It’s also an exciting time to meet up with colleagues who I’ve only worked with remotely.

This included a bunch of community members who I’ve worked with in the open source world, or swapped fun stories with on social media over the years.

I also got to see Mainframer Barbie! Clad in her Open Mainframe Project t-shirt and an IBM Champions jacket.

But on to the technology! During one of the kickoff talks on Tuesday, Tina Tarquinio took to the stage with an IBM Telum II wafer. Wow! As you may recall, I attended Hot Chips at the end of August where the Telum II was announced, so I was really eager to get a close up look myself. As soon as Tina concluded her talk, I made a bee line for her before she had a chance to carefully pack it away. It began a running theme of the week of getting my photo with hardware.

My next dose of new hardware was getting to hold an IBM Crypto Express card, which isn’t much to look at because the cool stuff is inside, but it also demonstrates the size of one of these that gets slotted into one of the drawers in the mainframe. Definitely not what I traditionally thought of when someone says the’re adding a PCI card to a system.

A big chunk of my time at the event was doing booth duty, and I also took a few trips around the expo hall to see what was happening at other booths. I was delighted to see that the storage team had brought in a whole IBM Diamondback Tape Library! And they had it running! It was pretty cool.

A booth featuring IBM UX Research brought along a special guest that I had been clued in would be there: A red IBM Selectric typewriter.

They had attendees select from a series of prompts to them write up on the typewriter. From the printed word, they’d run it through OCR and have AI do sentiment analysis on it. It was a really eye-catching and tactile melding of old and new technology that I was totally there for.

We all know how fascinated I have been with the life-size IBM Z Lego build, and if you don’t, I wrote about it last year: All about the life-size IBM z16 LEGO® brick model! Well, IBM Quantum team decided to follow in our footsteps with their own Lego build! The latest models have a trio of components that each support their respective Quantum Processing Units (QPU), so what they did was rather clever, they had one Lego model built, and then mirrors put in to simulate three.

Even though much of my time on booth duty, I did have time to see a few sessions throughout the week. One that stood out for me was related to a Kubernetes deployment on IBM LinuxONE mainframes because of how much open source software was called out in the presentation as they walked attendees through their hybrid cloud solution. I also attended Sarah Julia Kriesch’s presentation on our Open Mainframe Project Linux Distributions Working Group. As usual, she expertly guided attendees through the value and benefits of bringing several distributions together with the shared purpose of supporting the s390x architecture.

I could say 100 more things about my experience, the conversations I had, and the people I met, but I only have limited space and time to write this. So I’ll just say that it was an excellent event and I’m really grateful I was able to participate again this year.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The truth is, every new mainframe has a new chip, and all of them have impressive new features that are innovative and exciting, but this is the first time in a long time that there was such a detailed technical splash with a named chip. What a roll out!

When I learned that Hot Chips would once again be hosted at Stanford, just across the bay from me, I jumped at the opportunity to attend for the next announcement: IBM Telum II

I was a little nervous about the event because of how deeply technical the sessions were on the hardware side, but I quickly found my stride. Since I haven’t kept up very closely on processor design, it was interesting to learn about Intel’s Lunar Lake processor, including the work they’ve done toward power reduction. But I’d say the general theme of the day was hardware accelerated AI on the processor. Telum II fit right in and Chris Berry gave a great presentation.

Now it’s time for me to geek out about it. As you can see, some of the big numbers that make this chip distinctive:

• A new built-in low-latency data processing unit (DPU) for accelerated IO
• 8 high-performance cores running at 5.5GHz
• 40% increase in on-chip cache capacity
• A new AI accelerator, the compute power of each accelerator is expected to be improved by 4x over Telum, reaching 24 trillion operations per second (TOPS)

See more on the full announcement from IBM and on the IBM Telum page.

