Still, we got to see Portland Head Light! One of the most famous light houses in the world, it was in my back yard. It’s strange coming to the town I grew up in as a tourist, but also interesting to see the beautiful place I grew up in through a different lens and share that with my family.

After the light house, we did go over to the lobster roll food truck, because A Bite of Maine makes my favorite lobster rolls in the world.

Our adjusted lunch plans took us to the grocery store where I picked up grapes and what we needed for peanut butter sandwiches for the boys, which I cobbled together in the tailgate before heading over to Portland. But if I’m honest, the whole situation was stressful to me. Forgetting the food stole the opportunity for us to drive by the house I grew up in to show the boys. Plus, it caused us to skip a stop at The Lobster Shack where I really, really wanted to get some fried clams and take in the view of Two Lights, the pair of lighthouses at the end of the road where I grew up. Bummer.

MJ had some errands to run, so he dropped us off at Thomson Point in Portland where we stopped at another brewery, as I do. This time it was Bissel Brothers which makes an excellent assortment of beers, of which I enjoyed their Swish Silver pale ale and the Forbidden Knowledge saison. Are we friends on untapped yet? Again, it was an incredibly chill, family friendly place and they also had no issue with the boys eating the peanut butter sandwiches and grapes while we enjoyed some delicious snacks from the food menu. Highly recommended.

Next door was our next stop, the International Cryptozoology Museum! I had the pleasure of visiting in 2016 when they were at their downtown location, and got to meet Loren Coleman that time! This time my main goal was to show Aaron the mothman exhibits, and it didn’t disappoint. Aaron is four years old and doesn’t quite understand cryptids, but when we stuffed my Mothman at Build-a-Bear, he fell in love, he now has his own Squishable Baby Mothman. The Mothman part of the museum didn’t disappoint! They have a big Mothman model, a lot of pop culture Mothman items, and all kinds of information about the legend.

Annette and Xavier enjoyed it too, so it was fun to be there with them to explore! And I got to visit with bigfoot again.

MJ was back by the time we wrapped up at the museum, and it was time to go pick up the U-Haul trailed that we’d take all my other sister’s stuff back to Philadelphia in.

Then we had to load it up! The boys went back to the hotel with our au pair to go swimming again, and Annette and I did a final trip to the local Goodwill with some donations, and she helpfully took a bag of trash with her so we didn’t have to figure out a way to dispose of it (mostly old bathroom supplies and a few old/broken things that weren’t being kept). It was done pretty quickly and we got to head back to the hotel to relax before dinner.

At dinner I finally got my fried clams at nearby Coppersmith Tavern & Table where we enjoyed a lovely time in their outdoor seating area in the gorgeous summer weather that people come to Maine in the summer for. It was our last meal with Annette and Xavier, so we said our goodbyes once we wrapped up. A long day for all of us, the boys were quite sleepy on the ride back to our hotel for our final night there.

The next morning it was time for our journey home. It was a long journey home. We had to avoid certain bridges and routes due to pulling a trailer, and our speed was capped at 55mph. What might have usually been an 8 hour journey ballooned to over 12 hours. Thankfully, the boys did great. They were generally in good spirits and took it all in stride, as much as they could. Lots of TV, Adam and I played Mario Kart, and there were some road games and car bingo played. We stopped at Target in New Hampshire to pick up a TV we had pre-ordered for the guest room in Philadelphia (the trailer came in handy!), and the boys did some shopping for new backpacks. We also made the decision to stop for a late dinner just 90 minutes from home so we could scoop the kids into bed as soon as we got home.

But we made it! We were back at the townhouse late on Tuesday night, concluding our first grand road trip.

As I’ve written, our first stop was Boston and on Saturday we left midday for the drive up through New Hampshire and into Maine. Our first adventure stop in Maine was one of my favorites, the Seashore Trolley Museum! When I was a kid, I frequently asked to go, and I now often make a stop there on my trips to Maine, so I was really happy to bring the boys. We got there a bit late in the day, but we were able to enjoy a trolley ride, and I absolutely love that journey through the forest and the boys did too.

And then do some exploring through the barns before dropping by their very fun gift shop. The weather was beautiful and we all had a good visit, even if I wished we had gotten there earlier to see a bit more.

