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.

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?