Adam, on the other hand, wanted to see a baseball game for his birthday. Unfortunately, his birthday is in January, and that’s about as far as you can get from anything baseball. How about a hockey game? Yes! We penciled one in for January and got to planning.

But first we had to go see Aaron’s cave. Both of these events landed in January, since I was in no shape to go to a cave right after my surgery in December. Our cave day began with a trip to the farmer’s market in town, then the boys and I took a bus to our favorite cafe in town where we met MJ for breakfast (why did we take a bus and MJ take the car? Because the boys love buses, of course). After breakfast we drove directly to San Francisco, and encountered the usual amount of traffic along the way which reminded us why going to the beach side of San Francisco is such a time investment these days.

There was a lot of parking at the park that houses the Sutro Baths ruins, which was a relief.

To get to the cave, you first walk down some trails and past the baths, the cave is pretty easy to spot, and it’s actually more like a tunnel. It was enough for Aaron though! They got their shoes all coated in sand and ran through the cave, and tried to jump in puddles. The cave has little openings here and there where you could see the waves crashing in, which was pretty cool. Reading about it, the cave is actually a rock quarry, and they used the rock to build the now ruined Sutro Baths.

I’m glad Aaron was satisfied, but I think the rest of us preferred the rest of our adventure, traipsing through the national park that’s there, seeing windswept trees and taking in the magnificent views of the Pacific Ocean. It’s such a beautiful place. The very California gift shop was nice too.

Afterwards, we made our way down to the Beach Chalet. MJ and I went there regularly when we lived in the city, so it was nice to be back, even if the boys were finicky about their food. After lunch, we took a little walk in the western-most part of Golden Gate park to see Queen Wilhelmina’s windmill and the gardens surrounding it.

It was a good day.

Adam’s birthday adventure was on the following weekend, a San Jose Sharks game! During his party, we made plans with his current and former au pairs, so all eight of us ended up going together.

I definitely had my apprehensions, there wasn’t a daytime game until March, so going in January meant we were taking them to a 7PM game, and their bedtime is usually 7:30. They were definitely a little tired, but Adam eventually got into the excitement of the game and really enjoyed spending time with his au pairs. I bought Aaron a Shark hand puppet to keep him entertained, and the boys kept eating my food.

I forgot how much I like SAP Center, even if it’s a driving journey to get there from the east bay (no useful trains like on the peninsula). It’s bright and clean and there are TONS of screens, so when I left my seat to grab some more food I was still able to see the game, and didn’t have to deal with the between-period crowds.

And a success for Adam’s birthday? Yep! I think hockey is nice because of how fast-based it is and even between periods they have entertainment to keep the crowds happy. We were lucky enough to attend on the evening they were observing the Lunar New Year, so we were entranced by lions and dragons, which was quite a lot of fun.

As for me, it was a bit of a stressful evening. I’m still bringing a diaper bag and snacks, and I do have to entertain them, so it’s not a lazy night at a game like it used to be, but it is starting to get a bit less stressful. The boys listen a bit more, run off less, and with careful planning I can make sure no one ends up too hungry/thirsty/bored. And it was worth it, I did still have pockets of fun, and I always enjoy having new experiences with the boys.

It worked out really well, and on Saturday we were joined by our first au pair (who got married and stayed in the US), their second au pair (who is now going to school in the US) and their current au pair! Maybe next year we’ll do a birthday with other kids, but none of us were ready for that yet.

As requested, he had a cake with dark blue frosting and a Chase from Paw Patrol decorating theme.

And his au pairs brought him gifts, which is always fun.

He’s really grown up in these past few months. I think being in preschool is helping him, but generally he seems to have just really taken off conversationally. He’s also more strongly communicating his preference for things, like dinosaurs and drawing, so much drawing. I love the little person he’s growing into.

Beyond the birthday, December didn’t exactly unfold the way we expected. I had an emergency appendectomy the day before the party, which I’ll write about soon, and it knocked me out of commission until our trip to Philadelphia on the 18th. But before we left we made time to go over to our favorite donut shop, Rudy’s Donuts, which was closing for good. I’m really bummed, it was so good and we could walk there as a nice Saturday or Sunday adventure. But the owners are retiring and I that’s certainly a conclusion of business that I can respect. The news had gotten out about their pending closure though, and the weekend we went was the weekend before they closed and the line looped around inside the building! I can’t imagine how it was their final weekend.

As we packed for Philadelphia the boys got to pack their new Lego luggage! We picked the pair of suitcases up at Costco and they came with matching backpacks. This was the first trip where the boys would have their “own” luggage (what ended up in the bags was only partially theirs). In general, it was a success, though there were several times at the airport where they asked adults to pull them for a while.

