On Sunday I met up with my friend and former OpenStack/HPE colleague Sean Dague who now also works on IBM Quantum. We’ve kept loosely in touch over social media, but it had been a few years since we’d actually connected in person, so it was really nice to have some time to catch up. That afternoon I also had the pleasure of finally meeting my colleague Rishi Misra in person, who I’ve worked closely with for years on s390x porting work. A nice start to a great week!

Monday kicked off with a series of opening keynotes. The other day I wrote a long, rambling blog post about open source and AI, so I won’t talk too much about the AI-heavy keynotes, except to say that there were some hopeful observations alongside the concerning ones around data and security. It was nice to see where the Linux Foundation was taking action to make sure we continue having an open source driven future. My favorite keynote of the morning was from Sean who talked about, you guessed it, IBM Quantum! Not only was I personally delighted to see Sean up on stage, I’ve always been fascinated by Quantum computing and have enjoyed seeing the progression over the past several years. His talk gave a whirlwind tour of the ecosystem and presented opportunities for developers that are still being offered by IBM. Also, it was a nice break from AI talks. Google and Microsoft also spoke on AI-related topics, with Microsoft also happening to mention an update around Azure Linux, which Steven Vaughan-Nichols helpfully covered here: Microsoft surprises with its first server Linux distribution: Azure Linux 4.0.

The next few talks I attended were around Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs), the first was a panel around scaling them, where I was happy to see a wide range of experiences presented from across industries, including Ford, Geico, and CISCO, with a moderator from GitHub. There’s definitely a trend of using AI tooling to help the work in OSPOs, especially as the work and importance of these organizations grow. I also enjoyed Dawn Foster’s talk on “Strategic Approach To Demonstrating the Value of OSS Efforts” where she presented the highlights of the Demonstrating Organizational Value Practitioner’s Guide that she co-wrote.

From there I dipped into a couple of MCP talks, starting with Automating MCP Server Testing from Neethu Elizabeth Simon of Arm. It was an interesting talk overall, but my big takeaway was the server she demonstrated with: the Arm MCP Server, which is “An MCP server providing AI assistants with tools and knowledge for Arm architecture development, migration, and optimization.” Cool. I took notes and was texting with Rishi about how we might be able to leverage something similar in the s390x world. From there I went to a talk on ContextForge in the context of managing MCP sprawl. It was also a timely talk for me since we had just on-boarded the project to our GitHub Actions runner a few weeks before and I’d been meaning to learn more about it. Done! It was also nice seeing Dave Neary and his What Developers Should Know About Hardware Architecture talk, where he throws out lots of interesting facts about things that matter in architectures, along with other topics like just how slow spinning disks are, especially compared to CPU caches.

Monday evening was the conference reception at the Mill City Museum. It’s a museum I had wanted to go to anyway, so I was happy to learn that was the reception venue. It was a nice museum about the history of flour milling in the city, and the elevator they converted into a “ride” that takes you up and down several floors through a history of the mill was an absolute delight. The views from the top where you’re let out were beautiful, especially since the rain hadn’t rolled in yet! Unfortunately, the rain did eventually come in, just as the scheduled drone show for the 35th anniversary of Linux was to start. The drone show still happened, but it wasn’t really dark enough and drizzle quickly turned into a thunderstorm.

Tuesday’s keynotes got us back in the realm of AI, with talks on Strands Agents from AWS and AI used in robotics. They also had a panel on the value of open source software foundations for projects, which surprised me as a keynote topic for an open source conference, because most of what was covered struck me as pretty basic, and I think a lot of folks in the audience had experience engaging with projects within foundations.

From there I went to a talk on Package Testing Across Distributions and Architectures at Scale where the presenter walked through a move away from dozens of servers and consolidated on x86 and arm64-based cloud servers, using Ansible Molecule. Alas, not immediately applicable in our s390x porting work, but it was an interesting tour of what they had done and how much disk speed impacts package building performance. An afternoon session from the OpenSSF that gave a whirlwind tour of their projects was also interesting, since it can be a little tricky to keep up if your day to day work is unrelated to security.

That evening was the Tux Trek in the expo hall, and in addition to some great conversations, including one where I got to nerd out about mainframe stuff to someone who was curious, I got a tux cotton candy! I then got to have dinner with Rishi and a colleague who I didn’t expect to see there: Cheryl Fillekes! She’s worked on various OpenShift products for Linux on IBM Z, and we’ve connected on various topics over the past several months (mostly when I needed something, hah!). It was really nice to meet her in person. I was also pleasantly surprised when she suggested our dinner adventure should include finding some Guinness 0 (non-alcoholic). You see, I’m a beer fan, but I got a bit sick back in March and have been taking a break from drinking until I feel better. Guinness 0 was a nice treat, and surprisingly good!

Day three began with the obligatory keynote discussion with Linus Torvalds, followed by another keynote about AI agents, but this time with a focus on specifically how they can help open source software maintainers. I really enjoyed Kate Stewart’s keynote on the Zephyr project though. Zephyr has been on my radar for a while, but playing with it is another one of those projects I am not sure I’ll get around to anytime soon. But hey, it turns out my RISC-V board is supported by Zephyr! That gets me one step closer!

The final keynote on Free to Use, Not Free to Run: Reinventing Package Registries is one that stuck with me. Basically, open source communities are running registries (PyPI, RubyGems, crates.io, etc) that companies using the ecosystem depend upon, but they’re becoming expensive to run, and projects are now hyper-aware of security and supply chain concerns that they need to take very seriously. So they’ve launched a Sustaining Package Registries Working Group to discuss concerns, and develop solutions together, up to and including starting to charge for industrial scale traffic. I’ve seen the thankless work that goes into things like PyPI. Helpfully, Stephen wrote about this too: 10 trillion downloads are crushing open-source repositories – here’s what they’re doing about it.

Most of the rest of my day was spent meeting up with people, but I also happy to make it to Rob Landley’s Building the Simplest Possible Linux System talk. I’ve seen Rob speak a few times over the years, and I love the enthusiasm for the work that he brings to it. He’s also been friendly in the realm of s390x porting, and I was delighted to see on his screen as he was preparing to begin that the emulated build he had up on the screen was s390x.

I talked a lot about sessions in this blog post, but ultimately what makes these events is the people. Connecting in person make a huge difference, and there were a lot of people I saw there who I hadn’t seen in a couple years. And this time I made sure to take lots of pictures!