When we got to Scarborough, we checked into our hotel and did a quick stop at the storage unit to get an idea of how much stuff we had. It was then dinner at Sebago Brewing Company, where I enjoyed a lobster quesadilla, a spectacular slice of blueberry pie, and learned that breweries in Maine can put THC in their beers. Wow, Maine!

On Sunday my sister Annette and my nephew Xavier made the drive down from their place and met us at the storage unit. We swiftly identified trash and donation items, and got through a lot more than I expected. Annette helped me load up her car with donation goods (mostly old kitchen supplies and such) and we got a lot more done than I expected. Xavier was kind enough to help MJ finish the work on wiring the trailer hitch, which I was grateful for since it allowed Annette and I to focus on storage.

Then it was off to have some fun! We had picnic area tickets to a Portland Sea Dogs game! We love baseball, but amusingly the only games I’ve been to this year were a couple games in Boston, and now their AA affiliate, the Sea Dogs. I swear I’m still a Phillies and Giants fan!

But baseball is baseball, and we had an amazing time with gorgeous weather. It was great to have a game to watch while I caught up with my sister, and our tickets included some food. And the Sea Dogs won! Plus, with the team going away for games elsewhere for a couple weeks, they held a Kids Run the Bases event so MJ and Adam got to run some bases while the rest of us cheered them on.

That evening we enjoyed dinner at The Great Lost Bear where we continued our trend of bringing our kids to drinking establishments (hah!) but truly it is a family-friendly place and I remembered it from when I was a kid. I now realize why it made an impression, the whole place from floor to ceiling is packed with pictures and lights and THINGS. It’s 100% my maximalist aesthetic, and I find a sense of peace in such chaos. The beers and food were top notch too, and I really enjoyed their buffalo fried cauliflower.

We got back to the hotel late, but I had promised Adam he could stop by a pond near our hotel before heading to bed. With Aaron asleep in the car, MJ ended up dropping off Xavier, Adam and I at the pond, and the boys proceeded to find some frogs. Xavier caught one and Adam was entranced! Those 20 minutes we spent at the pond doing some cousin bonding time was one of the most memorable moments of our trip for me.

But the trip wasn’t over yet! A whole day of adventures and the road trip back to Philadelphia were still ahead of us.

I’d say this was our first proper Great American Road Trip with the kids. They’d done an hour or two here and there, and three hours when we drove from Hollywood Beach to Melbourne, Florida over Thanksgiving, but this was a six+ hour trip. We wanted to stop and visit Boston and MJ’s best friend Matti, and then we’d continue up to Maine to see my sister and nephew, and show the kids where I grew up.

We drove up to Boston on a Wednesday, and made pretty decent time up to Boston in spite of a little traffic and the required potty/meal breaks. At one point we stopped at a Target to pick up some supplies. We made a final stop for fast food in Boston in the late evening and eventually got to our hotel. We did adjoining rooms again, but it was an extended stay style hotel so the rooms were larger and had pull out couches instead of the full multiple beds like we’ve done in the past. It also had a kitchen, which came in pretty handy for washing water bottles and keeping our fruit and leftovers chilled in a real refrigerator. The first night I slept with the boys while they got used to the room, but by the second night I was able to convince them to sleep on their own with the connecting room doors open in case they needed us (or just got scared), and we brought their audio baby monitors for an added level of support. It worked out well.

Our first day in Boston was spent going on their first MBTA subway rides!

We met up with Matti and took the subway over to the Boston Museum of Science. Growing up in Maine, this was basically the closest science museum to us, so it was where our Girl Scout troops did our adventures at, I remember sleeping there at least once (maybe twice?). I have a ton of memories from there, and it had been years since I’d been back. It was a real delight to bring the boys there.

I had hoped that going on a weekday would mean the shows wouldn’t be as crowded, but the Tesla coil demo was already filled up a full 15 minutes before the show, and the 3D movie shows were mostly booked for pre-registered school groups. Still, we had a lot of fun. Aaron’s love of animals drew him into the natural history exhibit and drawers full of specimens, from fur to beetles to bones.

Adam’s more mechanical inclinations had him chasing lights and motors. They both enjoyed the dinosaurs and the Boston Dynamics robot.

