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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks to Scott for taking a picture during my talk!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Phew.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Things kicked off on Monday as I worked with Maemalynn of The Linux Foundation to get ready for our full afternoon of Open Mainframe Project talks in two rooms beginning at 1:30PM. I want to start off by saying that I had a wonderful time on the Program Committee this year with Mae, Fernando Rijo Ceden, and Donna Hudi. We have fun together, and everyone brings a unique perspective to the line-up, any one of us missing from the committee this year would have changed the agenda quite a bit. Plus, we were all on top of last minute schedule changes due to speaker cancellations and adjustments that needed to be made. I think this comes from all of us deeply caring about the topic and community, which is so important

Lyz, Mae and Fernando, and I know Donna was with us in spirit even though she couldn’t make it to the event!

One of my favorite things was setting up a “birthday card” to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the project, where we had people write notes and sign their name – and they did! We had great support from speakers too who would remind people to sign it.

Birthday card part one, there was a whole second one!

Our rooms had a great location in the venue, right across from secondary registration at the Hilton. Sarah Julia Kriesch and I gave a talk in the opening time slot to a packed room – a trend that would continue all day. Next year we’ll request bigger rooms! We gave an update on the Linux Distributions Working Group and gave a lot of information about how others can get involved in the mainframe ports of various distributions. You can grab a PDF of our slides here: How_to_Contribute_to_Linux_on_the_Mainframe_-_IBM_TechXchange_2025.pdf

From there I saw Galasa talk from Louisa Denly. I’ve watched the progress of Galasa since before it was an Open Mainframe Project and it was being presented on Terminal Talk, back in early 2021. The induction into The Open Mainframe Project has been a great move to improve visibility to the project and do things like participate in the summer mentorship opportunities run by The Linux Foundation. Louisa’s talk covered some key ways that the project has progressed technically, and it was really great to see.

Then Kathleen Nordstrom of Broadcom gave a talk on “Skill Up! Mainframe Learning for All” where she quickly covered the work of the Mainframe Open Education project. If you haven’t seen their work and are interested, I have really enjoyed going through their Mainframe Open Education GitBook again and seeing how it’s grown (and where it still needs to fill in some gaps!). There’s a ton of free, entry to medium level education out there for folks who are mainframe-curious and this is a great place to start.

A group photo was taken before I found my fellow panelists and headed over to the Open Source track. It meant that I missed the last couple hours of The Open Mainframe Project event, but having additional content in another part of the event expanded our reach that much more, and I was delighted to learn that all the talks were still quite full! My worries of splitting the audience turned out to be unfounded.

Over in the open source track I joined my fellow mainframers, Len Santalucia, Steven Perva, and Louisa Denly, on a panel called “Dispelling the Myths Around Open Source on the Mainframe.” In this panel, we talked about security, support, and contributing, but it was also very audience-driven. One of the thing I learned while on this panel was from an audience member who shared how self-driven the next generation of technologists are, and how they expect to get support from their peers online, and generally expect documentation and other things to be public. This is definitely a departure from what I’ve traditionally seen in the mainframe world, and an interesting evolution in technology in general where open is becoming the default. I think this is doubly true in a world with AI chat bots that you can feed public documentation from and get answers without digging through 300 pages of dense technical documentation.

From there we had three more open source plus mainframe talks in the room. First up was David Frenzel who gave an excellent talk on “COBOL Meets Gradle: Streamlining z/OS Builds with Open Source” where he shared the Gradle plugin they developed for building COBOL applications. This kind of tooling is so important for getting the rest of your organization on board with building mainframe tooling, and consolidating your tech teams. No longer should the mainframe team be separated from the rest of your SREs. Everyone should use open tools like Gradle, just like everyone should use open tools like Grafana! Which leads me to the next talk in the room, David Harris of Grafana joined Anthony Papageorgiou to talk about “Grafana for the mainframe: lifting the lid on the black box”. I really enjoyed this Grafana talk because once again, it’s integrating tooling that the rest of the organization is interested into your IBM z/OS workflows. Taking a step back, you can see what’s going on with ALL of your systems, without the previous silos between operating systems.

