With MJ traveling, the boys and I spent the first Sunday of the month visiting a flea market in town, where I found a Disney’s Pinocchio picture vinyl – the same one my family had when I was a kid!

We then went over to The Chabot theater for an afternoon showing of the new live-action Lilo & Stitch. This is only the second time our boys had been to a movie theater, and the first time we went to one that wasn’t a special event. They did great! The movie was cute and the boys had a good time, but the live-action remakes aren’t really my thing.

I took Monday and Thursday off from work to do other summer things with Gaby (our au pair) and the boys. Monday it was a visit back to the Cull Canyon swimming lagoon for swimming! Unfortunately the weather was on the cooler side, so there weren’t a lot of people there and we were a bit chilly. We still had fun though, got to swim a bit, have some PB&J sandwiches, and try out the beach tent and wagon we bought after our first visit.

We picked up the wagon at Costco, and it collapses really nicely. The beach tent came from REI, and it’s not one of the easy pop-up ones, but setting it up is easily done with a single person and a few minutes of focus. It was actually good chilly and our visit to short to use the tent, but I could see it really coming in handy during longer visits on warmer days.

On my Thursday off I took everyone up to Fairyland in Oakland. It’s been on our list for a while, and I realized that at 4 and 6, Adam at least would age out of it in a couple years. Now was the perfect time to go! Gaby and I packed up a bunch of snacks and drove up. Parking was easy and it wasn’t busy when we arrived. The park is also celebrating their 75th anniversary this year, so at ticketing we got our Fairyland keys that were decorated with sparkles for the anniversary. So cute!

As one of the first theme parks, it inspired many others over the years, notably among them being Disneyland. I suspect it’s seen better days with fresher coats of paint, but these aren’t things that kids notice, and to Adam and Aaron it was one of their favorite days out in a while. There are lots of places to run and climb, there was a little train that we rode a couple times, and the carousel and Ferris wheel were kids-only, which they thought was pretty fun(ny). There was a giant (kids-only) dragon slide that they went down about a half dozen times, and they both thought it was hilarious to hide inside various little houses inspired by fairy tales.

We saw a puppet show at 11AM, during which we followed the lead of a bunch of other families in using the opportunity to have the kids enjoy their PB&J sandwiches. The Pinocchio puppet show was cute, but Aaron and I were quite distracted by a squirrel who understood it was lunch time and got very close to us in his efforts to take Aaron’s sandwich.

It was also great that they allow outside food, and even the in-park food didn’t seem wildly priced, maybe we’ll check it out next time. I think going on a Thursday morning was a good choice too, even if it required a day off from work, it meant there were virtually no lines and even the school groups that were there didn’t make the park feel full. In all, the place was pretty low-stress and enjoyable for all of us, as soon as we left the boys were asking when we could go again.

MJ returned from his work trip late on Thursday night, just in time for us to enjoy Father’s Day weekend! Saturday was spent at the annual Castro Valley Car Show. One of the reasons we delayed our trip to Philadelphia was to avoid missing local summer events like this, so it was nice that we got to go this year. Adam even found a Pontiac Firebird Trans Am, famously the same car that KITT is in Knight Rider, though this one was white and I think it was from 1983 (the one in the show is a 1982).

Sunday featured a trip out to the Hiller Aviation Museum for Father’s Day! They had some activities for the kids, but they didn’t seem too interested in them, so we skipped them in favor of the standing exhibits, including a 747 that we went in twice, and a large gallery of various other aircraft.

We also took the recommendation of a woman in the gift shop who said we should check out Sky Kitchen just across the runway at the San Carlos Airport for a kid-friendly lunch, which definitely hit the spot. Afterwards, it was easy to come back and check out a few things we didn’t get to before lunch, and to spend a little time in the gift shop. We also ended up getting a membership because we all really enjoyed it and there was more we wanted to see.

And then it was the countdown to our trip to Philadelphia! The boys and I finished a jigsaw puzzle that we’d been working on for a few weeks and I wanted to finish before we left.