This time there was a second announcement too, the IBM Spyre Accelerator PCIe attached card. If you’re at all familiar with mainframes, you know that the PCIe drawers make up a nice chunk of the system, with cards to handle various functions that are separate from the compute drawer, which houses the processors and memory. Having a dedicated AI accelerator card was a logical step forward, so I was really excited to be there for its debut.

Again from the announcement linked above, “The Spyre Accelerator will contain 32 AI accelerator cores that will share a similar architecture to the AI accelerator integrated into the Telum II chip.”

After the talk, I got to meet up with the other IBMers who were in attendance, which gave me the opportunity to meet Chris and Christian, who had spoken at the last Hot Chips.

At this event I also got to meet a couple folks from Chips and Cheese who were covering the event, and wrote an article that came out last week, Telum II at Hot Chips 2024: Mainframe with a Unique Caching Strategy, which was referenced in a recent Hackaday article Mainframe Chip Has 360MB Of On-Chip Cache and led to a few of my non-mainframe friends seeing it.

They also set up an interview with Susan Eickoff and Christian Jacobi, during which Susan shared view into development, beginning with how far out they have to plan (5+ years), a lead time that means its predecessor hasn’t even been released yet. I love these interviews because they give a public view into why certain things were designed in a specific way, which the community doesn’t often get to hear about from IBM. I wish we did more of these behind-the-scenes things at industry events that are so close to the tech community, there’s so much fascinating innovation happening at IBM and I still run into people who are surprised when they learn about it.

As I made my way around the event, I saw some more fascinating talks, but also got to meet a bunch of people. I spoke to a professor at Stanford and some of his students about open source and hardware architectures. I met Lori Servin of the RISC-V Foundation and got to geek out a bit over the talks I’ve been giving about porting open source software to various architectures.

I also got to spend a few minutes with Dr. Ian Cutress, who wrote the article on caches that I read three years ago (linked above).

In all, it was a great event and I’m grateful that I could attend. The following day I watched the live stream from home to check out what companies like Meta and Tesla are doing, plus a keynote from Victor Peng, President of AMD who spoke on our future of AI pervasiveness. It was a real stretch for me on a technical level, there are things I simply don’t understand and appreciate about chip design, but what I could follow (or quickly look up) made the event quite the learning experience.

The first was to a baseball game! The A’s are moving away from Oakland next year, which is heartbreaking. I wanted to get a few final games in before they move, but it was logistically difficult. So one day I took the afternoon off from work and hopped on BART to see a game. It was great!

I ate chicken nachos out of a helmet.

And had a delicious churro sundae.

And watched the A’s lose, but that’s OK. It was a delightful afternoon away.

As a solo activity it was OK, I think I prefer going with someone because there’s so much down time in sports and it’s really a more social activity. I think going to movies, museums, or other active exhibits or parks may be more my speed moving forward.

And I know I said solo time should be time that’s not work, but on a whim I went up to RSA 2024 recently with an Expo hall pass. I met with some folks and got some great work done, I’m glad that I went.

Then I got to the solo not work part! I took a lovely walk down Market street to check out the new fancy food hall attached to the new Ikea. It was really nice. I decided to check out Curry Up Now, an Indian street food spot that served up a delicious Saag Paneer And Chicken Tikka Masala burrito, along with a mango lassi. I really miss living in San Francisco, so even if it was a work visit, just getting back in my favorite place was refreshing. On my way back to BART I was also happy to discover that the entrance from BART to the mall has re-opened!

We’ll see where my solo plans take me moving forward. I really can’t let this time get de-prioritized again, my family deserves a happy and energetic mom, and I deserve a happy and energetic me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I began my job on the road, as would characterize much of 2019, where I met my new boss at IBM TechU, which I wrote about here: IBM TechU 2019 in Atlanta.