The boys are growing up!

The first weekend in November began with me taking the boys over to our local Farmer’s Market, but this time riding their bikes! It was an interesting experiment, and worked pretty well, but when a woman who works at the bakery stall we frequent saw them, she shared how she remembered when we brought them in the stroller. Indeed, they have grown!

Sunday was spent at a book fair in San Ramon, where Aaron got to “meet” Bluey and Curious George. Adam passed on this experience, and the whole thing was a bit crowded and overwhelming, but we did manage to pick up some books from local authors, including the Captain Mama trilogy of books, written by USAF veteran Graciela Tiscareño-Sato, who was a delight to meeting. Adam loves her books, and we now talk a fair amount about the KC-135R aerial refueling airplane.

Imagine our delight and surprise when we walked into our library a few days later and saw a whole display featuring her!

But back to the day of the book fair, that evening Adam lost his first tooth! It’s a first for all of us really, the first time we did Tooth Fairy! How much is the going rate for a tooth at our house? $5. I also discovered that the whole experience really grosses me out, I’m reminded that it did when I was a kid too. I’m glad I’m not a shark.

That week also marked the results of a heartbreaking election. Donald Trump was elected to the presidency again, in what probably shouldn’t have come as a shock to me, but I really was quite upset. Personally, his first term emboldened folks who are not kind to Jewish people, and antisemitic attacks rose. It was really the first time I had fear related to raising our children Jewish in the United States. Beyond our immediate household, changes in immigration rules, draconian changes to women’s rights and those of other minorities, and the threat this puts on science and research is all terrifying. My heart goes out to loved ones who are at more risk than I, and my only hope is that communities can band together on a local level to protect our own, and that the backlash toward states like California won’t hurt too many people or do much long-term damage. It did remind me that it was a good time to get vaccinated, who knows when federal funding for health initiatives that his incoming administration doesn’t believe in will go away. Sigh.

But life goes on, and on Thursday I flew to Seattle for SeaGL 2024. I arrived mid-day on Thursday because the flights worked out well that way, and gave me some time to catch up some work in my hotel room before heading out in the early evening to visit the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, which was within walking distance of my hotel. I had planned on using my reciprocal membership there, but it turned out to be free that day, and open late! I was excited to see their fossil collection, but the museum was full of really beautiful displays and I enjoyed all of it.

Upon my return we celebrated our au pair’s birthday, complete with a Taylor Swift birthday cake, which was done by a local baker and came out spectacularly!

We spent the next weekend having a pretty chill time, we went to a playground, visited our usual weekend restaurants. And we needed some down time, as our Thanksgiving trip to Florida was coming up. I’ll write about that soon, but it’s only the second time we’ve all gone on vacation, and the first was just a road trip to New Jersey, so flights and eight days of hotels was quite the next experience.

It’s taken me a little while to get back into conferences, and I’m generally traveling less than I once was just because of how much my role has changed, so it wasn’t until this year that I finally made it back to Seattle for SeaGL.

One of the things I love about SeaGL is that they work hard to give voices to folks who haven’t presented before, and they always end up with a very diverse lineup. That means throughout the event you hear new perspectives and ideas, mixed in with voices like my own that have been around the open source world for decades.

The event kicked off with a keynote from Aaron Wolf, who spoke to conscious, and intentional leadership and organizations, and shared his resulting FLO-Conscience project. Then Christopher Neugebauer who gave us a fresh take on lessons (anti-lessons?) that can be drawn from failures in direction and leadership throughout the history of the open source software movement, and how that’s lead to a fundamental disconnect between users and developers which has done a lot to create a culture of maintainer burnout. It was really nice to take a step back and look at some of the history in this way, there are definitely some thoughts and oft-repeated phrases we’ve held dear in open source that aren’t doing us any favors.

I really enjoyed a talk by Vagrant Cascadian, who I knew from Reproducible Build work, where he compared and contrasted the approaches Debian and GNU Guix take to trustworthiness of their artifacts. I always learn something new that I hadn’t thought about before when I hear him speak, and this time I had a fascinating history lesson in how some unusual things came to be in Debian.

Ariadne Conill also brought her A-game with a talk on LoongArch, an architecture designed by an organization in China that had just recently landed on my radar as I schmooze in architecture circles. The talk helpfully brought me from zero knowledge to what I feel is reasonably well-informed for someone who moves in these spaces. It was also nice that she had real experience within Alpine and direct interaction with the architecture developers.