The next day we took the other two subway lines (we hit all 4!) and for a visit to the New England Aquarium. Once again, this was the aquarium from my childhood, but the last time I was th/images/journalpics/072025/mtba_subway_fam.jpgere was actually in 2019 when Adam was a baby and we were in town for a conference. My mother, sister, and nephew came down to visit and we had a lovely day together.

It was really fun to meet up with Matti again and go with MJ and the boys. The aquarium was a bit lean on sharks, much to Aaron’s disappointment, but they both love penguins and this is a good aquarium for them.

We split our aquarium visit in half, taking a break for lunch and playground mid-day and then returning to see the rest of it later in the afternoon.

We also got ice cream, during which time the boys insisted upon getting soft serve ice cream from a truck, while the adults partook in Ben & Jerry’s. Yum.

The next morning it was off to Maine! MJ had a few car parts for the trailer hitch we couldn’t complete in Pennsylvania shipped up to Matti’s house, so he collected those in the morning and we got on the road around midday. I was thrilled to be on our way up to Maine, but the boys are real city kiddos and they loved spending time in Boston. We’ll definitely have to make the trip up again in the coming years, but this visit was a great start.

What’s for dinner? A lobster roll, of course! I ended up at The Barking Crab where I enjoyed a blueberry wheat beer, some steamers (clams), and my glorious lobster roll with fries and coleslaw. I was seated in a 2-person table right by the water, which with the lovely spring weather, made the whole experience basically perfect.

That evening I also stopped by L.L. Bean because the perfect weather was threatening not to last, and I had a baseball game to go to the next day. I picked up some quick-drying hiking pants that I wouldn’t have to worry about getting wet, and a rain coat that I needed anyway and had been wanting to buy for a while. I also walked over to some more touristy areas to pick up some gifts for the boys.

Saturday morning was the most chill time I’ve spent in a long time. I slept in, enjoyed the hotel pool, spent some time reading and playing video games. That allowed me to leisurely get ready for my journey to Fenway Park for a baseball game. I took the MBTA regional rail to a station that was about a 20 minute walk from Fenway, and the lovely walk took me through a park. The stadium took me by surprise, I was just walking down the street and suddenly it was in front of me!

I walked around to get a feel for the area, and then went in side to enjoy the pre-game Taco and Tequila Fest that I had tickets to. If I were to do it again, I’m not sure I would have done that part because it was a bit boring to do by myself, and there was a fair amount of milling around as we waited for the rest of the stadium to open so we could get to our seats.

I had good seats, and there was an empty one next to me which was nice. The weather ended up being absolutely perfect for an evening game, with the threatened rain not making an appearance. It was just warm and lovely. And it was a great game, with the Red Sox trailing for most of the game but pulling off a win against the Braves in the end! Plus, I got to see a home run sail over the green monster and out of the park, and the Braves have former Athletics players Matt Olson and Sean Murphy so it was nice to see them play again, even if I was rooting against them.

The journey back to the hotel was noteworthy for me because it was my first time riding the subway in Boston and it was completely overflowing with baseball fans leaving the park. They were running a lot of trains, but it was still a squished ride back. I took two subways and then a bus which put me quite close to my hotel, and it was all pretty easy to navigate. Thanks, Boston!

Sunday morning I took a walk down to the Boston Tea Party Museum for a 10:45AM tour. I was lucky to be on the tour with a small group and so we all got our hands on the “tea boxes” to throw off the boat and could ask questions. Throwing things off a boat because we’re mad at the government over import taxes felt very appropriate right now. I really enjoyed the downstairs walk through of the tea party story as well, they made really fun use of projectors and other tech to make the whole experience quite immersive. We’ll have to take the boys some time.

From there it was over to enjoy lobster roll number 2, this time at James Hook & Co where you ordered from a truck and then sat down in their outside patio. Continued nice weather made this a lovely lunch, though I did prefer the food the day before. My walk back to the hotel included a stop for ice cream, and then I swung by the conference center to pick up my badge before things got busy on Monday. I had a relaxing evening, and then popped downstairs when I got a message from a colleague about a few folks who had gathered in the lobby to say hello for an hour or so.

My week was spent at the Red Hat Summit and on Thursday I had a late check-out which allowed me to take it easy and then have a late lunch (and lobster roll number 3) nearby. But a spring nor’easter was coming through, and the rain was coming down in buckets. I’m grateful I decided to take my tourist days before the event rather than at the end, because it would have been very disappointing otherwise! Even as it was, I got to the airport rather early because I had nowhere to be late on Saturday afternoon and my flight was ultimately delayed due to the weather. A rainy end to my trip, but rain is lovely once I’m out of it.