It’s with IBM that I found a new way to expand my career by developing a vast network of internal contacts. Prior to this, I’d been quite outward-facing, from getting involved with the Debian and Ubuntu communities at my first Linux Systems Administration job, or giving dozens of talks while I worked on the OpenStack Infrastructure team for HPE. My first foray into developer advocacy at the startup in San Francisco only managed to scratch the surface of internal network development as I brought requests from developers in, and then at IBM I had a gigantic wrench thrown in my plans to continue in the path of developer advocacy: a global pandemic. Less than 11 months into my time with IBM all travel was canceled and all of our work went online.

At first I tried to do the same thing as usual and hope it ended quickly, but I quickly found myself in a position of having to re-write my role to continue being effective. I ended up increasing my involvement with open source software communities who were developing for Linux on IBM Z (and LinuxONE) and I started developing metrics to track our progress. This ultimately led to the to launch a federated Open Source Program Office (OSPO) for IBM Z and LinuxONE. This OSPO would still refer to IBM global resources for policy and procedure, but gave me a virtual doorway for folks internally and externally to ask questions and get guidance. My internal network at IBM grew rapidly as I laid the groundwork for this OSPO, and even more now that it’s been open for a year.

It’s been quite the journey, and becoming the Global Head of this OSPO has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my career.

First, I get to work closely with open source software communities, which is my true passion. Second, I can directly connect that work to real impact for organizations who are using the platform. Third, I am constantly learning, both technically and through growth in this leadership role. And finally, I’m working with an amazing team with a great manager.

I fully believe that having five strong years at IBM are directly related to having the same supportive boss during my whole time. She has also brought together a team of remarkable, smart, and kind people who I love working with. This is no small feat! And if there’s one thing I’ve learned through my journey in tech, it’s that the people you work with make all the difference. You could be working on a technology you believe in and love, but if you don’t have a good team, your chance of success takes a nosedive. Find your people.

In spite of the progress I’ve been able to make during a global crisis, it’s been amazing to get to see people again as I’ve been able to resume some traveling. 2023 and 2024 have offered several opportunities to meet with my colleagues from around the world and firm up those professional relationships that I treasure so much.

Many thanks to everyone who has been with me at various parts of this journey, and let’s see what the next five years brings!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First, they tend to mostly attract locals, so you meet folks you won’t see at other conferences and allow you to get an idea for what’s popular and how they’re using technology in their region. Secondly, they tend to be inexpensive, most are under $100. This is in vast contrast to some of the larger events put on by major tech players, where a ticket can easily run into the thousands. Plus, even if you can’t afford that, all the events I’ve gone to also have generously granted free passes to folks from various demographics, ensuring that the attendees are a diverse crowd. They also often happen on weekends (CPOSC is on a Saturday), which means folks who can’t get off from work to attend events can participate.

I also feel like these conferences get me closer to what most folks are doing with open source software at their organizations now. They aren’t all showing off the newest things, but they are showing off things that are incredibly popular and broadly used, and that gives a more genuine snapshot of where the industry is, rather than where it may be going. But I think the most important thing for me though is discovering pockets of innovation that I wouldn’t have otherwise encountered. From the individuals developing new ideas to the small companies that sponsor these events having innovative business models, these events are always remarkable for learning fascinating new things that may be overlooked elsewhere.

AI has been a big topic at a lot of events, and it was interesting to see how it unfolded at CPOSC. One talk centered around the idea of creating a digital self using the AI technology of today, including voice synthesis services and LLM prompts that are fed a lot of personal data. It was an interesting talk, but definitely keeps us in uncanny valley. The next talk that included an AI focus was a panel made up of a family unit, a pair of married professors whose work is both in computing, and a son who works in the tech industry but doesn’t code. The son demonstrated using ChatGPT to create code from a library for a device he was testing, and with English he was able to explain what he wanted the code to do, and have it spit out the code to do it. The resulting discussion was around how we teach software development. How much of the fundamentals of coding do we teach now? Should we also be teaching LLM prompt engineering? It was an interesting discussion that compared this transition to the one to higher level languages beyond Assembly (a parallel I’ve made myself as well) and doubling down on the fact that we will need some folks whose job is software engineering, even if some of the coding can now be done by AI.

