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.

I mentioned that the boys had been earning badges from the local library through a free program to inspire kids to do challenges and activities. They each earned four badges, and it was a lot of fun for all of us. I’m not sure I’ve mentioned before how much I enjoy the library programs from the Bucks County library system, but their branches are incredibly kid-friendly and the play areas are more extensive than what I see in most of the San Francisco bay area. My sister in law Irina suggested it’s because there are more outdoor activities year-around in California, so there’s less of a need for a library on rainy or frigid days, and she may be right. The culture here in California generally seems to be more catered to adults and mature kids than young ones.

The Bensalem library definitely ramped up things for the summer, and Aaron particularly enjoyed a presentation from the Center for Aquatic Sciences where he got to pet a horseshoe crab.

In the evenings we also got really into some Lego builds. Aaron even helped out a little, but would mostly work on his creative Duplo creations while Adam and I focused on building a train, a firehouse, and a fire helicopter. I think we’re going to end up with a little Lego City there.

Seeing family is also obviously a big part of why we were there over the summer, so it was nice to head downtown one evening to have dinner with MJ’s cousin Lauren and her husband. I had met her husband once before, but only MJ could attend their wedding due to a bunch of unexpected circumstances last year. So it was our first time seeing them as a married couple. We met at Emmy Squared Pizza where I got the “Angel” pizza consisting of Truffleist mushroom cream, ricotta, mushrooms, and it was spectacular! I’m still dreaming of this pizza. And it was also great as leftovers. I think our only complaint would be that something went a little wrong with our order and we waited almost an hour for the adult food to come out, which made the boys a bit antsy as the evening wound down and they had finished their meal. It was nice to have the extra time to catch up though, and Adam got his wish of getting to see the sun set on the Philadelphia skyline so we could enjoy the beautiful nighttime lights of the city. He’s definitely my kid, I love those nighttime city skylines too.

In other family news, our regular visits with Irina and little Sam were a highlight of our trip. Sam and Aaron are roughly the same age, so it was nice for Aaron to have a summer buddy. One evening we were able to go over to their house to have pizza and catch up, and Aaron was absolutely enamored with her dog Maya, and both the boys enjoyed spending time with Olive the cat.

Animal-wise, our neighbors were rabbit-sitting, so one evening we went over there to catch up and get the latest neighborhood gossip while the boys got to play with the rabbit. Predictably, all of this has lead to a string of requests to get a pet. I really would love to, but we have a lot on our plate right now, and our extended visits to Philly definitely make having a pet tricky. We’ll see, I haven’t been pet-free in decades, and while the loss of Caligula still stings, the pull of getting another cat is getting stronger.

During our visit I also was able to sneak out one afternoon to meet with Kris, a former colleague from my Tyco days. We’ve loosely kept in touch via Facebook, but we hadn’t seen each other in over a decade. Some of my posts throughout the summer clued her in to the fact that we weren’t too far away from each other. It was a great to reconnect, and we’ve penciled in doing something more involved with the boys next time we’re in town.

The final Friday before we left we made our way back to the Churchville Nature Center for a moth-themed presentation and camp fire. It ran quite late, and I think the boys were on the young side to appreciate a lot of the introductory lecture, but they got to walk around outside at night, see some bugs, hear a screech owl, and finally roast a couple marshmallows over a camp fire. I did a lot of camping as a kid, but it’s hasn’t been something we’ve done yet, so it occurred to me that the boys hadn’t really experienced a camp fire before. What an oversight! There’s a campground not too far from here, maybe next summer we’ll spend more time in California and do a weekend adventure in a tent.

Our last day in town we did some final clothes shopping (tax-free in Pennsylvania!) and then turned picking up the rental car that we’d be taking to the airport the next day into one final adventure with a train ride to the rental car center at the airport. The plan had been for MJ and Adam to go down alone while Aaron and I went on our own adventures around town, but apparently there’s nothing more fun than taking a train, so we all went.

Some of my low-key stress around packing and preparing to leave bubbled up during our train ride, but I did my best to be present and enjoy the journey with everyone. I mostly succeeded until Avis was over an hour late with our rental and we had to sit at the rental car center trying to keep the boys entertained. I should have brought more snacks. Then the stress carried into Sunday as we closed up the house and began our journey home. I hope this gets easier as the kids get older, but I also need to keep working on strategies to manage this family travel stress, I hate that the conclusion of our visit is so tainted by such an elevated stress level when there were so many great moments throughout the summer.