I also took a long lunch one day and went bowling with Gaby and the boys to make sure we had our fun with the Kids Bowl Free pass once more before we left (though we will have some time in August to use it too). Leaving for six weeks is always a bit nerve-wracking for me as we prep the house, make sure we don’t forget anything, and get our house sitter all set up, but I paced myself as much as I could and made extensive use of lists, and it wasn’t as chaotic as it usually is. I’m definitely glad we didn’t leave right after school ended, it was really nice to do California summer for a little while before Philly summer began.

Adam’s graduation from Kindergarten was a week later and we were all able to attend that, and conclude the day with a graduation cake for both of them and dinner at Fogo de Chão!

And then it was time for a few weeks of California summer! Last year we left for summer in Philadelphia directly after Adam concluded school, which meant we couldn’t do anything in California before we left, and I was pretty disappointed about that. California is gorgeous, and in spite of nice weather year around, there still are seasons for things like swimming and boating and it was a shame to miss that. This year, we didn’t!

When I returned from Boston, we went to Ardenwood Historic Farm for their annual Rail Fair. The last time we were at Ardenwood the train wasn’t running, so our first stop was getting to ride on that.

From there, we met with folks from the Western Pacific Railway Museum where we learned about their Run-A-Locomotive program where an instructor teaches you how to run a diesel locomotive and then you get to run one on their grounds! We are 100% going to do that. They were also really kind to the boys, both of whom asked a lot of questions and they were happy to indulge.

Several areas were also set up with model trains, which is always a lot of fun. Perhaps the most fun was the Live Steam group from the Bay Area Garden Railway Society whose model trains ran on actual steam. Some use little pieces of coal for the boiler, others some type of gas or alcohol solution. Very involved, but also very cool.

We spent the following weekend with a lot of water. First up, was our first visit to Cull Canyon Swim Complex! Gaby had gone a couple weeks earlier and reported that there wasn’t a lot of sand, which was important for one of our very sand-adverse kiddos. We went on a rather warm day, so it was already crowded by the time we got there, in spite of getting there rather early. Still, we had fun! And promptly made plans to buy some additional supplies from Costco and REI for our next visit so we could enjoy our time there for longer. On our list: Beach tent, beach chairs, and a collapsible wagon.

The next day it was over to Lake Chabot for paddle boats! We had considered going to Golden Gate Park in San Francisco to enjoy the paddle boats there, but the boys didn’t want the long drive, and we were slightly concerned about crowds. None of those problems at the Lake 10 minutes from home!

We quickly learned that paddle boats are quite tiring, hah! Adam and MJ started the journey, but Adam and I very carefully swapped places on the boat halfway through so I could take over for him and MJ and I could get us back to to the wharf. It was fun, but we all agreed that next time we’ll take out one of the motor boats so we can focus more on the scenery and less on paddling.

For some indoor summertime fun, we enrolled the boys in the Kids Bowl Free program that our local bowling alley participates in. It’s funny though, in over seven years of living here all of our au pairs have taken the boys bowling, but MJ and I had never been! So the other morning I took them over to get them checked in and watch them wildly throw a few balls down the lanes. I should participate next time.

It’s been fun, and we have more to do! I took a couple days off this week so we could enjoy a few more fun things and avoid the weekend summer crowds. Plus, after the whirlwind that was April and May at work, I could use a break.

This year, I was one of the key people who worked on planning our presence there. Quite a different experience!

IBM had two booths at the event, one with standard pedestals that had demos of various products, and then an IBM LinuxONE area that featured the plexiglass IBM LinuxONE 5 which had just been announced, and a quartet of laptops that my team was running. I spent several months working with various teams to come up with the best demos to showcase and tailor for the audience, but ultimately the best resources came from within our Ecosystem team and I was really excited to pull everything together. The cherry on top was our final name for the space: IBM LinuxONE AI Arcade

We had two hands-on activities, the first was our arcade where we had folks install three open source command-line games with three different mechanisms on Red Hat Enterprise Linux to drive home the “Linux is Linux” story. Unfortunately, the expo wifi wasn’t great, so Pong was a bit of a bust, but people seemed to have a lot of fun with vTetris.

Then we leveraged our AI/ML in Jupyter Labs that we’ve used for Datathons to give attendees a fully open source fraud detection demo. This was a bit more involved, but it’s very well-documented so even if they didn’t actually run the lab, we could walk them through the steps and diagrams on GitHub.