Saturday morning I showed up bright and early for VM Brasseur’s talk on Open Source governance. One of the things I love about going to her talks is that no matter how well I know her (including having read her book!), I always walk away feeling good from her talks and having learned something I hadn’t thought about. One of the things I’ve recently struggled with in a leadership capacity has been building up the work of women who are coming behind me, because they still struggle for recognition and respect that I now have in my communities. The easiest thing to do in these circumstances is to just have me handle everything because “they listen to you” but what I need to promote more is having these fresh leaders voice their opinion, and then adding my supportive voice to theirs. It seems obvious upon reflection, but it is the harder path in practice. I’ll mention now that Deb Nicholson’s talk was a nice flip side to this talk, re-focusing on how you can solve problems, and reminding us that we have the freedom to both learn from giants and forge our own path forward.

Allison Cao’s talk on “Building my first open source software with AI: A teenager’s journey into innovation for social good” was probably the one I’ve thought the most about since the conference. One of the strategies that code camps aimed at younger people have used is getting them to develop games. Makes sense! But for people like Allison, games were dull and social action was what was interesting. Plus, she learns in a way that a lot of self-taught people do (including myself) by finding a problem, cobbling pieces together for a solution, and then digging back into it to figure out how it all works to perfect and customize it. For example, when I was learning to build websites, I was viewing the source of lots of other websites to learn. Eventually I learned what all that funky CSS was doing to my HTML and built up a working understanding about it that way, rather than rote memorization of tags. The memorization came naturally. In her case, she wasn’t learning about variables, loops, and subroutines, she was using AI-driven code generation, and then when she needed to customize things she naturally learned about how variables, loops, and subroutines worked. Also, I was really impressed to see such a young woman presenting, so brave!

My talk was after lunch, and I was pleasantly surprised by how many people came back to it! So first, thanks to everyone who came by, was curious, and asked questions. Even thanks to my acquaintances who didn’t hold back from some good natured heckling. My talk covered resources for porting your open source project to various architectures, which I updated on a technical level since the last time giving it and added in a few new stories. Slides from my talk are available here: Will_your_open_source_project_run_on_a_mainframe_smartwatch_-_SeaGL_2024.pdf (1.2M).

Kenneth Finnegan gave a talk on open source mirroring work he’s being doing, and that was a great introduction to some of the challenges they’ve overcome to expand the amount of mirroring that’s happening as universities scale back their internal infrastructures that had been handling the bulk of it. It was also nice to chat with him and a couple friends of mine after the talk as we lost at Uno to a competitive seven year old.

Meeting new people and catching up with folks is where participation really shines for this event. I had a couple scheduled meetings with folks to check in on their s390x porting efforts, but the incidental chats I had in hallways and in the expo hall are why I’m there, and why I found pandemic virtual events to be such a struggle to extract value from. I also had lunch with a long time mentor of mine who I was able to be really with regarding some advice I was seeking, and it was precisely what I needed in that moment.

The event concluded with keynotes from Rachel Kelly and Duane O’Brien, both of whom I’ve known in the open source community for some time and was thrilled to see on stage. Rachel talked about having conversations around personal data management with your less technical loved ones, and stressed with all her examples of tooling that getting just them to a better place was worth it, even if it’s not quite as secure and open source as we would like. Duane’s talk was around funding in open source, and how we reach for sustainability. It’s something that I know a lot of organizations are struggling with, so I’m grateful that Duane is taking a serious look at it and bringing us along for the ride.

As the keynotes wrapped up it was time for me to get to the airport. Many thanks to the organizers and volunteers to made it all happen. I’ll be back!

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.

Mae, Lyz, and Donna standing by the Open Mainframe Project sign (used with permission, source)

But as the sun rose on Monday, it was time for our big day! After running around all morning to find our banners and fixing up last minute updates and changes, we kicked off the event by inviting everyone we could find who was related to the project in for a group photo.

Open Mainframe Project group photo (used with permission, source)

The event itself then kicked off with a keynote from Meredith Stowell, Vice President of Ecosystem at IBM (and my VP!). She had a lot to say in the keynote about the state of open source on the mainframe overall, and where skills fit in, and new projects, including an AI-focused initiative. But what I loved most about her keynote was how eloquently she spoke on the value of open source not just to companies, but individuals and the broader open source ecosystem. This is one of those things I’ve been trying to convince people of my entire career, and to have leadership not only understand this, but be able to explain it so well, is something I really treasure.