The track, and day, concluded with Sarah Julia Kriesch doing a talk fully devoted to The Linux Distributions Working Group where she gave folks in our open source track a tour of the group and how we’re achieving our goals.

But that wasn’t all our content for the IBM TechXchange 2025 conference! The Open Mainframe Project event page has details of other sessions we had scattered throughout the week, and the ones I had the pleasure of attending were great. Over in the User Group Pavilion, Fernando provided an overview of The Open Mainframe Project. Helpfully, it was 1. in the session catalog (unlike our talk last year!) and 2. scheduled right before a SHARE event in the same space, so in addition to the planned attendees, we saw mainframers start to drop in throughout the session, hooray!

I also had the pleasure of seeing Jan Prihoda of Broadcom present “Beyond DevOps: Unlocking New Possibilities with Zowe” at one of the Tech Stages in the expo hall. Integrating so many of the talks into the expo hall was an interesting move, and I thought I’d be really bothered by the noise, but for me I found that the space being gigantic and the use of microphones for the talks made up for most of that. Plus, it was great to just be able to wander through the expo hall and drop in on a talk. For Jan’s, the space was also overflowing, with only a few little cubes to sit on, we had dozens of people standing for his session. It was good too, I’m glad he’s out there promoting the various use cases of Zowe so it doesn’t get tagged as just a DevOps tool. His demonstrations of usage with Ansible in his session were excellent.

Finally, I was really happy to continue my involvement with Michelle Kovac and the Open Source team by scheduling several booth slots over in the Open Source Zone of the expo hall. These 2-hour slots allowed projects to more casually show off their projects and chat with attendees. I was able to grab Mae to do a shift generally on The Open Mainframe Project, where she also took the opportunity to get more notes and signatures on the birthday card! And then both Joe Winchester of Zowe and Louisa of Galasa did shifts for their respective projects.

It was definitely the best year yet for Open Mainframe at TechXchange, and I was able to continue that with the fully open source demos I was showing off at the booth, but that story is for another day!

Thankfully, our trip got much better from there! Thanks to MJ’s dad, we found Wheelworks over in Huntingdon Valley that was able to do a thorough detailing of the back of the van to get every molecule of milk out of it. And we ordered an all-weather mat to put in that portion of the carpeted floor so this doesn’t happen again. We also finally picked up a dresser for the boys so we could move their changing table upstairs now that diapers are largely a thing of the past. Aaron helped me assemble the dresser next to the old changing table that’s now being used for storage in their bedroom closet. The trip to Ikea for the dresser also gave us an opportunity to scope out some furniture for an “art center” to put in our kitchen for the boys and some cabinets for a server project we’re working on.

MJ’s father has come over several afternoons to spend time with the boys, which they’ve really enjoyed, and is the whole reason for us being here. We’ve also had a chance to catch up with MJ’s sister and nephew for dinner and house visits, including an evening that included a fire pit outside, which Adam won’t let us leave without doing again, this time with s’mores.

The boys have enjoyed catching the ice cream truck each time it comes through the neighborhood, and literally catching fireflies when we keep them up late enough for the fireflies to come out. One evening we also found a toad in the road that Aaron hilariously scooped up to help him cross it.

On our first full weekend here was a bit chaotic as we settled in, but then we went down to The Franklin Institute to visit the newly re-opened Heart and got to finally show the boys the Baldwin 60000 steam train that resides in the under-construction-for-years Hamilton Collections Gallery. The train used to move, but we learned that since it only could move a few feet the wear on the wheels was uneven and maintenance under those conditions was challenging. It’s still cool even though it doesn’t move, and the boys do enjoy a run through the Heart.

