it’s happiness or your career, you’re in charge of your own destiny.

I spent most of my post-keynote morning in the “hallway track” catching up with folks and then just before lunch I went to Jim Jagielski’s Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs). Since I am now the global head of a federated component of IBM’s main OSPO (as of this year, I run the new OSPO for IBM Z) I wanted to see if there was anything missing in my strategy, meet with some like-minded folks, and ask Jim if there were other organizations working with a federated OSPO model like IBM is. It was a good presentation and after speaking with Jim I definitely had a nice confidence boost about our strategy, but it doesn’t seem like anyone else is doing it this way. I guess IBM is a bit exceptional in some ways due to how big the company is and how specialized the technologies are in our various departments. I work with IBM Power a lot since we’re quite aligned, and IBM Quantum every time I can find an excuse to, so we do work closely, but we do have somewhat different goals and mandates given how our technologies are used, and domain knowledge is required. The talk also inspired me to finally sign up for TODO Group communication channels, which is a great thing.

On Monday afternoon I gave my talk on Linux Distribution Collaboration …on a Mainframe! which had an… interesting start. I was chatting with couple of folks who were familiar with older mainframe technology, and someone walked in and, in front of everyone in the room asked, “Is this a funny talk or an educational one?” when I responded “educational” they walked out. It was rather jarring, but thankfully everyone in the room was incredulous as I was at the question, so it turned out to be a little bonding moment. Still, yikes. I understand not wanting to waste your time by attending a you’d rather not be in, but there are more kind and tactful ways of determining that. Thankfully, the talk itself went well (slides here), the audience was engaging and asked great questions, and it was fun to chat with folks after the talk, and even after the conference!

The next talk I went to was in a similar vein to mine, exploring the landscape of and porting open source projects to another hardware architecture. In this case it was a talk from my old friend Michael Hall who now works for Arm. They have an Arm developer program that I’ll have to take a look at, especially since they have lots of tiny devices that are fascinating and I want to buy a whole box full, haha! Since the Raspberry Pi is Arm, I actually have a couple in-use, one sits on my desk.

That evening we congregated at the nearby Crank Arm Brewing before I returned to the hotel for the Speaker & Sponsor dinner. These sorts of social events are always where my social awkwardness is showcased, but at dinner I sat with some kind people. Hopefully I didn’t talk too much about typewriters and trains.

Tuesday morning I sadly missed the keynotes because I had to head over to the IBM office for a couple hours to meet with some folks and do a recording, but by mid-day I was back at the conference to staff the Presto booth with some of my fellow IBMers.

While doing booth things, I also had the pleasure of meeting the founder of AlmaLinux, who I’d actually been sitting with at the speaker dinner the night before, and spoke with, but hilariously we didn’t talk much about work, hah! It was particularly fun to see that they listed their supported platforms (architectures) on their banner, hooray for s390x on there! I knew it would be, since they’re part of our Linux Distributions Working Group, but it was still nice to see there in person, printed out for the world to see.

From there I went to one final session, and then settled in at a table where I met some new people while assembling my IBM z16 LEGO set. I brought the LEGO set on a bit of a whim, but it turned out to be quite the conversation starter! Which is good, because I am not.

The event concluded with a lovely closing keynote from Todd, but I was a bit peopled out at this point and decided to skip the final social at a bar and arcade in favor of a quiet dinner with an old friend and an early evening back to my room.

In all, it was an amazing event. I did hallway track more than sessions, which is unusual for me, but there were so many people I wanted to meet or catch up with, that I found my time was better spent with people this time around.

I will spend some time on the All Things Open YouTube account once the sessions that were recorded are uploaded. Many thanks to all the organizers and volunteers who make this exceptional event happen every year, I was so glad to be back!

I moved to California just a few months later, during one of the snowiest winters Philadelphia had seen in years. I was aware of CPOSC continuing over the years, but I could never sync up my visits back with the conference. This year serendipity stepped in. I just happened to discover via a chat in #plug a week and a half prior that CPOSC was happening during our visit to Philadelphia. Even better, they were still accepting applications for lightning talks. I swiftly submitted something (which was accepted!) and started making arrangements to attend. It was on a Saturday, but thankfully MJ had a friend in town who wanted time with the boys, so it wasn’t a big deal for me to sneak out for a day.

Friday night I attended a musical with some friends downtown, stayed the night in a hotel in Philadelphia, and then was up bright and early the next morning to catch my Amtrak train to Lancaster, where CPOSC was now based. Unfortunately it was a little rainy that day, so I got a little damp on my walk to the station, and then had to take an Uber from the station in Lancaster to the venue, but it all worked out. I was at CPOSC in time to catch the tail end of the provided breakfast refreshments and to say hello to some friends before the opening remarks.