With that, the summit came to an end. To close things out, I went out to enjoy another round of Guinness 0s with Cheryl before it was time to call it an early night before my 7AM flight home the next morning.

I also don’t think I’ve every heard the word “human” said so many times in a week. It’s weird to talk like that.

This blog post isn’t meant to be anything shocking or insightful in the realm of AI. It’s more a brain dump checkpoint for me personally to share what working through the shift to AI tooling is like from where I’m sitting. The value you can get from this post may vary ;)

The first thing I’ll say that I’ve never seen a tech industry shift happen this fast, and having been in the industry for nearly 25 years I’ve worked through some major transformations. In the past 9 months I’ve seen multiple cases where a conference CFP being 6+ months before the conference causes a considerable change in the resulting presentation material, I’ve seen two talks change their titles from what was listed because tools and companies rose and fell in that time. Tech has always been an industry of continuous learning, and I love that, but today if you haven’t spent some time learning about AI in the past 6 months, you’re going to be blindsided by a whole slew of terms and concepts. You’ll likely find it hard to learn at conferences because there’s so much new foundational AI knowledge that’s assumed. Indeed, I like to think I’ve stayed fairly well-informed, and even I had to go back to my room in the evening and do some learning so I could properly absorb what I had been exposed to throughout the day, and be ready for the next day. My conference notes have a lot more “learn more about this” notes than usual.

Career-wise, this has already proven to be a difficult time for people in tech. Huge layoffs have hit major tech companies with AI given as a reason. Obviously, this is incredibly painful for folks who have a mortgage to pay, health care costs, and mouths to feed; suddenly the market has become unrecognizable and they can’t find a new job. That sucks. The core programming skills that coding boot camps were founded on as being a golden ticket to a high paying job in tech are rapidly being replaced by AI tools. We’re not there yet, I’ve been reviewing some very bad AI-generated code in the past few months as I touched upon in my blog post about CPOSC, but there is a fast-paced trend of improvements. If the rise of AI in programming turns out to be sustainable (capacity can be expanded and that it continues to be cost-effective), the need for straight up entry level programmers will continue to decrease, and we’ll need more folks with more advanced skills related to computer science and architecture. How do you get more advanced skills without learning programming basics first? I don’t know the answer to that, but there are a lot of smart people trying to figure it out.

I’m also aware of the fact that adoption of things like AI agents will actually take a while in most companies. I think back to the rise of configuration management, and in spite of all the benefits, the amount of work it would take to rebuild their systems with configuration management in place was simply not a priority (indeed, in most shops I saw it implemented slowly, and only with new systems that were brought up). Will this be the case for AI agents as well? I had more than a few conversations where developers were using AI-assisted coding tools, but having an infrastructure that supported using agents to automatically carry out tasks was nowhere close to their reality. There’s also the question of economies of scale. A massive tech company like Google may see the value of heavily investing in AI, but for a company with a tech department of a half dozen folks? Maybe it doesn’t sense any time soon. After all, using that Perl script we’ve always used is still faster than re-writing everything in Puppet, since our ten servers are unique pets (no cattle here!).

Coming back to open source, I’ve also been thinking a lot about the reason companies invest in open source software. At the core, it’s because… of the core. Core technology is what everyone uses and there’s no business advantage to it, so it makes sense to invest in them collectively. Kubernetes is not what makes money, Red Hat OpenShift and the ecosystem built on top of it is, so SUSE can also play that game with Rancher. Is there a future where that core technology is created by AI, and it’s good and cheap, so the need for open source collaboration is no longer “worth the trouble”? I hope not. And not just because my livelihood depends upon it. I’ve always believed that open collaboration on tooling across the tech industry has literally made the world better.

At the Open Source Summit the keynotes were AI-heavy, as was to be expected. Jim Zemlin had a lot of positive things to say about the role of open source software today at every layer of the AI stack, but acknowledged that the final layer is what is missing: data.

The open data community will always lag behind here, because those who hold private data will always have the open data plus their own. It seems like the question that’s being asked is whether a vast pool of open data can be “enough”, even if it’s not “better” than the private data. This is already being seen with AI models, the best ones are proprietary, but the open ones? Pretty good! Probably good enough for most of us! The statistic Jim shared was that open source models only lag proprietary ones by 3-6 months, whereas the gap was measured in years back in 2022. The concern with data is that the desire for open data is arguably in direct competition with privacy and the ability for us to keep our servers running. What happens when you’re running a webserver and 80% of the traffic is bots collecting data rather than serving your customers? You get that bill, and that bill is getting larger. This leads to an inclination for organizations to pull back what they share, and put more and more behind paywalls and proxy services, or in apps that aren’t on the web. Still, the Linux Foundation still believes we’re in a world where the problem is not lack of data, but lack of coordination to collect and curate these data sources. Maybe.

Open source contributions were also a big topic. Speaking personally from a tiny, niche project I run, things have clearly changed. Until 2026, every contribution was from someone we personally engaged with in some way. This year we’ve received multiple small patches that have zero contextual awareness of the project, but fix common errors in code (cool, thanks!). My current core developer has pulled back on self-assigning issues when he creates them because we’ve started to see new contributors just show up and start working on them. That has never happened before. And are they AI-assisted? Definitely. In some ways this is great. A major change landed this week that would have taken us months to do without it. We’ve gotten lucky so far, that particular change had a clever developer behind it who was willing to engage with us through a month of back and forth with fixes and improvements, and he actually understood the code that was submitted. We can’t always bet on that, and that erodes trust. My default reaction to new contributors used to be elation, now it’s turning to apprehension. I hate that. We have drive-by contributors who will never use or care about the project, so their motivations aren’t driven by usage or focused on holistic improvements, but done in order to fill up their GitHub contributions graph. Some of this has always been this way, not everyone who contributes becomes part of a project in a real way, and some of these are changes that can improve the project! But it feels like the community element that drives lifelong open source contributors like myself to maintaining a project is slipping away. As someone whose closest and longest friendships have predominantly come from shared involvement and values related to open source, this is very sad for me.

See? I told you this blog post was personal. I’m getting all mushy when you expect me to only care about the code and what’s technically best for the project. But I’m human and me caring about community is what’s best for the project. That thrill of welcoming a new contributor and the connection we build as they move up through their career is what gets me through long nights, difficult decisions, and burnout, so I can continue being an effective contributor.