Thankfully, once my delayed flight took off the journey home was uneventful, and I was able to rest at home on Friday.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As far as the drive up goes, we learned over the summer that the boys do not enjoy long car rides, so three hours would be quite the challenge for all of us. We made plans ahead of time to stop halfway through for lunch, so at least then the drive would be split into two roughly 90 minute chunks. We ended up at Suzy Q’s Hometown Diner in Jupiter, Florida. It was perfect, we all found food that we enjoyed. In the car I sat in the back with the boys so I could help keep them entertained, and we played with a trouble-making puppet dinosaur, got out some Colorforms, and scoured the road for colorful cars and interesting landmarks. We arrived at our hotel in Melbourne the late afternoon and quickly discovered that the air conditioning in one of the rooms wasn’t working, and maintenance had to come by while we were at dinner.

For dinner we met with my Aunt Pam and her new husband Gil at Marker 99. It was a pleasure to catch up, and I was so excited for them to meet the boys, even if they checked out fairly early in the dinner to play on their phones. It was nighttime, but we did also enjoy the views over the intracoastal. After dinner, Adam and I went down to the end of a pier at the restaurant and looked at stars.

The next day we planned on spending the afternoon with my Uncle Don and Aunt Tanya, but we quickly discovered that the air conditioning problems hadn’t been resolved and we had to change rooms. Following this, the boys were feeling a bit on edge and we figured it might be better to just have a pure vacation day at the hotel. But we had to eat too! We had a fantastic breakfast at The Blueberry Muffin just down A1A from our hotel. I went with the blueberry pancakes, but we all found food to enjoy, and we also picked up a pumpkin pie to bring to Thanksgiving dinner the next day. After breakfast, it was down to the pool!

This chill day meant we had a fair amount of time in our room, which we filled with drawing and some Colorform games (mostly sorry and Snakes & Ladders), as well as working with Adam on a Lego Mustang that we had picked up at Walmart precisely for this reason. There was a fair amount of TV too, and while watching some around 5PM little Aaron fell asleep in a chair while eating an apple. The day off was the right move.

On Thanksgiving we began our day at the beach where Aaron build more sand castles and found a crab. Adam and I braved the surf again and had a bunch of fun in the water. We then rinsed off and made our way over to the pool for a little while before going back to our room to get showered and changed for Thanksgiving dinner.

Thanksgiving was held at my Uncle Frank and Aunt Amy’s house, with my Grandpa and his wife Jo, and my Uncle Don and Aunt Tanya also joining in the festivities. It was absolutely perfect, even if the boys were a little energetic. The food was great, and so was the conversation. We were also incredibly grateful that they were willing to host us on such short notice. It was great to catch up with everyone and have them meet the boys, especially having them visit with their great grandfather. Amy even gave the boys a tour of the back yard.

Friday was our last full day in Florida, and the weather was a little gloomy. We began the day by visiting a couple local parks to see if we could spot some manatees, which we didn’t succeed at, but we did see some birds, lizards, and rabbits! We then stopped for lunch and that’s when it started pouring out. While eating, we decided that the poor weather meant that we should take my Aunt Amy’s advice and drive up to The Dinosaur Store for the perfect afternoon visiting dinosaurs at their exhibits!

I think all kids like dinosaurs, but Aaron loves dinosaurs. Going to an exhibit with fossils alongside full size colorful recreations and scenes was an absolute delight. He ran around excitedly pointing at things and rushing between each next great exhibit. We got the tickets for the “Adventure Zone” which was an unlimited arcade area, which the boys enjoyed and I guess it was a nice spot for them to enjoy while I scoured the amazing store they had there (I picked up a moon rock and some fossil earrings), but it was a little underwhelming. There were also some live animals in the zone, which is where we finally saw an alligator! And several beautiful snakes. Still, the upstairs rooms with the museum really were the draw for us.

Our flight on Saturday out of Orlando was quite late, so we got up and went straight to the pool for a final dip.

