The flight down from San Francisco was a quick regional flight into Burbank, my go-to airport for this conference so I can avoid LAX. And then I spent Wednesday evening getting settled in and putting some finishing touches on my talk based on some feedback I had requested from some community members working on projects I had an interesting in learning about.

Thursday is when the magic began! I spent the morning picking up my badge and immediately seeing several familiar faces. It didn’t take long to meet up long time friends from our time in the Ubuntu community Jorge and Amber, and we all went out to lunch.

Talk-wise on Thursday I found myself attending several AI talks as part of the Kwaai Summit.

So, AI. We are in the middle of an AI revolution in the tech industry and things are moving fast. A year ago a lot of the AI being used in tech was being marketed as helpers for developers. At SCaLE I heard someone suggest that we treat AI like a junior developer. We’re now replacing junior developers. But I had an experience over the holidays where I was in the trenches with code these “AI junior developers” were spitting out, and it needs a lot of guidance. Without that, the code, documentation, and even commit messages can come out nonsensical and solving things in way that is not “clever”, they legitimately don’t make sense when viewed in the correct context. It also took away the thoughtful collaboration that I love of development: How do we solve this? Can you explain what I’m reviewing? Why did you make this decision? When you’re met with a series of shrugs and a finger pointed at the AI, the job of thinking ends up solely on the person reviewing the change, and that means more experienced developers doing the reviews are being buried in AI slop code.

The technology will get better, and I anticipate an absolute decimation of our industry job-wise. I’m not exempt from this. Plus, there are real environmental concerns about power consumption and resources being used to build out all the data centers to implement these AI solutions, and I worry that it will be painful for our society in a way that may not be ethical. But we aren’t going back, that’s not how technology works in our world.

Add in that so much of this space is flush with more money than the world has ever seen, and decisions driven by greed and a horrifying lack of consideration for humanity seem to winning.

So, why did I run off on this terrifying, negative AI rant? I wanted to share what head space I was in when I walked into SCaLE. I’ve used AI tooling, and I’m constantly learning, but I’m deeply worried about it.

Thankfully, there are still good people doing good things in AI and some of those people were speaking at SCaLE.

As I strolled into the Kwaai Summit it was refreshing to be reminded of some of the more optimistic views of AI, and how success doesn’t necessarily have to follow the money. AI can be used in ways that benefit us all. There are tedious tasks and “impossible” problems that are starting to be solved by AI. Can I actually get a good handle on a big chunk of open source projects on GitHub supporting s390x? Possibly! Can we finally cure some of the most dangerous forms of cancer? Maybe! And there are people building communities around things like Beneficial General Intelligence (BGI, a play on AGI, the Artificial General Intelligence that tends to be the holy grail of AI) where things like ethics and sustainability are considered. These are my people. These are the people who built the first online social networks and open source projects. This is the messaging that I found so inspiring when I first got into open source software and what made me so fully devote my life’s work to it. It was nice to be there.

On Friday I attended Guinevere Saenger’s talk on building out developer infrastructures, which brought up a lot of points one might not necessarily think about when doing so. From there I went to Jon “maddog” Hall’s talk on “Open Source In Computer Higher Education – Past, Present and Future” which was definitely a highlight for me. I don’t need to learn how to teach computer science in higher education, but I do love hearing whatever he has to talk about because he has so many wonderful stories. He took us on a tour of this career with an eye toward education, dropping references from everything to the IBM System/360 to learning assembly from difficult text books that he read solo and then went on to teach. He’s a strong proponent for learning topics deeply, and teaching students to learn how to learn so they can thrive in an industry that requires continuous learning. We’re all in agreement there.

That evening I joined a bunch of folks from The Software Freedom Conservancy for dinner and software freedom discussions. It was a lovely evening and I had the pleasure of meeting some new people, including a fellow from Oakland Privacy who told me about the StrayCap Multispace in Hayward that I’ll have to check out some time soon!