Another major topic of discussion at the summit related to AI was security. There have always been solid security teams for major open source projects, but the levels to which they were funded at and the tooling available have been less impressive. And smaller projects? Honestly, very little attention paid to security. This has started changing, but we’re not where we need to be, because the vulnerability landscape is changing much, much faster. By most estimates, the number of CVEs in 2026 is expected to exceed 50,000 for the first time. With AI-assisted scanning, it’s simple and cheap to find vulnerabilities in every single piece of open source code out there. So that little project on GitHub that had security through obscurity before? Not anymore. My little tool doesn’t just have bugs being identified and reported by AI tooling, it has security problems that are being identified and reported (or just exploited!).

There’s good work happening here though. The Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) is leading the way on the foundation side, and continuously coming out with new tools to help projects (now they just need to adopt them, me included!). One of the talks I went to at the Open Source Summit was a really helpful project overview of projects within the OpenSSF. I took notes to look into incorporating Allstar and to revisit SLSA tooling (it’s been a while).

Projects like OSS-CRS are also great to see, even if I expect the industry to play a much bigger role in this kind of vulnerability scanning and remediation. For my employer’s part, IBM joined Project Glasswing, but more importantly announced a $5B investment in our own Project Lightwell. I’m really proud this, it’s what industry should be doing.

So, overall, how am I feeling?

Unsettled. Scared. AI has the power to be an existential threat, and at the very least it will transform computer-based work over the next decade, and people will lose their livelihood over it. A lot of them. I can’t stress enough how serious this is in the United States where we are seeing support structures being dismantled when they should be built up to prepare for this future. I am deeply concerned about what this means for our society, and my own family.

I’m also excited. Remember how I like technology? I do, I do! I have dozens of projects in my head that I’ve never done because I don’t have that much hobby time. AI-assisted tooling has already helped me start tackling some of that. I had several very fun conversations with folks at the summit around personal projects that ranged from useful to ridiculous that we’re having fun with because we can suddenly cut out six weeks of coding time from the equation and knock out a prototype in a weekend. It’s probably a bad prototype, but maybe it’s functional enough for personal use, and it simply wouldn’t exist otherwise. It’s also an exciting time for non-programmers who can now get computers to do innovative and new things they want them to do by simply speaking to them, a goal which has been worked on at least since Grace Hopper wrote FLOW-MATIC in 1955. AI is removing the barriers that have kept the full potential of computing in the realm of technologists, and that’s a good thing.

At the end of the day, we’re not going back. Even if the recent push-back of building data centers succeeds in a big way and capacity is limited, we’ll write better models and find ways to squeeze more computing power out of reduced resources. Things probably won’t continue to grow exponentially, but AI is here, and I see no benefit in fundamentally resisting it. Let’s keep an eye on privacy and safety though, shall we?

This year we were just a small component of the booth, and had a monitor that was set up for going through technical demos (shared with Storage and Cloud), and a small table in front I could put my conference laptop on to walk attendees through an activity. But we could work with that.

First stop in prep: Activity criteria.

As an open source advocate, my goal was to bring in as much open source to the activity as possible. Leadership wanted a demonstration of Red Hat OpenShift AI. And so began my search! IBM Z has an excellent technical sales department and we also have a variety of teams that do cross-training across the company and out to our clients, so I knew there would probably be something out there that I could use. It took a few weeks, but I was finally introduced to Artem Minin who presented a workshop at SHARE late last year, and a portion of which beautifully met my expectations. As a bonus, it not only relied upon LinuxONE, but the new IBM Spyre card that I hadn’t had an opportunity to interact with.

Over the next few weeks Artem took the time to prepare the environment and run some tests based on my own criteria, using an IBM z17 technical document I prepared as a source for AI-driven document summarization and AI assistant engagement with the material. The goal was to use the open source tooling defined in the diagram above to integrate with OpenShift AI, all within the confines of your mainframe environment. Effectively, critical, secured data doesn’t need to leave your mainframe to benefit from leveraging the latest models and AI tooling. Once Artem got me access to the system, he was kind enough to more carefully walk through it all with me so I was able to rewrite his documentation from the SHARE workshop into a more concise document for use at the booth. Plus, Artem was able to join me at the Summit! On my end, I prepared the laptop with a fresh Ubuntu install, got the VPN we’d need set up, and prepared all the materials on the desktop to be ready for the summit. I also tossed a bright orange, 3D-printed IBM LinuxONE 5 and am [unofficial] Lego Telum II in my backpack so I’d have some props at the booth.

I arrived in Atlanta on Sunday afternoon, and had the pleasure of meeting up a few IBM Z colleagues for dinner at a local Mediterranean restaurant.

On Monday I got everything set up at the booth and by the time we opened at 2PM, we were ready!

It was a busy week at the booth. Artem and I swapped off shifts Monday through Wednesday, with Leon stepping in as well, and Catherine Guo from LinuxONE Marketing supporting us (and bringing some new LinuxONE swag!). Several others from the IBM Z and LinuxONE team came by throughout the week too, some of whom were participating in the broader event through talks and other client-focused direct engagements. IBM also had a firm come in to help with booth traffic, and they were great at starting conversations with attendees that lead to finding the right place for them at the IBM booth, including with us!

With Catherine and Artem

With Amit and Leon

With Amparo and Latasha

On Tuesday and Wednesday I had the opportunity to attend the keynotes. As expected, they were heavy on AI with some things like the RHEL Long-Life Add-On (offering even longer support for the distribution) sprinkled in. It was nice to also hear from users like NASA and Nissan.

Tuesday was also the day that I kind of hijacked the monitor where we were showing off demos. But listen. Storage was very happy to chat with folks around the giant interactive box they brought to show off near life-size storage demos, and Cloud wasn’t actively staffing the booth. Plus, I told everyone they could take it back to show off the tech demos whenever they wanted. The result was the lovely “Hero video” of the IBM LinuxONE and Spyre card running on a loop and looking really nice at the booth.

The conference wasn’t all work though. During my breaks I was able to explore the expo hall, which gave me time to catch up with folks from the community I’ve worked with throughout my career. It’s always nice to see how many people I’ve worked with through my involvement with Ubuntu and OpenStack are still around, and to find an opportunity to catch up. I never had much of a social life outside of a handful of very close friends, so these bonds I’ve made through contributing to open source are very important to me, and attending these conferences to connect in person gives me a nice burst of connection that I really long for.

The expo also had some fun little activities to do, like assembling a gardening kit that would go to children in the area and free play with white and red Lego bricks, which I really enjoyed as a decompression activity.