I think for me the more interesting question for me was how many doors this opens for folks who don’t know how to code, but for whom having code written for them would transform their ability to succeed. I’ve known so many people over the years who needed to learn how to code, but don’t enjoy it and wish they could have stayed on their original path in arts, sciences, or where ever. How many ideas in the sciences have we lost because the experts in their respective fields are too busy doing basic coding work to make their breakthroughs? Or worse, just gave up? Or wasted their time doing things manually, forsaking computers entirely? There is a need for fast, high quality code, but I think for most people the ability to further streamline their interactions with computers on their own terms with code developed by LLMs is an exciting prospect. I’ve spent a lot of time feeling a bit apprehensive about use of AI in technology, but I’ve definitely turned a corner to be my more hopeful self again.

My own talk at the event happened just before lunch, where I was talking about building your open source project for various architectures. It was similar to the talk I gave a few weeks before at SCALE, but with a few localized tweaks and improvements from the last time I gave it, slides are here: Will_your_open_source_project_run_on_a_mainframe_Or_on_a_smartwatch_-_CPOSC_2024.pdf.

I’ve had some good feedback, and more to respond to post-event via email. Overall, I’m thrilled to see how much interest there is in software testing these days, and that people are thinking beyond the defaults in order to bring in more advanced testing techniques and tooling.

Naturally, I also brought along my props. This time it was an IBM Power Systems tux penguin, the VisionFive 2 SBC, and the 3d-printed IBM z16 I keep at our townhouse in Philadelphia, except for special outings like this one.

The final talk I went to before the closing lightning talks was on “How to get your ideas implemented at your organization” and it gave me a lot to think about. Career development-wise I’ve been advised to get more methodical about stakeholder buy-in, especially as I pursue ideas that are not universally popular. The speaker outlined the strategies he’s come up with for being successful here, partially based on the time he spent as a Chief Innovation Officer. A huge part of this is just sitting down with people to listen to how your idea impacts them, incorporate feedback, and develop a sense of shared ownership for the idea. It gave me a lot to think about and helped solidify my own natural tendency to just reach out to people and ask. I think for me what would help the most is some training on how to be more tactful and polished when I approach people, since I can be very technical and direct by nature.

Of course, I also know people at CPOSC. I was able to meet up with several folks I know, including my long-time events-all-over pal Jason Plum of GitLab. CPOSC or the Philly Linux Users Group are where I get to catch up with most people I see there, so I always look forward to this opportunity to catch up.

I went to the after party for a bit to grab pizza and a beer while continuing chats with folks, including a few people I randomly ended up with as we walked over to the venue. I think we all have a natural tendency not to end up alone at events, so we latch on to a few people, which I absolutely do, but I also have grown comfortable with walking around alone and coming up with things to talk about with strangers. It’s a little anxiety-inducing, but it pays off in spades over time. Many long-time relationships have been forged after chance meetups in hallways.

My friend Will walked me halfway to the train station at the conclusion of my stay in Lancaster, which was a lovely time to catch up. The train ride home was uneventful, though it was a long day and I was tired, so I curled up with some podcasts for most of the journey home. We’ll see where this event lands next year and whether I’m close enough to attend, but it certainly was a delight to stop by two years in a row!

Coming back to SCALE this year was like a rite of passage in this new existence in a world with COVID-19 floating around. It was an absolute pleasure to see everyone who I only see at this conference, and generally to get back into the swing of things. Plus, the first day of SCALE landed on Pi Day, so I got to wear my new pi dress! Logistically, bringing the whole family along this time didn’t work out, but we’re definitely keeping it in mind for next year.

My first stop at SCALE was an Ubucon, which just like me, had returned to SCALE for the first time since the pandemic. I quickly caught up with several old friends from the community, and then was delighted to meet Cody Smith and Simon Quigley, who I’d only known through the Ubuntu community online. It was also nice meeting some of the folks who came to the event from Canonical and the various projects they’re working on around automation and tooling, a few of whom I had the pleasure of having dinner with when the first day of the event concluded on Thursday.