We parked in Trenton, NJ and took NJ Transit up to Penn Station. From there it was a cross-town bus over to the ferry terminal.

And then the ferry to Brooklyn!

In Brooklyn we met up with MJ’s cousin Arielle, her husband, and her 5 month old son. I hadn’t seen his cousin in years, and this was my first time meeting her husband and the baby. It was really nice to catch up and given the environment, the boys even did OK, even if Adam didn’t want to eat.

After lunch they showed us nearby Domino Park which had a bunch of huge factory artifacts from an old Domino Sugar factory that used to operate in that location, but has since turned into a riverside playground and recreation area. I love this. It was a great spot and on a warm summer day it was the perfect spot to let the kids run around for a bit and then stop for ice cream.

We then took the ferry back to Manhattan and a bus over to Grand Central Station. Grand Central has a small annex and transit gift shop, so in addition to showing the boys around the beautiful station, we got to stop and shop at a gift shop I knew they’d enjoy. And let’s be honest, I love that gift shop too. The boys got an articulated bus (slinky bus!) toy, which they are enamored with. Upon our exit I was able to geek out with the cashier a bit who fell in love with my SEPTA t-shirt.

It was then off to a couple subways to go back to Penn Station to get a train home.

At least, that was the plan.

Once we got to Penn Station we found that all the trains going south were shut down due to electrical problems on the tracks that Amtrak maintains. They were re-routing people on buses and other non-rail options, but we were quite restricted in what we could do with the boys and no car seats. We decided to leave the station and grab dinner at a nearby diner, hoping the situation would improve by the time we finished. It didn’t, but we only had to wait another hour before the trains began running around 8:30PM. It made for a very late night for the boys, but I think lack of communication from NJ Transit was the most annoying part. They announced the wrong track for the next train at least three times, causing a mad dash of hundreds of people down to platforms where there were no trains. When they finally announced the correct train and track, we were in a mob of hundreds going to that train, which we almost didn’t get on because the front cars were standing room only and we couldn’t ask our exhausted kiddos to stand for the 90 minute train ride home. Thankfully it was a long train and by going down to almost the end we found a spot with available seats.

It wasn’t an easy day, the summer heat really got to me and I was feeling a little nauseous and light-headed mid-day as we were swiftly walking to catch one of the buses. I was exhausted by the time we all collapsed on the train. It also felt like we didn’t do much, since most of the day was spent on public transit. But I was quick to remind myself that the boys love public transit, and all that time spent on buses, subways, trains, and ferries was The Activity as far as the boys were concerned. I think the next trip we take to the city should be a bit more targeted though: we take the train do to lunch and some tourist spot, then go home. Lack of planning because we wanted to be flexible led to a bit of stress and frustration that I would have loved to avoid. But we enjoyed ourselves enough that there will be a next time!

But this year we are spending the summer in Philadelphia, what about the New Jersey shore?

I didn’t grow up in Philadelphia, so while I’ve visited Atlantic City boardwalk once or twice, I’d never actually spent the night or done a real beach visit there. We also had an additional challenge: the boys had never stayed in a hotel while they were mobile (Adam stayed in one a handful when he was a baby). Our kids are a little chaotic, and we had a whole list of concerns. Will they stay in the room? Will they push all the buttons on the phone? Will they flood the bathroom in the middle of the night in an attempt to create a pool? We wanted to do a trial run in a hotel that’s not too far from home before doing a bigger trip. At about 90 minutes from home, a trip to Atlantic City ticked all the boxes.

We made the drive out on Friday afternoon, hitting expected traffic along with others from the region going to the shore for the weekend, but overall it wasn’t too bad. We got ourselves loosely settled into our hotel rooms at Caesar’s, enjoyed the statues decorating Caesar’s, and then went out to the boardwalk.

It was the first time the boys had been on a boardwalk, so that was pretty fun. We also picked out a restaurant that had the required cheeseburgers for them, and managed to arrive right before a downpour.

The duration of our meal almost perfectly synced up with the storm, and by the time we were ready to leave and visit the pier where the rides are, they all had opened back up. It was pretty late though, so we stuck to just doing the giant ferris wheel. And jumping in a bunch of puddles.

Saturday was beach day! The morning was spent at the beach, and we took a break for lunch and some enjoying of fudge and saltwater taffy.