The conference reception was also a lot of fun. It was held a the Georgia Aquarium, which I hadn’t managed to go to! I missed the OpenStack Summit in Atlanta due to an unexpected surgery (gallbladder) and the last time I was in Atlanta was for TechU the first week I was at IBM, and I was juggling a bit too much at the time to enjoy any local attractions. But you know me, I love zoos and aquariums. The Georgia Aquarium is notable because they have a whale shark, and they’re the only facility in the Americas to have one. That means I’d never seen one! They are huge. It is quite the experience to get up close and see one gliding by, and I highly recommend it if you’re in the area. They also have belugas and penguins, and as an all adult event, the bravest among us crawled through the penguin tunnel to get a close up look at our favorite birds. I saw some people throughout the evening, but I mostly did the event solo, which was perfectly find for me as I enjoyed an evening communing with water-loving critters.

We’ll see if I continue doing these events. Booth work is a lot, and I think I can dig up other expertise within the organization, depending on what the focus is next year. I always enjoy it though, it gives me a deadline to learn a bunch about our latest tech, and in this case actually use a Spyre card in our booth activity, something I wouldn’t necessarily get to do in my day to day work.

Huge thanks to everyone who made it possible for IBM to participate this year, and it was a nice start to my two city journey for this trip. What was the next stop on my itinerary? Minneapolis for the Open Source Summit! But I’ll write about that later.

We flew out on Friday, so we were able to attend a birthday for their cousin Sam. The birthday party took place at an large indoor playground with all kinds of fun stuff for the kids to run around and play on. It was a lot of fun for them, and I enjoyed the Godzilla theme and cake.

Afterwards we did a bit of shopping nearby, but it was a pretty long day having just arrived the day before! It was nice to check off some shopping things off our list at the beginning of the trip though.

The following day we made our way over to New Jersey to visit with some family and continue a TV setup process that MJ started over the winter holidays. It was nice to visit them again, and the boys enjoyed playing on their power lift recliner.

Since MJ and I work while we’re there, the weekdays were pretty normal with our au pair, who travels with us, watching the kids during the day. The weather was beautiful for most of the time were were there, so throughout the trip the kids got to visit lots of interesting playgrounds and Ana also brought them to a K1 go kart place one day, which Adam hasn’t stopped talking about (Aaron isn’t big enough yet, but he enjoyed the video games!).

One evening I took the boys to the theater to see Hoppers. They’re getting a lot better at being quiet and focused during visits to the theater, which is nice because I enjoyed taking them, even if they weren’t huge fans of the movie. I was surprised at how expensive it’s become though, I clearly need to find a cheaper way to do this in the long term, but in the short term I found a pile of AMC ticket vouchers that MJ bought YEARS ago that should still be valid. With all the great movies coming out this year, we’ll have a summer full of theater adventures!

I already wrote about spending the next Saturday at CPOSC. On the way home we took the scenic route down 340 and the boys enjoyed seeing all the horses and Amish buggies, counted farms along the way, they stopped when they got to 100. We haven’t properly done Lancaster with them, so maybe that’s an adventure we’ll embark on over the summer. On the way home we needed some dinner, so we stopped in King of Prussia and went back to the Netflix House and had a surprisingly chill dinner at NetFlix Bites.

On Wednesday I took the day off from work to prepare for a Passover Seder. I’m glad I did. Even though I wasn’t cooking the meal, I did have to pick up the catered food, and I made Charoset for the first time! Making Charoset is actually pretty easy, I looked at a few recipes and then settled on a version of My FAVORITE Passover Charoset where I simplified it spice-wise, swapped out the walnuts for almonds, and wine for grape juice, so the recipe ended up being:

• 1/2 granny smith apple
• 1 gala apple
• 3/8 cup sliced almonds
• 3/4 Tablespoons honey
• 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
• 2 Tablespoons grape juice

For chopping the apples I pulled out the food processor that I got a couple years ago for latkes.

I know it’s dead simple and all you do is mix everything together, but I’m no chef, so anything is a win. I think I will double the recipe next year so we end up with leftovers.

Then it was time to prep the dishes! I decided to pull out nice china that belonged to MJ’s grandparents, a set of glasses that my father-in-law explained came from a trip to Italy, and took some polish wipes to the silver utensils, also inherited from MJ’s grandparents. We didn’t have a Seder plate in Philly, but I solved that the week before with a drive down to Jerusalem Israeli Gift Shop. The women who own the shop were incredibly helpful, and I left with a Seder plate, a matzoh plate, a matzoh cover, and a couple bottles of wine. The last bit of shopping was picking up some endives from Acme. Finally, I had to roast the lamb shank bone that we picked up from House of Kosher, along with the hard boiled egg, both for the Seder plate.

It was a lot to do for a day when I’m “not cooking”. All worth it though, things came together really nicely and the boys enjoyed having grandpa come over instead of just doing a Seder with our immediate family in California.

I wanted to make sure I slowed down to enjoy our time too, so we didn’t really focus on home improvement projects. However, a built-in microwave repair was thrust upon us a couple days before we left. I wasn’t a microwave person until I had kids, and now we use it all the time. The switch inside the door had stopped working properly, so it could no longer reliably sense when the door was open or closed, which meant sometimes it would work. Thankfully, an appliance repair company was able to come out the next day and get it fixed. I still have mixed feelings about repairing it verses replacing it for how much we paid, but I kept an otherwise perfectly fine appliance out of a landfill, and saved us all the stress of shopping and coordinating a mounted installation, so it was probably the right move.

And I wasn’t completely idle. I realized one of the ways I want to enjoy our home there is by using our deck. We’re coming up on our 9th year with the townhouse, and we’ve never had deck furniture! Sometimes I’ll haul a folding table out there for a “picnic” or the boys will use it to run around, but effectively it wasn’t a space we could really enjoy. To change this I did a minimal amount of searching and found a nice patio couch and coffee table set that I could pick up at the Home Depot right away, and got that assembled one evening. Hooray!

Coincidentally, a neighbor also posted on the Facebook group for the development that she was looking to get rid of her patio table and six chairs. It’s a nice set, so I reached out and arranged a pick-up time. That’s how MJ and I ended up hauling a table over a deck railing and into our house the night before we left Philly, hah! It’s on the larger side, but I think I found an orientation that will work for us on the deck. I’ll take some better pictures when everything is set up over the summer.

Super Mario Galaxy came out while we were in town, we planned on having all of us go, but Aaron fell ill with a stomach bug that slowly made its way through our household, and so I just took Adam. It was a fun movie, and it turns out the whole family will get an opportunity to see it together at the end of this week when we go to our local single-screen theater to see it with their elementary school.