We saw a planetarium show, which Aaron continues to be unable to stay quiet during (thankfully, he does ask questions that are on-topic, and the person sitting next to us fell asleep in spite of his regular whispering, hah! We also made our way over to the Demonstration Theater to see the “Liquid Air Show” that Adam really enjoys, and this time didn’t disappoint.

The next day we drove out to New Jersey to have some pool time with our friends Mike and Jess and their two sons. The boys are getting really comfortable with water, which we’re really happy about. I’m hoping this translates to more security when it comes to their swim classes upon our return to California in August. It was great to catch up with our friends too, which only seems to happen about once a year, Facebook contact aside. The heat did get to me at the end though, so the drive home was a bit of a queasy one for me.

On the 4th of July we took a drive up to Kutztown for a visit the Crystal Cave. Aaron loves caves, and was left wanting after we took him to the cave/tunnel near the old San Francisco Sutro Baths for his birthday. Fair. This time we went to a real, natural cave! Plus, it’s a cave MJ had gone to with his parents when he was a kid, so there was the nostalgia and family connection factor there too, which was amusing to reflect upon as the tour guide through the cave mentioned that visiting the cave has become a family tradition for generations. Indeed! The story of the cave is an amusing one too; discovered in 1871 it was opened to tourism just a year later when they learned it was an otherwise useless limestone cave, but tourists might enjoy seeing it.

After lunch and the cave tour, we took advantage of the less humid, cooler summer weather of Kutztown to do through their mini-golf course. I’ve continued my streak of having enough focus/interest to complete about 9 holes really well, and then take a bored/distracted approach to the second half of the course. It’s a good thing I don’t play real golf.

Then we had some ice cream on-site and bought a big bag or rocks and sand with gemstones and fossils mixed in that they had a little “panning” area set up for. The boys LOVED that. As expected, Adam was very into the rocks and gems, while Aaron is still completely enamored with the fossils.

That evening we enjoyed some sparklers in the yard before getting to bed much too late, but that’s what summer is for!

On Saturday we began our serious New England trip prep. MJ had done a lot of the legwork to determine what would probably be needed to install the tow hitch on the minivan, so we had an appointment at a place in King of Prussia to get the work done. I drove out as well so we could spend the afternoon having a lovely (if too filling) lunch at Fogo de Chao and then a little adventure over at the mall. MJ and I both picked up some things we needed at L.L. Bean, and then the boys and I made our way over to the Lego store for… things we didn’t need.

Unfortunately, the hitch installation didn’t go well, and we had a multi-state adventure to get that completed ahead of us. The heat and overindulgence at Fogo also got to me that afternoon and I was flagging a bit by the time we all had to drive home. Still, part of the work was done and I was happy to have our new Lego treasures with us. But speaking of the car, MJ and Adam also had a project of installing a new rear view mirror on the new minivan. As high as it was, the trim level on our minivan didn’t have the buttons to open the garage, or auto-dimming for nighttime driving. Bummer. So we ordered the mirror from Kia and eschewed the dealer quotes for them to install it. It took more time and a few more panel removals than expected, but they got it done! Right in time for our road trip to New England that began on July 9th.

I had one last big event before out trip though, and that was presenting at the Philadelphia area Linux Users Group chapter that I was a member and organizer of years ago. It’s a great group of folks, several of whom I’ve known for decades, and I was there to give the latest about open source on mainframes. I started out with a Star Wars scroll parody with a mainframe theme (YouTube video) There was a lot of hardware geekery, but the gem of my presentation was definitely showing off zopen Community tools that bring familiar open source CLI tools to IBM z/OS Unix System Services (USS). I had a developer account that I was able to do a live demo with, and then several folks dove into the repositories during the meeting. It was a great night and I really enjoyed seeing so many old friends, and at the end I was surprised that one of the organizers had brought his son, who I hadn’t seen in probably 15 years? I babysat him once, he’s now old enough to be a software developer and attend PLUG talks now, wow! Also, cool. I couldn’t have thought of a better way to wrap up work and go on vacation than that.

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.

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.