MJ grabbed some lunch at a pizzeria across from the hotel, and then it was all the packing and packing while the boys ate lunch and watched TV in the room. We got to the Orlando airport suitably early to clear security, ride the air train, watch the air train a bunch, and spend a little time in a lounge getting some snacks. It was nice to not be rushing, and our flight home was uneventful.

It was a great trip, I’m so glad we went. It also made us feel a lot more secure in doing other trips with the boys. We definitely learned that having a small stash of toys/activities for the hotel room during gap time and healthy snacks was key, and to just expect sleep problems (even my own) and cope with it accordingly.

Our trip started by flying into Miami and spending four days near Hollywood Beach, and we had Gaby with us to help with the kids during the daytime. On the first day we met up with my cousin Shannon at Frost Science Museum in Miami. Unfortunately our big adventure with her son and ours didn’t quite work out, but Adam and Aaron had an absolute blast at the museum anyway. They had a beautiful Bugs special exhibit, and you know what our boys love? Bugs.

And the ocean focus on a big chunk of the museum was a lot of fun. We also got to see a short planetarium show, this one about constellation stories from around the world, which was fun but we still need to get the boys out to a classic night sky show sometime. Maybe at Chabot when we’re back in California.

There were even some dinosaurs, and some hands-on exhibits where the boys could build paper airplanes and launch them across the room, always a hit.

The next day went better for meeting up with my cousin and her son. We spent the afternoon enjoying a fantastic pool, and I’m glad the boys got to meet, even if they largely ignored each other in favor of splashing pool time. I got to catch up with my cousin, who I hadn’t seen in nearly a decade but who I regularly chat with about kid stuff. She’s been such a life saver when I’m in mom crisis mode.

We also made plans to see MJ’s cousin Rachel, her husband, and their two year old son, finally! Gaby came with us, and found the perfect restaurant: Kosher de Brazil. MJ’s family is Jewish, and Gaby is Brazilian, so it was a nice mixing of worlds, and we all love a churrascaria! It was very good, and we even found some food from the market table (a salad bar, plus!) that the boys would eat. Aaron and our little cousin had a lot of fun running and dancing around the restaurant together, though we did have to rein them in a bit so they wouldn’t disturb other diners.

We were also in vacation mode. The hotel pool was spectacular and the boys were absolutely in love with it. Plus, Adam really enjoyed seeing the wild iguanas that were walking around nearby. They’ve been in swim classes for several months, but it didn’t quite cure them of the fear of pools, and some days we still struggled to get them both into the pool and focused on their lessons instead of playing. I think going to Florida and spending DAYS in the pools helped a lot. They’re a lot more comfortable with the water and have a better idea of why they need to learn how to properly swim. It was a ton of fun to play with them in the pools too, since I also love pools! And with appropriate use of long-sleeve bathing suits all around and reapplication of sunscreen, none of us got burned. Phew. And I had a dorky looking phone carrier for the pool, which helped me stay in touch with everyone as plans came together, and take photos in the pool, woo!

The beach was also a short walk from the hotel, so we spent a couple hours there one day. Adam and I spent a bunch of time hilariously crashing in the waves in the water. Aaron preferred to stay on land this time and enjoyed playing in the sand.

Eating while traveling is definitely tricky, since the kids don’t have a huge selection of things they’ll eat, and it’s all easier to accommodate at home, or at least supplement with some vegetables. We walked to a Super Wal-Mart at the beginning of our trip to stock up on fruits and healthy snacks, but honestly the boys just ate a lot of kids menu food. There was one restaurant that we went to twice during our four days in south Florida though, and that was Family Fresh Cafe. Why twice? Excellent, diverse menu making the meals very different (even for the boys) and a playroom in the back:

“Family Fresh® is the only restaurant which offers a kids playroom with with video surveillance broadcasted to the dining area so the parents can enjoy dining out and having kids entertained.”

GENIUS! The boys had a ton of fun, and asked to go back, so we were happy to oblige on our last night there. It clearly also works for the restaurant, it meant we went twice and ordered more food and drinks than we would have if we were rushing to get antsy kiddos out of the restaurant quickly.

That night we also dropped Gaby off at the Brightline train station so she could head up to Orlando to meet a friend for a vacation over the Thanksgiving holiday. We returned to our hotel and got ready for our own journey up to Melbourne the next day. The second half of our vacation was coming up quickly!

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.