As the visit wound down, we managed to get lunch with cousin Lauren and her husband and new baby. I think we’ll be seeing a lot more of them over the summer, as they’re only about 40 minutes away now and they have pools at their development. And what do our kids love? Pools. And we got to see Aunt Irina and cousin Sammy one last time before we left, we picked up some takeout sushi and had a nice time in her recently renovated back yard, and then down in the playroom basement where I got to play with Lego. Oh, and the kids played with Lego too. I also managed to successfully make matzoh brie on the Saturday before we left, even if MJ and I were the only ones who enjoyed it.

In all, it was a really nice visit that didn’t end up feeling like too much, in spite of how much we packed into it. The kids had plenty of down time to play video games, and I did too. I finished reading a book while we were there, and definitely got some springtime enjoyment out of that new couch in the back, from nighttime playing on my Switch to having breakfast outside with the boys. We also had a deck umbrella delivered which will fit nicely into the hole in our new table, we’ll just need to get a small umbrella base when we get into town so that it stays put during our visit (we’ll bring it inside between visits).

The flight down from San Francisco was a quick regional flight into Burbank, my go-to airport for this conference so I can avoid LAX. And then I spent Wednesday evening getting settled in and putting some finishing touches on my talk based on some feedback I had requested from some community members working on projects I had an interesting in learning about.

Thursday is when the magic began! I spent the morning picking up my badge and immediately seeing several familiar faces. It didn’t take long to meet up long time friends from our time in the Ubuntu community Jorge and Amber, and we all went out to lunch.

Talk-wise on Thursday I found myself attending several AI talks as part of the Kwaai Summit.

So, AI. We are in the middle of an AI revolution in the tech industry and things are moving fast. A year ago a lot of the AI being used in tech was being marketed as helpers for developers. At SCaLE I heard someone suggest that we treat AI like a junior developer. We’re now replacing junior developers. But I had an experience over the holidays where I was in the trenches with code these “AI junior developers” were spitting out, and it needs a lot of guidance. Without that, the code, documentation, and even commit messages can come out nonsensical and solving things in way that is not “clever”, they legitimately don’t make sense when viewed in the correct context. It also took away the thoughtful collaboration that I love of development: How do we solve this? Can you explain what I’m reviewing? Why did you make this decision? When you’re met with a series of shrugs and a finger pointed at the AI, the job of thinking ends up solely on the person reviewing the change, and that means more experienced developers doing the reviews are being buried in AI slop code.

The technology will get better, and I anticipate an absolute decimation of our industry job-wise. I’m not exempt from this. Plus, there are real environmental concerns about power consumption and resources being used to build out all the data centers to implement these AI solutions, and I worry that it will be painful for our society in a way that may not be ethical. But we aren’t going back, that’s not how technology works in our world.

Add in that so much of this space is flush with more money than the world has ever seen, and decisions driven by greed and a horrifying lack of consideration for humanity seem to winning.

So, why did I run off on this terrifying, negative AI rant? I wanted to share what head space I was in when I walked into SCaLE. I’ve used AI tooling, and I’m constantly learning, but I’m deeply worried about it.

Thankfully, there are still good people doing good things in AI and some of those people were speaking at SCaLE.

As I strolled into the Kwaai Summit it was refreshing to be reminded of some of the more optimistic views of AI, and how success doesn’t necessarily have to follow the money. AI can be used in ways that benefit us all. There are tedious tasks and “impossible” problems that are starting to be solved by AI. Can I actually get a good handle on a big chunk of open source projects on GitHub supporting s390x? Possibly! Can we finally cure some of the most dangerous forms of cancer? Maybe! And there are people building communities around things like Beneficial General Intelligence (BGI, a play on AGI, the Artificial General Intelligence that tends to be the holy grail of AI) where things like ethics and sustainability are considered. These are my people. These are the people who built the first online social networks and open source projects. This is the messaging that I found so inspiring when I first got into open source software and what made me so fully devote my life’s work to it. It was nice to be there.

On Friday I attended Guinevere Saenger’s talk on building out developer infrastructures, which brought up a lot of points one might not necessarily think about when doing so. From there I went to Jon “maddog” Hall’s talk on “Open Source In Computer Higher Education – Past, Present and Future” which was definitely a highlight for me. I don’t need to learn how to teach computer science in higher education, but I do love hearing whatever he has to talk about because he has so many wonderful stories. He took us on a tour of this career with an eye toward education, dropping references from everything to the IBM System/360 to learning assembly from difficult text books that he read solo and then went on to teach. He’s a strong proponent for learning topics deeply, and teaching students to learn how to learn so they can thrive in an industry that requires continuous learning. We’re all in agreement there.

That evening I joined a bunch of folks from The Software Freedom Conservancy for dinner and software freedom discussions. It was a lovely evening and I had the pleasure of meeting some new people, including a fellow from Oakland Privacy who told me about the StrayCap Multispace in Hayward that I’ll have to check out some time soon!

I’ve supported the Conservancy for many years, and have known several of their staff for even longer. Need a free software license violation acted upon? This is the group that does that. They get a remarkable amount done with the staff and budget they have, and I’m incredibly grateful for that. Please consider donating.

The keynote from Cindy Cohn, Executive Director of the EFF, on Saturday morning was wonderful. I’ve been a supporter of of the EFF for years, and am closely aligned with most of their views. It was fascinating to hear about her work in this space, and the fundamental protections that she’s worked to help pioneering technologists secure over the years. I vaguely knew that encryption was restricted by the US government in the earliest days of the internet, but I didn’t realize it was classified as munitions which ultimately meant that encryption algorithms couldn’t be shared and collaborated on online. Wow. Could you imagine the internet without encryption? Our world? Cindy, with an army of early free software hackers, argued in federal court in San Francisco and for over a decade beyond that to make sure encryption was freed from this classification. This story was the first of three that she dives into in her new book Privacy’s Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance which I promptly pre-ordered. Her call to action to us hackers today was to stay engaged in this fight so that we show up for all the future legal battles that have the potential to threaten the future of our world and lives with regard to digital freedom. I had the pleasure of running into her later in the conference to thank her for her talk, and I had the presence of mind to pull out a piece of paper to have her sign so I could put it in my book when it arrives; I’ll have a signed copy, kind of! Then I went to the EFF booth to do my annual contribution.