Ubucon itself kicked off with a talk from Jason Nucciarone, who was standing in for a colleague who couldn’t make it, where he discussed changes that have been made in recent years to revitalize the Ubuntu community. A big one was communication methods. When I was largely involved with Ubuntu, most of the communications took place over IRC, and like many communities, the Ubuntu community had been slowly drifting away from that. Some folks went to just using the Discourse forums, others had Telegram groups, some went off to pockets of Discord. I’ve remained on a rather silent IRC partially because I don’t have a lot of time to work on Ubuntu these days, so I hadn’t looked into where to go next. Turns out, they’ve started using Matrix and it has started picking up steam. Another thing they’ve done is started up in-person events again. There’s a new Ubuntu Summit that has now had two iterations in 2022 they met in Prague and in 2023 the event was held in Riga, Latvia. The Local Community (LoCo) communities have also received a bit of an injection of activity, which is nice to see. It’s definitely a different Ubuntu community from the one I stepped back from a few years ago, but that’s the nature of communities and I was swiftly reminded at the event that Ubuntu is turning 20 years old this year. There’d be something wrong if it was the same community I created a vBulletin account on all the way back in 2005.

I also enjoyed the talk from Simon on “Open Source is Not Just Code” where he spoke about his own journey. This is quite a bit different from the list-of-things talks I’ve seen (and given!) on this topic, and I think by sharing his story and journey we got a much more memorable talk. He spoke honestly about the challenges of starting contributing as a young age, and how his curiosity and willingness to give a variety of things a try paved the way for him to become a release manager for Lubuntu and hold several other roles while he was still a teenager. I can definitely speak to his enthusiasm as well, he was a big help when I was still running the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, and I’m so happy to see him still contributing and making such a big impact.

Perhaps my favorite talk on the second day of Ubucon came from my friend George Mulak. I’ve known George through the Ubuntu California team for years, but his talk was my first glimpse into some of the paid work he’s done over the years. His talk was on “Setting up an Ubuntu lab for seniors and the disadvantaged” where he shared details of the mobile computer lab that he ran for communities around the Los Angeles area to learn skills and help with technical literacy. It was a fascinating project, but also connected me with Ken VanDine who works at Canonical but also participates in a non-profit that does custom images (which can be used on USB sticks) for computers they install Ubuntu on and then provide to the community, to the tune of thousands per year. It’ll be an interesting thing to explore for Partimus, since our reduced scale these days means resurrecting our netboot imaging machine doesn’t make a lot of sense anymore.

The expo hall also opened Friday afternoon, and that’s where I had the pleasure of formally meeting Jon “maddog” Hall for the first time. He’s a hero of mine, but I never gathered up the courage to say hello. No more of that! We had a lovely chat about mainframes, and on Saturday morning I went to his talk, “How Is Linux Like a Player Piano?” I adored his talk. As a fellow vintage-mechanical-things enthusiast, his love for player pianos really resonated with me, and the tale he weaved around the role of open standards and patents in the shaping of what technologies succeed was a compelling one. I also appreciate that he concluded his talk with a nod to Hedy Lamarr, whose technical collaborators during her development of frequency hopping included George Antheil, who had used player pianos in some of his own work, which was another round about way for today’s technologies to be linked to those of the past. Unfortunately, now I kinda want to have a player piano, hah!

On the topic of meeting people I had the pleasure of meeting Tommy Chang, who is famous in the mainframe world for being a hobbyist who owns a couple of vintage mainframes. It’s always a pleasure to catch up with community members who share my passion for the platform, especially at an event like a Linux conference because we have this immediate kinship, and can geek out about various historic computing finds of late. We probably won’t found a computing museum together, but it’s fun to dream about.