The flagship project of the Open Mainframe Project continues to be Zowe, so we had a lot of Zowe content and were careful to make sure it was always scheduled against something that was unrelated to Zowe. As such, I ended up in most of the non-Zowe talks just because of my expertise and focus in the community. The talks were really exceptional, and I was grateful that all the talks were purely open source focused, with no hint of product or someone trying to sell something. I give credit to my peers on the planning committee for this, we thoroughly vetted speakers and asked hard questions about their materials long before the event began to make sure there were clear content expectations.

As for me, I gave a talk on the Software Discovery Tool in the afternoon, where I talked about the open source landscape on the mainframe rather broadly, and then shared where the tool comes into play. I also spoke a bit about other tools and resources that folks might want to use when learning about open source software on the platform. Slides from that presentation are available as a pdf here.

Directly after this presentation I went to the other room to participate in a panel on “Crowdsourcing Mainframe Education” where I was there to represent the mentorship program, while others talked about the COBOL Programming Course and the Mainframe Open Education project.

Sudharsana, Mike, Lyz, & JJ at our mainframe education panel (used with permission, source)

The sessions were extremely well-attended, and made for what I can fairly confidently say is the best in-person Open Mainframe Project event we’ve had thus far. It’s definitely going to be one of my shining accomplishments for the year.

The day concluded with sessions around 5:30 and then we did clean up before Mae, Donna, and I went to a lovely celebratory dinner. After that, I was off to my one Vegas show of the trip: Michael Jackson ONE, which was playing there at Mandalay Bay.

It was a lovely way to wind down and relax, and the show was really enjoyable. The one thing I’ll say about Cirque du Soleil shows is that they’re always beautiful and magical, no skimping on things anywhere. Perhaps obviously, you have to enjoy Michael Jackson music to enjoy it, since that’s basically the whole show, but I sure do.

After we went on the Niles Canyon Railway train two days I took off from work to spend some time with the kids while our au pair was out of town, and recover a bit from everything going on. On Monday I had the morning solo with Adam, since he had a day off from school and Aaron was at preschool. Our first activity together was putting up some Halloween lights and decorations outside. Then we went inside to make a custom t-shirt, which Adam had been asking to do for months. His subject? A BART train that we designed from a photo! On Tuesday I had Aaron for the morning while Adam was in school, and we tried out a new breakfast restaurant in town, The Breakfast Club. Everything about it was exceptional and we both ate too much.

On Saturday we had more trains! We went up to the Western Railway Museum for their Pumpkin Patch Festival about 90 minutes northeast of us. Gaby came along with us for this one, and we stopped to pick up burgers about 20 minutes from the museum, and so we enjoyed a burger picnic upon arrival, which worked out really nicely.

When we finished lunch, the boys played in the signal garden! They have a series of old railway signal crossing signs that they have hooked up to buttons that can be triggered with a press. We saw it the last time we visited the museum, but didn’t get the opportunity then to visit.

From there, it was onto the Key System tram that whisked us off to the Pumpkin Patch.

The pumpkin patch activities were supported largely by the local Rotary Club and they put on a really enjoyable time. There was a HUGE hay fort, which the boys were happy to explore on their own at first, but swiftly took my hand and made me run through with them.

There was a bouncy house! And a zipline for kids!

They also had a little hay ride that took us past a bunch of scarecrows made by local groups. On the way out we visited the pumpkins for sale, but we went with some of the smaller gourds so it was easier to bring them back on the tram, and ultimately home, with us.

It was a wonderful experience. As the afternoon wound down we got on one the last trams leaving the pumpkin patch before making the long drive home, during which both boys fell asleep.

On Sunday we finally found a way to celebrate Sukkot. The synagogue in San Francisco that we used to attend had a Sukkah in Colma that they’d set up, so we made the drive across the bay to celebrate with them. Unfortunately, the rabbi couldn’t make it and there were only a handful of people there, but we had some nice discussions and at least the boys got to see the sukkah and hear the group recite some prayers. We went from there to the city where we had lunch at Fogo de Chao, yum.

The late afternoon was spent just hanging around at home before making mini pizzas for dinner together, and then I was off to the airport! In my first work trip in months, I was off to Las Vegas for IBM TechXchange.

I brought a bunch of snacks for the boys, which Aaron spent much of the ride down enjoying as we sat in our seats and enjoyed the views. At the end of the line, we were able to head to the back (now front!) of the train to see them move the steam engine to the other end of the cars and reconnect.

There was also a scheduled Amtrak passenger train that traveled by while we were stopped, which everyone enjoyed.

On the journey back, we spent a bit more time away from our seats, with Aaron and I venturing back to the front of the train to take in the breeze and see the engine operating up close. Then MJ and Adam took a turn.