After the keynote I was able to meet up with Kaitlyn Davis, a new colleague at IBM who joined us from HashiCorp and I just started working with a couple weeks ago. She happens to live in southern California! So I made the case for her to come out to SCALE. She has some really helpful ideas around leveraging AI for open source contribution tracking and so we were able to sit down for about an hour and chat about IBM in general and drill down into some of the problems I’ve been focused on to see where she wants to jump in. It’s not every day that I have the pleasure of working with someone like her, so I’m really eager to see what we come up with together in the coming months. See? I’m not negative on all uses of AI.

From there, it was time for my talk on Open Source in Closed Ecosystems. Originally I was planning on just drawing from my experience in the mainframe world, but after a chat with John Mertic of The Open Mainframe Project I was convinced to draw from a broader pool of expertise and to look into Automotive and Motion Picture industry use cases. I was fortunate that Alison Chaiken of Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) and Emily Olin who has worked on both AGL and the Academy Software Foundation (ASWF) were able to get back to me quickly regarding questions I had about the initiatives. I was also thankful to get time with Nithya Ruff whose expertise in running open source software programs across the industry has been incredibly valuable to my own work, and the broader community through her extensive work in the community of the years, and direct contributions to the TODO Group.

The talk had some rough edges flow-wise, and I’d like to flesh it out with more examples and talk to more people in industries where open source hasn’t taken a firm hold yet to see what barriers they’re encountering in their organizations. But I had some great conversations after my talk and I think it generally went well. Slides from the talk are available here: /presentations/2026/Open_Source_in_Closed_Ecosystems_-_SCALE_23x.pdf (1.3M pdf)

It was nice to run into Dave Neary, whose Open Source in Business series on YouTube got me some clues I need for my talk too. He gave a couple multiarch talks, and though they were focused on ARM64 it was still nice to hear someone talk about multiarch manifests and containers, since I bump into some confusion from community members about them. He gave some nice demos using Argo CD and Argo Rollouts that I’d like to take a closer look at.

Speaking of multiarch, I then enjoyed a talk by Amy Parker whose talk focused on QEMU user mode. I’ve used QEMU on and off over the years, but honestly since I’ve shifted my focus to bare metal testing, I’ve used it a lot less. I don’t have a lot of experience with the user mode emulation that she covered, which made the talk a fascinating dive through binfmt_misc, ld_preload, and chroots to accomplish a lot of interesting work across architectures. She also talked about using FatELF to create universal binaries, which wasn’t even on my radar. So many fun things to dig into!

Saturday evening I had the pleasure of joining Nathan Handler for dinner at a sushi place nearby. I’ve now had my first sake bomb. But just one!

Happy Sunday! The opening keynote was presented by Mark Russinovich of Microsoft, who, poor guy, spent the first 15 minutes of his talk convincing us that in spite of being known for Windows Internals, both he and Microsoft have a lot of Linux credibility. With that taken care of, he dove straight into a great tour of open source security solutions and how they relate to the growing interest in secure supply chains today. I was happy to see the security components of my own talk from the previous day reiterated, but more broadly, I’m glad SCaLE brought someone in to talk about all of this. Open source has made tremendous strides in recent years related to security, but it doesn’t get as much attention as I believe it deserves, both in terms of usage and awareness, and having more people to work on it, and its importance is only increasing.

The expo hall at SCaLE is always a delightful place to walk through, and this year was no exception. They have a wonderful mix of big, paid booth areas for larger companies, and smaller booths for non-profits, so it always brings a great assortment of people. I had a lovely time catching up with my friends from the Ubuntu community. It’s always a pleasure to catch up with Nathan Haines and George Mulak who’ve been quite involved in the Los Angeles computing scene for years. It was nice to get some time to chat with Erich Eickmeyer, lead for Ubuntu Studio, and I was pleased to learn that his wife, Amy Eickmeyer, is a professional educator and actually got the Edubuntu flavor off the ground again back in 2022! I had planned on a DIY lockdown of Ubuntu for our kids this year, but I’ll have to take a look at Edubuntu now.

And the RISC-V booth was on my list too, as I’m always eager to learn the latest (you know me and architectures!). That’s where I met a fellow IBMer who was involved with the Works with RISC-V community which I didn’t even know existed. Cool. I was able to ask about HDMI support on my VisionFive 2 and learn that there should be mainline kernel support soon, and learned that people are saying good things about the latest RISC-V mainboard for the Framework laptop. My kids like to remind me I have a lot of laptops, so I’ve held off on Framework for now, but I’ll have to take a closer look at this one.

I also went to a talk by Brendan O’Leary on From COBOL to Claude: What Hopper Knew (actually, his slides swapped “Claude” for “Cursor” (the AI coding environment). Things in AI move fast). I enjoyed this talk and his premise, given all I’ve said above about the inevitability of AI in our industry. He began by talking about Rear Admiral Grace Hopper’s desire to make “programming” computers a more human-language driven endeavor, and how that began with her FLOW-MATIC and ultimately COBOL, which is still widely used today. His belief is that she’d be happy that anyone today can vibe code their own application, and made the same comparison I tend to do with evolution of coding. AI does have very, very important things that differentiate it from the previous major evolutionary steps of computer programming, but I just don’t believe that things like being nondeterministic are enough to so forcefully push back on it. Most of this talk continued by talking about how software engineering practices that professionals are using will simply need to be adjusted to have a lot more planning and a lot less hands-on coding, and with these research, plan, and implement frameworks in place we’ll be able to trust the results AI comes up with a lot more. I think he’s right.

The conference concluded with a walk down network memory lane with Professor Douglas Comer. I love computer history, so I was familiar with a lot of the general touch points he discussed, but since his focus was on networking there were a few things I’ve missed along the way. He talked about magentic tape mailers, how Endianness caused problem with computers communicating in the early days, and how a technology like TCP/IP or even the client/server model were not obvious. His stories around how phone companies charge for transit and the sorted path to get households connected to internet was really insightful, especially when paired with the observations from Cindy Cohn the day before.

Huge thanks to all the volunteers who makes SCaLE happen, I’m really happy I could make it down this year, and after seeing how many kids where there, I’m going to make plans to at least bring our eldest down for the weekend next year.

The day after we got home, I grabbed tickets to Oakland Zoo Glowfari. The tickets for weekends tend to sell out quickly, and it’s busy, so I decided that we wouldn’t wait and would just grab a weeknight far enough before the December holidays that it wouldn’t be too crowded. So the boys and I went with Gaby, our new au pair Ana, and then their former au pair Rebeca joined us! It was a ton of fun, the structures are beautiful and there are a lot of them. The first area we explored was a future of Oakland-themed village which had all kinds of great Oakland landmarks, including the Tribune tower, the boot from Children’s Fairyland, and a Chabot Space & Science Center observatory.