My own talk was on Saturday afternoon, which was on building your open source project for various architecture and titled “Will your open source project run on a mainframe? And beyond!” I brought along my VisionFive 2 and my LEGO IBM z16, which I spread out on a mat I got from the arm developer program and allowed attendees to check out along with some stickers.

On Saturday I also went to a talk from Tyler Menezes on “Nurturing the Next Generation of Open Source Contributors” where he talked about CodeDay Labs where they provide successful mentorships between students and open source maintainers and projects. It’s a fascinating project that I’ll keep in mind once I can clear more time for volunteering again, but in the shorter term it was interesting learning what college students are struggling with today when it comes to contributing, and how project maintainers can help. He covered making sure you have a CONTRIBUTING.md and ARCHITECTURE.md files so students can find their way, which should also have a quick start for building a dev environment, including on Windows. He also shared how important it was to have properly functioning tests to help them avoid making simple mistakes that slow down the contribution process and ultimately lead to reduction in enthusiasm and drive. The final piece of advice was around criteria for good-first-issue bugs for newcomers, stating that they should be rather self-contained (one file to fix?), require minimal tracing through the code base, be clearly defined so you don’t need to ask questions, and make sure they’re still applicable, since it can be incredibly frustrating to fix a bug, only to discover later it had been fixed and not documented several months ago.

Part of my time this trip to Pasadena was also spent enjoying Pasadena itself. One evening I took a long walk around the downtown and to a park southwest of the venue where I got to enjoy a spectacular sunset before doing my only take-out meal of the weekend. On Saturday evening before meeting my friend Nathan Handler for dinner, I went on a quest to find a post card to send to the boys, and along the way found some rainbow abacus earrings (perfect for celebrating St. Patrick’s Day at a Linux conference!) and got to snag a couple green doughnuts from Randy’s Donuts.

Sunday began with a keynote from Casey Handmer on “Hacky solutions to real world problems: Applied Computing Past, Present, and Future” which I really enjoyed. I think like many of us we’ve slipped into a bit of a doom loop regarding the struggling middle class in the United States and promises of AI that have questioning deliverables so far. His talk was a breath of fresh air, positivity, and real world problems and solutions that are being worked on today. He began by talking about the recent deciphering of crushed, burned, scrolls from Herculaneum by students with the help of AI-assisted technologies (article). He also shared about his own company, Terraform Industries, that’s working to do “gigascale atmospheric hydrocarbon synthesis” with the intent of producing cheap energy while also cutting CO₂. He also brought some statistics about how in just my own lifetime, global poverty has gone down significantly, and a big piece of the puzzle to going further is making sure all humans have access to energy. I found myself reflecting on how myopic my views have been by focusing on what feels so hopeless at home, and I was really inspired by not only his perspective, but the fact that his company is actually doing something real to change things.

I had the pleasure of chatting with Duane O’Brian at SCALE this year, and then attended his talk in the last slot of the day where he spoke on some analysis he’s been doing on where funding is coming from and going in the open source world. He scoured historical event and foundation websites going back 10 years to see where much of the funding had come from and assembled it in a series of spreadsheets and publicly available data. It was fascinating to see the information come together, though it wasn’t particularly surprising overall. He shared a handful of other efforts around both community-driven and more academic focused approaches to digging deeper into the data, but this was a nice beginning of a glimpse into where major events and organizations in the United States are getting their funding from.

With Pi Day on the first day of SCALE, we capped off the event with another holiday: St. Patrick’s Day! I was sad to miss a festival this year that MJ and our au pair attended with the boys, but I tried to make up with it by joining my friend Mickey Lyle for lunch and having a green beer.

The event concluded with a closing keynote from Bill Cheswick, which I only caught part of due to it going a bit long and me having a flight to catch. What I caught of it was a fun trip down memory lane, but by catching the flight I did I was able to be home in time to tuck Adam and Aaron in to bed Sunday night, which is precisely where I wanted to be.

Many thanks to all the volunteers who make SCALE happen, it was great to see so many of you!