The plexiglass LinuxONE was the real draw into the booth though. People love checking out hardware. Several of us had shifts showing off the components, and I wasn’t shy about doing them, it was probably the most fun I had at the event. Not only is it a lot of fun to geek out about the hardware, it was the perfect segue into learning about what attendees had worked on hardware-wise, which lead to some fascinating trips down memory lane.

It was a real pleasure to work with the events team, but especially Alex Osadchyy, JJ Asghar, and Julianna Gingold who basically spent the whole event there in the expo with me running the arcade. I’m glad it all went so well, though next time I’ll definitely ask for more help, since they ended up being very long days for all of us. I’m still recovering!

People-wise, the summit is a great way to catch up with my friends in various open source communities I work in, so that was a lot of fun. I also got to visit with our mainframe grand bosses Ross Mauri and Tina Tarquinio from IBM who descended upon the summit, with Tina participating in a talk that I hear was very well-received.

And if you look very closely, you’ll notice that the earrings I’m wearing are made out of IBM System/360 Solid Logic Technology (SLT) covers. I made a couple pairs of earrings before I left by carefully melting them off their boards with a heat gun, then using jewelry epoxy and tiny screws to attach them to the earring hooks. Nerdy? Yes. Awesome? Also yes. I hope they don’t have lead in them. I’m also glad I finally got a couple pairs done in time for an event! I hope to finish a few more before TechXchange.

The other big outcome of the summit is a huge milestone in a GitHub Actions runner project that I’ve been working on for about a year and a half, we started on-boarding projects and could finally announce it! I’m grateful the timing worked out so well, the LinuxONE 5 launch was a great opportunity, and the summit even more so.

Wednesday night the summit event was a Red Sox game at Fenway Park! Amusingly, I had just been to one the Saturday before because I didn’t realize this would be part of the conference, but I’m perfectly delighted to have two baseball nights. Plus, it’s more fun with friends. I tagged along with a whole crew and we had a wonderful time, in spite of slightly gloomy weather.

I spent a couple hours wrapping up things at the summit on Thursday, and then it was time for a rainy journey back home to California on a woefully delayed flight out of Boston.

I also took the opportunity of being up in the city to go over to the San Francisco Modern Art Museum (SFMOMA). I hadn’t been in years, and I was looking for something nearby to where I was to spend a peaceful afternoon. I’m not a fan of abstract art, so modern art museums are sometimes a bit tricky for me, but if I stick to the more real stuff, I tend to enjoy it. One of the things I quite enjoyed was seeing the Daisy with Rider collotype by Eadweard Muybridge, but not because he was a good person, quite the opposite. I had recently started listening to the History on Trial podcast, and back in 2024 she did an episode called The Motion Picture Murder that I had listened to just a few days before, and it was about Muybridge. What timing!

I spent the night in a hotel in the city, which was a bit of a last minute decision because we happened to have a free night to use and I was attending the RSA Conference expo hall the next day. It worked out nicely, I got up early and went to the pool, which was a glorious way to relax before a busy day. I popped over to Moscone Center just after opening time for the expo hall. There, I met up with some open source folks I had planned to see, incidentally saw a few others, dropped by the IBM booth to get a lead on some AI stuff I’d been looking into, and had a lovely lunch with a friend who was in town.

On the weekend of May the 4th we had a somewhat Star Wars and Lego themed weekend. On that Saturday we went to Brick by Brick, our local used Lego store to pick up some Star Wars mini-figs that were on sale. While we were there we discovered a new used video game shop in the same small shopping plaza, genius location! We got a couple Nintendo DS games for Adam, along with another Lego game for the PlayStation. They buy old consoles as well, and seemed very interested in my R2-D2 Xbox 360. I’ll have to think about it, but it’s doing no good sitting in a box in the closet. On our way home, MJ dropped Aaron and I off at our local comic book store for Free Comic Book Day and we had a lovely walk home together from there. On Sunday we went over to the mall to the Lego store for their Star Wars releases, since Adam was quite eager to pick up Lego Chopper since I showed it to him a few weeks ago. I think that might be our next build once we finish my big R2-D2.