Later in the afternoon Adam decided he was done with the beach, so while MJ took Aaron back to the beach, Adam and I explored the hotel, rode on elevators and escalators, threw coins in fountains, and then took a tram down the boardwalk to do a little tourist shopping. Perfect.

Dinner was at the nearby Rainforest Cafe, which would have been better if either of the boys ate. Hah! It was an unusual weekend for them though, so I’m not surprised their appetites were off.

Sunday we checked out of our hotel and then got to enjoying Father’s Day by going somewhere MJ remembered from childhood: Lucy the Elephant right next to the beach in Margate, NJ. Lucy is a building, complete with a roof deck, that’s shaped like a big elephant, and originally built in 1881. To someone who hadn’t grown up there, Lucy is quite the unusual sight, but I love kitschy things, so honestly it was right my my alley. We got tickets for the tour so we could go up inside, and it was a lot of fun, even if the boys each had their moments of being a little scared by heights and steep staircases.

We had lunch next door to Lucy and then made our 90 minute journey home.

As for the experiment? We didn’t have any catastrophic failures logistically, though it was a bit tiring for me because I was sharing a bed with little Aaron and he’s a bit of a wild sleeper. I imagine staying in a hotel is never easy with young kids, so I think we are where we need to be. We will do another trip soon!

When I was in Seattle in 2018 I went up to the top of the Space Needle with my friend Walt, which I wrote about in MST3K and the Space Needle. With that done, I didn’t feel the need to do it again, especially on a cloudy day, so instead I went over to the Chihuly Garden and Glass exhibit.

I knew of Chihuly from his glass flowers in The Bellagio, so it was lovely to see an entire exhibit devoted to his work, and it was breathtaking.

As you walk through the galleries you’re presented with a series of themes, and I admit being quite impressed by the sea creatures, from octopuses to eels.

But the big scenes he created were also quite stunning, including this one, and others with boats, fans, and chandeliers.

The glass house was also quite stunning, and as I was taking photos I realized I was standing under the Space Needle. Neat!

When I stepped outside I saw a vintage style Airstream which had been turned into a glass blowing studio. The crew was warming up when I arrived, but the glass blowing demonstration began swiftly and it was a lot of fun to watch. That’s where I also learned that the Space Needle gift shop was the recipient of the glass they blow in these demonstrations, and sales go to benefit local artists.

Halfway through the demonstration it started raining, so I was grateful to be under a tent outdoors and that it calmed down to a drizzle by the time the demonstration concluded and it was time for me to explore the outdoor gardens. The gardens are a literal garden with trees, flowers, and shrubs, accented with glass structures, which was quite lovely.

I was able to grab a quick lunch, and while I was walking around to find a place to eat I realized how much our boys would love a visit to Seattle. There’s the light rail to bring us in from the airport, the monorail, and then several spots around the Space Needle that the kids would love, including a science center, a children’s museum, and a really fun looking playground. It’s now high on my list of places to visit some summer with them.

With that thought tucked away I headed back to the convention center on the monorail.

And I did end up stopping by the Space Needle gift shop to take a piece of this journey home with me. Thankfully, they do shipping and it’s quite reasonable, so my new glass vase followed me home after a week or so in transit.

The rest of the week was spent at the conference, but I decided to take it easy in the evenings. I did a couple solo dinners at local sushi bars, one of which featured a “sushi donut” and the other that had “sushi burritos” both of which were fun and delicious. The big social for the conference was held at a bar and a bowling alley and I decided to skip it because I was feeling a little tired and was worried that an event in that environment would be a bit too loud and boisterous than what I was hoping for. I really prefer conference parties that are at interesting places that give you an option of things to do, ones at museums or aquariums have topped my lists. We can socialize like we would at a bar, but also find quiet spaces, or mingle and bond over exhibits if I’m feeling shy and don’t have a designated conference buddy to hang out with. And if I strike out at socializing, hey, I saw some cool exhibits at a new museum and it was a lovely night!

I’m glad I got to do a little bit of tourist stuff on this trip, but I’m also grateful to be home. Work trips are energizing for my soul and professionally inspiring, but as a parent now I do miss my family a lot and wished I had MJ with me when I was at the Chihuly exhibit. I also have a lot more house chaos to manage, so it’s good to be home to get back on top of things.

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.