Once back at the depot we got pictures of the engine! And then went over to the gift shop to get a couple post cards and magnet. They have a small museum there too that had some photos and text displays. The only downside is that we had just recovered from a stomach bug the week before and caused me to be a bit more queasy than I would have liked, but I’m grateful that we didn’t have to miss the excursion entirely, as it was our last chance in 2024 to ride on it.

For Adam, it was the water robot. It mixes two things he loves, and within a couple minutes he was able to control the robot’s movement around a little water tank. With other kids waiting, we had to swiftly move on from it, but he kept asking to go back. As our visit to the event wound down we made sure to go back so he could enjoy it more.

For Aaron it was roasting a marshmallow with a parabolic mirror! He’s only 3, so he had some help, but lighting a marshmallow on fire and then enjoying the sugary result of the roasting was definitely memorable. He now routinely asks if we can light marshmallows on fire at home, hah!

They had several student robots teams throughout the event, and elementary schools that had various small activities for kids to build little STEM activities, including a sling-shot made out of popsicle sticks, rubber bands, and a plastic spoon, which we had fun with, launching ping pong balls into buckets.

The event also featured four bouncy houses that were available to the kids for free, which was a nice treat. It’s no surprse that both boys had a ton of fun with those.

Unfortunately it was a very hot day. We left shortly before noon when the temperature got up to 95 and I was beginning to wilt, later that day it soared over 100.

We had several days of unseasonably warm weather, but one of the upsides of this is that during the Sunday morning swim classes that the boys go to they often complain of it being too cold to walk to BART to take it to classes and we drive instead. But when it’s 80 degrees at 8:30AM, it’s not too cold! It’ll probably be one of the last ones of the year that we could take BART to instead of driving, so I definitely wanted to take advantage of it. Plus it’s funny to watch the boys run home from the train station in their bathrobes.

After the weekend I took Tuesday evening off to enjoy on my own. First I walked over to my favorite local sushi place for a quick dinner, then I went to visit our local one-screen theater to see “The Wild Robot” which was a really well-done movie. It was one that I was supposed to see with Adam before we all came down with a cold, so it was a little bittersweet, but I’m still glad I went, and it was a nice break for me.

Unfortunately, we’re not robots, and we got sick again this past week. Aaron got sick with a stomach bug on Tuesday night and couldn’t go to preschool on Wednesday. Adam got sent home from school with a stomach ache on Thursday, and I came down with it on Thursday evening, totally destroying my Friday and causing me to reschedule a doctor appointment. It’s probably the worst stomach bug that’s swept through the whole house.

Thankfully we were all feeling mostly better by Saturday and could ease back into the world, and gave me time to wash everything that sickness may have touched, and clean up the temporary crib mattress we put on the floor of the family room that the kids took turn sleeping on as the illness made their way through. Here’s hoping for a healthier month ahead!

Thankfully, we didn’t have grand plans for my birthday, and instead I was simply welcomed with a beautifully themed cake as we celebrated with just the immediate family and our former au pair who dropped by with flowers. And no candles, because no one wants someone with a cold blowing on a cake, regardless of the infection status of everyone else.

My birthday present was quite the treat though, tickets to Niles Canyon Railway on their steam train! For two weeks in the future, which was good, because there was no way we were going out on my birthday.

On Tuesday of that week was the culmination of a TON of work: IBM Z Day. I wasn’t a track lead this year, but I put together the developer journey and consulted on several sessions, and I gave a talk in the Academic Symposium with Matt Germonprez of the CHAOSS project about the importance of open source software. I think the session went well, and thankfully I was feeling well enough for it.

On Wednesday night Rosh Hashanah began! I made honey cake with the boys, but unfortunately our bread maker broke and the new one didn’t arrive until Thursday so we couldn’t make round challah before the holiday. We participated in evening services virtually after the boys went to bed, and the next morning I took the boys out to the park to run around for a bit before morning services at 10:30AM, which we also joined virtually. The bread maker also arrived, and while strictly not appropriate to bake challah on Rosh Hashanah, we did anyway. A round challah! Which came out pretty decently. Plus, being able to bake the round challah together helped get over some of the disappointment of missing the fancy challah baking event the weekend before.

In the late afternoon, we cut up a bunch of fruit and figured out how to extract the seeds from a pomegranate to enjoy some fruit and honey.

Happy New Year! We’d like to finally attend services in-person again next year, but things just didn’t come together for it this year, especially with everyone being so sick in the days leading up to it.

If I’m honest, it was a lot for one week. I really wish we hadn’t gotten sick, but with little ones in school it’s tricky to avoid it, as we’d also discover two weeks later when we all got sick again. Oof!