I’ve supported the Conservancy for many years, and have known several of their staff for even longer. Need a free software license violation acted upon? This is the group that does that. They get a remarkable amount done with the staff and budget they have, and I’m incredibly grateful for that. Please consider donating.

The keynote from Cindy Cohn, Executive Director of the EFF, on Saturday morning was wonderful. I’ve been a supporter of of the EFF for years, and am closely aligned with most of their views. It was fascinating to hear about her work in this space, and the fundamental protections that she’s worked to help pioneering technologists secure over the years. I vaguely knew that encryption was restricted by the US government in the earliest days of the internet, but I didn’t realize it was classified as munitions which ultimately meant that encryption algorithms couldn’t be shared and collaborated on online. Wow. Could you imagine the internet without encryption? Our world? Cindy, with an army of early free software hackers, argued in federal court in San Francisco and for over a decade beyond that to make sure encryption was freed from this classification. This story was the first of three that she dives into in her new book Privacy’s Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance which I promptly pre-ordered. Her call to action to us hackers today was to stay engaged in this fight so that we show up for all the future legal battles that have the potential to threaten the future of our world and lives with regard to digital freedom. I had the pleasure of running into her later in the conference to thank her for her talk, and I had the presence of mind to pull out a piece of paper to have her sign so I could put it in my book when it arrives; I’ll have a signed copy, kind of! Then I went to the EFF booth to do my annual contribution.

After the keynote I was able to meet up with Kaitlyn Davis, a new colleague at IBM who joined us from HashiCorp and I just started working with a couple weeks ago. She happens to live in southern California! So I made the case for her to come out to SCALE. She has some really helpful ideas around leveraging AI for open source contribution tracking and so we were able to sit down for about an hour and chat about IBM in general and drill down into some of the problems I’ve been focused on to see where she wants to jump in. It’s not every day that I have the pleasure of working with someone like her, so I’m really eager to see what we come up with together in the coming months. See? I’m not negative on all uses of AI.

From there, it was time for my talk on Open Source in Closed Ecosystems. Originally I was planning on just drawing from my experience in the mainframe world, but after a chat with John Mertic of The Open Mainframe Project I was convinced to draw from a broader pool of expertise and to look into Automotive and Motion Picture industry use cases. I was fortunate that Alison Chaiken of Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) and Emily Olin who has worked on both AGL and the Academy Software Foundation (ASWF) were able to get back to me quickly regarding questions I had about the initiatives. I was also thankful to get time with Nithya Ruff whose expertise in running open source software programs across the industry has been incredibly valuable to my own work, and the broader community through her extensive work in the community of the years, and direct contributions to the TODO Group.

The talk had some rough edges flow-wise, and I’d like to flesh it out with more examples and talk to more people in industries where open source hasn’t taken a firm hold yet to see what barriers they’re encountering in their organizations. But I had some great conversations after my talk and I think it generally went well. Slides from the talk are available here: /presentations/2026/Open_Source_in_Closed_Ecosystems_-_SCALE_23x.pdf (1.3M pdf)

It was nice to run into Dave Neary, whose Open Source in Business series on YouTube got me some clues I need for my talk too. He gave a couple multiarch talks, and though they were focused on ARM64 it was still nice to hear someone talk about multiarch manifests and containers, since I bump into some confusion from community members about them. He gave some nice demos using Argo CD and Argo Rollouts that I’d like to take a closer look at.

Speaking of multiarch, I then enjoyed a talk by Amy Parker whose talk focused on QEMU user mode. I’ve used QEMU on and off over the years, but honestly since I’ve shifted my focus to bare metal testing, I’ve used it a lot less. I don’t have a lot of experience with the user mode emulation that she covered, which made the talk a fascinating dive through binfmt_misc, ld_preload, and chroots to accomplish a lot of interesting work across architectures. She also talked about using FatELF to create universal binaries, which wasn’t even on my radar. So many fun things to dig into!