The first talk was on “MAME – The Future of the Past (Open-Source Retro Computing and Gaming Emulation)” by Gregory Ember. This was one of my favorite talks of the event. While I may not have a lot of time for games these days, I do love them, and I really love geeking out about retro emulation tech. His talk gave a bit of a history of the project, which provided glimpses into some of the fascinating problems they’ve encountered and overcome. Fortuitously, he made an off-hand comment about mainframes, which gave me an opening to chat with him later and we were able to connect on social media post-event. Cool! I’m totally going to carve out some time to play with MAME.

Then I joined a packed room for a talk by my friend Walt Mankowski on “Remedial Math for Programmers” which I remember cheering him on for when he submitted his talk. In my case, about half the “remedial math” he was talking about was stuff I never actually learned because I didn’t go to school for computer science (I didn’t go to college or university at all). So it was a refresher for a few things, but some of the concepts were entirely new to me. I loved his style of presenting it with examples though, since it made it so much easier for me to understand.

The final talk before lunch was from Deanna Bledsoe on “8-Year-Olds are Learning to Code!” and she gave a great tour of the landscape today for younger folks learning how to code. I had been passingly familiar with Scratch and code.org, but it had been a while since I’d looked at any of it, and that was all before I became a parent. I didn’t really need an excuse to strike up a conversation with her, so it was a real delight when I saw her in the hallway later and we were able to talk about our shared interest in getting kids into STEM for a few minutes. I also used my time in the “hallway track” to chime into a conversation about package management, which folks came and went from and then ended up talking about amateur radio. It was during this discussion that I remembered what I missed so much about in-person conferences: those random, geeky personal connections. I’m shy, and half the people I was talking to I’d just met, but in that moment we were all just geeking out over topics we either had expertise or interest in. It’s so nice to be back to doing events. Just prior all that, I attended a talk by Tom Swartz on “Open Source Home Automation” where he focused on Home Assistant, and I was really glad to hear (and see!) that they’ve made some really great advances in the past couple years, it may be time for me to play around with it again.

If I had to say there was a them to my afternoon, it was AI. The first talk after lunch was “An AI Wrote This Talk” by Tom Swartz and it was an incredibly entertaining romp through the power, and shortcomings of ChatGPT and other LLM technologies out there, for now. We still need human intervention to truly make something engaging that connects to people, but how far are we away from a world where it’s not? This dovetailed nicely with the final talk of the day, from Richard Everts, on “What is Really Happening Right Now With AI”. Want to be scared a bit? I joked that it wouldn’t be an open source conference without a scary AI talk, and while he did have some bright spots, the general tone of the talk was a bit dystopian. There are some real concerns out there about the rapid progression of machine learning technologies. We may not have to worry about robots for a while, but deep fakes are already altering our perception of the world, and there really is no closing Pandora’s Box. In more localized concerns, routine programming tasks may be very well suited to AI, so our expertise in the technology realm may be going up a rung on the ladder. But I thought about this a lot on my train ride home, hasn’t this always been the case? As our tools and hardware advance, so do we. None of us are swapping out vacuum tubes or writing code for punched cards anymore. Plus, with every advance in technology, we’re able to do so much more! The folks breaking codes with early computers in WWII couldn’t dream of what would be happening in the world of computing just half a century later, let alone now. When we free up the humans from doing tedious tasks and offload that to computers, that allows us to focus on more interesting, complex problems. I wouldn’t say I’m an eternal optimist, but at the same time it’s nice for talks like this to knock some perspective into me every once in a while. Still, I’m going to cling to the positive in this case, because doing otherwise leads to a dark future that I’d struggle to live with.

The last part of the actual conference was the round of lightning talks, it was my time to hop up on stage! Admittedly, I’d been talking about mainframes to anyone who would listen all day, but the big stage was a nice chance to get spiel out to everyone who stayed long enough for them. Plus, I got to use a few moments of my talk time to gush about coming back to CPOSC after over a decade.

Sadly, I had to rush out as soon as I finished my talk, since I had a train to catch back to Philadelphia. I lucked out on timing though, since it started drizzling just as I got to the station, and the thunderstorm began while I was standing on the platform waiting for the train.

The thunderstorm really picked up steam while I was riding back, and it was glorious. I had a paper book in hand and listening to a storm while on a train is pure bliss. Unfortunately the storm also caused some power outages, which got us stuck for a bit in downtown Philadelphia, and so I was over an hour late coming into the next station, which should have been about 20 minutes from there. Plus, Uber had surge pricing due to lots of people being stuck in the rain, so my ride home from the station was quite a bit more pricey than I had anticipated. Still, I arrived back in time to scoop the boys out of the bath and help put them to bed. It was a long day, but worth it.

It’ll be several months before my next generalist open source conference. The pandemic is not over, and I doubt my travel schedule will go back to what it was pre-pandemic any time soon. A lot has changed with the world and the work I do in the past three years.