Mother’s Day began with swim class! I had thought about an adventure out to a museum or something, but work has been incredibly intense lately and I was honestly just feeling tired and wanted to have a chill day. We had lunch at our usual cafe and then dinner out at a local brewery, which is a great Mother’s Day spot since they don’t tend to be very busy that day, and I love beer!

With spring here, the boys are spending a lot of time outside (and so am I!). Aaron recently went from riding his bike like a balance bike to getting the pedals on. He’s really excited to be riding on two wheels like his brother, and we’re really proud of him for catching on and doing it all without training wheels. With how well both the boys did, I’m now a firm believer in balance first bicycle training.

Our town has an annual rodeo parade, which was cancelled last year due to some organizational restructuring and returned this year with a small festival attached. The festival was a great addition, there were tents out with various local businesses, along with food vendors and music. The parade itself was cute, though I wish it wasn’t so spaced out and that the horses were scattered throughout instead of being mostly at the end, since that’s what everyone seemed to enjoy the most. Still, it was a lovely way for us to spend the afternoon.

The end of the school year is creeping up, and with that the elementary school had an open house. So the evening before I flew out for a work trip to Boston, the boys and I went over to the school to visit Adam’s current classroom and say hello to the teacher he’ll have when August rolls around and the new school year begins.

Then I was off to Boston!

For the z17 launch, I built out a Developer Journey for IBM Z Day Special Edition, which took attendees across some of the most technical, developer-focused talks of the event. I wasn’t a track lead this year (intentionally), so it was nice to take a step back but still be engaged with the event with an eye on developer content.

On launch day, I spent the day at the IBM Silicon Valley Lab, arriving just before 8AM in anticipation of the keynote where the z17 was announced. IBM Z Day began with a simulcast of this keynote, being held at the new flagship office at One Madison Avenue in New York City.

That afternoon I joined a bunch of my colleagues on-site to partake in a z17 cake. It was mostly IBM Db2 developers that I spoke with, which was an interesting experience because our work threads are quite far apart, so we don’t get much opportunity to interact aside from social settings.

Shortly after launch, I received news from Camillo Sassano of the Industrial Design Team that they had released the 3d-printable z17 files. I love these things, and they’ve really taken off in a broader community with people printing them in various sizes, colors, and remixes. It’s been a lot of fun, and as soon as I had the file in-hand I sent it off to an online 3D printer, and it arrived at home a few days ago.

I think I’ll spend a little time sanding down the sections I want to paint to turn it into a LinuxONE 5, and maybe I’ll see about getting it printed by another 3D printer vendor or two to compare quality. Of course the itch to buy our own 3D printer is always the highest around this time. We’ll see.

Perhaps the biggest thing I had for the launch was writing a blog post about the hardware inside the IBM z17 in A Tour Inside the IBM z17 and it’s sister post a couple weeks later, Journey inside the IBM LinuxONE 5. I started writing these posts not too long after I joined IBM and I realized a lot of people didn’t know what modern mainframes looked like, or how cool they were from a technical perspective. Things have started to change, with official release materials including glimpses inside, and things like videos from the test floor and a lot of really fun social media. The marketing team has also been engaging with technical influencers from YouTube who have been granted tours of various facilities, this time it was ServeTheHome who did a really fun video, THIS is how IBM makes servers that cannot fail. There may not be a reason to see these machines in person, but a lot of us still love to!

Next up on my agenda is continuing with the LinuxONE launch activities by running the “IBM LinuxONE AI Arcade” portion of our IBM booth at the upcoming Red Hat Summit in Boston. We had a meeting with a company that’s helping with the booth, and I had the opportunity to meet some of them recently when I spent a few hours at the RSA Conference in San Francisco to meet up with some folks who were in town for the event.

I’m flying out on Friday to spend the weekend in Boston before the big week of summiting begins. We’ll walk attendees through installing some command-line games before diving into an AI/ML Jupyter notebook that walks them through a fraud-prevention scenario, all running on LinuxONE. I’m looking forward to it, not only do I enjoy these events in general, but it should be a satisfying culmination of a lot of work. Plus, I’ll get to see my first LinuxONE 5, in plexiglass form!

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.