Plus, they had a BART train you could go inside! And run inside, which the boys did, of course.

From there we walked through areas devoted to insects and African animals. Of particular interest to every kid there was a tile you could jump on to trigger a stink bug to spray “smoke” out of his rear end. Oh boy.

We then met up with Rebeca and got a bunch of great photos of the boys and three generations of au pairs. I’m really glad we were able to do that before Gaby went home! With Rebeca, we took the Gondola up to the California Trail to explore the ocean part of the Glowfari. Up there the bubbles filled with “smoke” were a big hit with the kids. They were pretty cool. We didn’t get to go on the Zoo train which gets you to even more light up goodies, but since just train tickets are required for that, I’m hoping that we can go with MJ some time in January to just do that.

I mentioned Gaby leaving, and that was a pretty big deal for all of us. She’s our first au pair to actually go home at the conclusion of her term (the first got married, the second stayed to go to school in the US). As a result, the boys still see their past au pairs! We’re really going to miss her. I think we got really lucky with our new au pair though, the boys immediately connected with her and she’s been great so far.

The following weekend we joined a bunch of other Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) fans at Rockridge station for Sweaterfest. It was a whole little celebration with BART crafts and other related pop-ups with little activities for kids and photo opportunities. At the end, they took a big group photo with us in our sweaters! MJ wore one from when we attended a couple years ago, Adam and I had matching BART sweaters from this year, and Aaron donned this season’s BART winter hat (no shirts in his size this year). We got to ride the BARTmobile (a hilarious train with tires that use used in parades and other events), and managed to get in the group photo.

Inside the BARTmobile!

We checked out the craft table briefly and the boys got to jump around inside a big inflatable winter bubble. It would have been nice to arrive earlier since things closed fairly promptly around 3PM, but we still had fun, and it was probably for the best that we didn’t go on such a long adventure, did I mention December was very busy?

The next day, we went to the Great Train Show, which was set up at the Alameda County Fairgrounds. This is also an event we’d gone to before, I think it was last summer? Last time, MJ realized he knows one of the folks who regularly attends with one of the model train clubs, as they used to work together, so he likes to use it as an opportunity to say hello.

Plus, it’s a great place to shop for model trains to expand our Hanukkah train layout! Sadly, the engine on ours wasn’t working well. In spite of buying it just five years ago and only taking it out for the winter holidays, think it was dropped a few too many times by small kids. We brought it to the train show to test it on their test track, and that’s where it completely failed. We tried to get a replacement engine, which is lovely! But will take some work to get it going with our equipment. Still, the fellow who sold us the engine also had a really cute Hanukkah box car that we bought along with it. And maybe I’ll see if I can get our other engine repaired.

The boys also got to check out a couple of retired maintenance cars that are kept running by members of the West Coast Railroaders Group. Some people have boats and sail over water. Some people buy old rail maintenance cars and ride down tracks through beautiful forests. MJ spent some time talking with them as the boys kept themselves occupied by sitting in the cars and playing with the controls.

It was a fun afternoon, but I was tired. I had developed a sinus infection that was being treated with antibiotics, but I think what I needed was rest, and not a weekend full of train adventures,. I was also prepping everything for Hanukkah, which had me up on a ladder outside hanging Hanukkah lights during this time too, something I thought I’d skip this year but ultimately wanted to do because I love holiday lights. And prepping to come back to Philadelphia. It’s no wonder I was feeling worn out.

We’re in Philadelphia now, and while I didn’t take much time off of work through the winter holidays, I am grateful to be able to focus on more project work that tends to bring me more peace and calm. I’ll try not to overdo it activity-wise while we’re here. I think I’m finally over the sinus infection, but both my body and mind could use some time to relax and recharge. Maybe some time reading a book by the fire. We’ll see how that goes.

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.

That week my Aunt Mary Ellen and Uncle Joe were drifting through town following a conference in Napa and we made plans to meet up. The boys were excited by the prospect of a ride up to San Francisco, but then some plans shifted and it was rainy. We made the best of it though, instead of meeting up early for dinner, the boys and I took BART, MUNI
Metro, and then hopped on a Caltrain for a few stops before taking BART back downtown to meet for dinner. It was a lot of trains for what amounted to a big loop, but the boys have been asking to go on Caltrain for quite some time, and I figured this was the perfect opportunity. It was also a nice opportunity for us to pause and have some snacks since Caltrain is the one local train that they can eat on!

After the trains, I took the boys up to the roof deck at the condo (between tenants right now) to take in the gorgeous sights of downtown San Francisco at night. Adam actually gasped at the sight when we got up there. It really is beautiful.

We met MJ in the city and met my aunt and uncle for dinner at Fogo de Chao for a lovely dinner. It was really nice to see them, it was our fourth attempt to see them in the span of 18 months, which every other plan being ruined by illness (COVID, flu). We had a nice time finally catching up, and it was the first time that Joe was able to meet the boys, and the first time Mary Ellen met Adam. They boys did great, actually engaging in conversation rather than instantly demanding their phones for TV, which was nice. We definitely kept them up too late though, Aaron fell asleep on his chair toward the end, and they both zonked out in the car on the drive home. Carrying Aaron out of the restaurant, I completely forgot to get a family photo! Whoops. Next time.

The first week of November concluded by celebrating Gaby’s last birthday with us. I finally succeeded in making brigadeiro! With her help. And we picked up a custom cake that I had ordered the week before. Adam decorated, which is how we ended up with jungle animals on the tablecloth, hah!

We then had a rather chill Saturday that concluded by attending the Castro Valley Light Parade. It’s funny, we’ve lived in Castro Valley since 2018, but this is the first time I actually managed to see the parade! I was either working or traveling, and one year life with little kids meant we simply made it out of the house too late to see the parade. But I finally saw it!

Aaron got a light-up balloon that he swiftly asked me to hold (I’m glad we only got one!) and after about 45 minutes of parade the boys had enough and we walked out to our favorite restaurant just down the Boulevard. It was enough to get a nice taste of the parade though, and we really love enjoying events in town with the rest of our neighbors.

MJ flew out for a work trip later that night, so the boys and I had Sunday to ourselves as we did swim class, haircuts, and a trip to one of their favorite playgrounds. That evening, Aaron and I made banana bread for his monthly school project where he also got to draw the ingredients and take pictures. For a quiet weekend, it was surprisingly tiring!

We spent the week with normal life stuff, lots of school and work and random things like appointments, including a follow-up to check on Aaron’s infection (getting better!). The next day, he fell off his bike and landed on his face, earning him another visit to the urgent care. Thankfully, he was OK, having narrowly escaped getting stitches on his lip. Yeesh. Kids.

The next morning we were up bright and early for a Saturday morning garage sale! The boys and I go to a lot of garage sales, and Adam has been talking about his desire to have one of our own for over a year, but we’d never done one ourselves. We didn’t take the request very seriously because sitting in our yard for hours for a few bucks doesn’t sound like fun, but with Gaby heading back to Brazil soon she was looking to sell a bunch of things so she could have a lighter collection of things to bring home. Well, if Gaby wanted to do a garage sale, we might as well toss some of our things in too!

I don’t think I thought it through completely. Garage sales are actually quite a bit of work, from developing the listing online and putting signs around the neighborhood, to figuring out what we’ll get rid of. Then actually setting up, and then cleaning up when we were done! It was nice to get rid of a bunch of stuff, and the $100 we got for it was nice, but it wasn’t nearly enough to make me want to do it again any time soon. Next time we’re going to just make some donations, maybe sell the higher value things on a local Marketplace board or something. Don’t tell Adam, he’s already making plans for our next one.

That evening, we picked up our new au pair from the airport! She had a week of overlap with Gaby so she could settle in and get shown the kiddo care routines. I was grateful for all of this, since both MJ and I have been slammed with work lately, and it would have been a real challenge for either of us take off time from work right now.

The weekend wound down with a visit to our local Lego reseller shop where we all had some fun digging through Lego bins for a couple projects we have in the works (including one related to work which led to: “We have to go to the Lego store.” “Have to?” “It’s for work!” “I doubt it.” hah!). We also started prepping for our Thanksgiving trip to Philly and generally trying to get things in order for the winter holidays.

Mix in with all this, I’ve also been doing a lot more cat care than I expected. I haven’t written about it much here, but it turns out our beloved Zara came to us with a paw and tail wound that have been taking forever to heal. Her paw seems better now, but the tail wound became infected with MRSA and is proving to be a lot more stubborn. We’ve tried a whole slew of treatments which I’ll write about at some point, but it’s been a lot.

Still, she’s an absolute sweetheart who continues to love her wild human brothers, so she is still the right cat for us. Thankfully, as Gaby enjoys some vacation time before returning home, she agreed to watch Zara and take care of her, even taking her to a specialist vet visit that was really tricky the schedule. I hope she starts to heal up soon, but at least she’s in good hands while we’re in Philly this week.

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.

One evening after school we went over to the pumpkin patch and handful of carnival rides that we can see from the highway. It’s expensive for what it is, with the rides all being pretty quick and forgettable, but I kept our activities within some clear parameters as we all had a good time, even if I still hate bumper cars.

A week before Halloween was the Halloween carnival at the elementary school. This is always a fun one for the boys, and it was the first year that it was Aaron’s school too! As usual, they had lots of little activities set up around the schoolyard to play and win prizes at. I really enjoyed the photographer who got a great picture of the boys and I (rare, since I’m usually holding the camera!) and I’m grateful that the pumpkins the boys picked out from the little pumpkin patch there weren’t too big for the walk back to the car.

Over the weekend we met up with my friend James at Hiller Aviation Museum. With MJ traveling throughout a chunk of October, it was nice to have another adult join me on a Halloween-themed adventure! In this case, it was a pumpkin drop from a helicopter, because, why not?

They had kids sign their name on the pumpkin that would be dropped, which was fun until Aaron realized the pumpkin would be completely smashed upon landing, along with his name. Oops.

They had Halloween-themed games and crafts set up throughout the space, and then a “Haunted Hanger” with a TON of spooky decorations throughout their exhibit space. We enjoyed making our way through the exhibits before the pumpkin drop, but we wasted no time getting outside in time to see the pumpkin get loaded into the helicopter and take off.

They had everyone stand behind a temporary fence and look away as little rocks and dust were kicked up during take-off, and then we all got to go over to the runway fence to see the helicopter actually drop the pumpkin. It did a couple loops before the drop and I have to admit, the actual drop was a little anticlimactic. We were close, but a pumpkin compared to a runway is quite small! Still, it was an amusing activity, and if nothing else the boys LOVED being so close to a running helicopter. Me too.

See that little dot? That’s the pumpkin.

The next day the boys and I glimpsed outside to see some gloom and potential rain, but there was another Halloween activity to get to! The park next to the school the boys go to was hosting a Halloween Make-a-thon where kids got to go to various tables to do crafts. It’s the first year they did it, and all of the volunteers seemed pretty overwhelmed with the constant flow of kids clamoring to do the crafts – even with the threatening weather! I suspect they need a bit more organization and volunteers next year, but I see a lot of potential.

As the event wound down, we went to the indoor space where I enjoyed making Halloween-themed magic wands more than anyone else, but Adam got to finish his scavenger hunt, which was quite satisfying for him. When we went to leave, the rain had finally showed up, so we waited a few minutes for it to calm down before our soggy walk back to the car, but thankfully we didn’t get too wet.

The final activity before Halloween was pumpkin carving. After work on Thursday, the day before Halloween, was the time we chose for it because of how quickly the pumpkins grow mold here, even when outside in the shade. We had someone over who has been helping with the boys, and she was delighted to help Adam carve his giant pumpkin into a cat, and Aaron and I got to work on the bat design he picked.

The both came out beautifully, but I’m glad I didn’t give in to their request to carve any more, because as expected, the adults did the vast majority of the work. Still, we had fun and the boys were enthusiastic throughout the whole process.

And then it was Halloween! MJ was home for Halloween and donned a Zoo Keeper costume, since he’d be herding around a cat and a bat all evening as we trick-or-treated. I went with a witch costume, and joked we were going with the classics this year. Our old au pair and current au pair joined us for the evening as well, which was really nice. We stay always stay in our neighborhood for Halloween, which gives us an opportunity to see and meet neighbors.

We also have several neighbors who go all out with Halloween decorations and activities, some of which are scarier than others. And enough of our neighbors in general participate in the holiday so the walking:candy ratio is perfect for us.

The boys got to bed much later than expected as they raided their candy bowls, enjoyed handing out candy to other kids who came later, and generally got to enjoy spending time with Gaby and Rebeca. It was a great night.