Saturday evening I had the pleasure of joining Nathan Handler for dinner at a sushi place nearby. I’ve now had my first sake bomb. But just one!

Happy Sunday! The opening keynote was presented by Mark Russinovich of Microsoft, who, poor guy, spent the first 15 minutes of his talk convincing us that in spite of being known for Windows Internals, both he and Microsoft have a lot of Linux credibility. With that taken care of, he dove straight into a great tour of open source security solutions and how they relate to the growing interest in secure supply chains today. I was happy to see the security components of my own talk from the previous day reiterated, but more broadly, I’m glad SCaLE brought someone in to talk about all of this. Open source has made tremendous strides in recent years related to security, but it doesn’t get as much attention as I believe it deserves, both in terms of usage and awareness, and having more people to work on it, and its importance is only increasing.

The expo hall at SCaLE is always a delightful place to walk through, and this year was no exception. They have a wonderful mix of big, paid booth areas for larger companies, and smaller booths for non-profits, so it always brings a great assortment of people. I had a lovely time catching up with my friends from the Ubuntu community. It’s always a pleasure to catch up with Nathan Haines and George Mulak who’ve been quite involved in the Los Angeles computing scene for years. It was nice to get some time to chat with Erich Eickmeyer, lead for Ubuntu Studio, and I was pleased to learn that his wife, Amy Eickmeyer, is a professional educator and actually got the Edubuntu flavor off the ground again back in 2022! I had planned on a DIY lockdown of Ubuntu for our kids this year, but I’ll have to take a look at Edubuntu now.

And the RISC-V booth was on my list too, as I’m always eager to learn the latest (you know me and architectures!). That’s where I met a fellow IBMer who was involved with the Works with RISC-V community which I didn’t even know existed. Cool. I was able to ask about HDMI support on my VisionFive 2 and learn that there should be mainline kernel support soon, and learned that people are saying good things about the latest RISC-V mainboard for the Framework laptop. My kids like to remind me I have a lot of laptops, so I’ve held off on Framework for now, but I’ll have to take a closer look at this one.

I also went to a talk by Brendan O’Leary on From COBOL to Claude: What Hopper Knew (actually, his slides swapped “Claude” for “Cursor” (the AI coding environment). Things in AI move fast). I enjoyed this talk and his premise, given all I’ve said above about the inevitability of AI in our industry. He began by talking about Rear Admiral Grace Hopper’s desire to make “programming” computers a more human-language driven endeavor, and how that began with her FLOW-MATIC and ultimately COBOL, which is still widely used today. His belief is that she’d be happy that anyone today can vibe code their own application, and made the same comparison I tend to do with evolution of coding. AI does have very, very important things that differentiate it from the previous major evolutionary steps of computer programming, but I just don’t believe that things like being nondeterministic are enough to so forcefully push back on it. Most of this talk continued by talking about how software engineering practices that professionals are using will simply need to be adjusted to have a lot more planning and a lot less hands-on coding, and with these research, plan, and implement frameworks in place we’ll be able to trust the results AI comes up with a lot more. I think he’s right.

The conference concluded with a walk down network memory lane with Professor Douglas Comer. I love computer history, so I was familiar with a lot of the general touch points he discussed, but since his focus was on networking there were a few things I’ve missed along the way. He talked about magentic tape mailers, how Endianness caused problem with computers communicating in the early days, and how a technology like TCP/IP or even the client/server model were not obvious. His stories around how phone companies charge for transit and the sorted path to get households connected to internet was really insightful, especially when paired with the observations from Cindy Cohn the day before.

Huge thanks to all the volunteers who makes SCaLE happen, I’m really happy I could make it down this year, and after seeing how many kids where there, I’m going to make plans to at least bring our eldest down for the weekend next year.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks to Scott for taking a picture during my talk!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Still, I love birthdays! We celebrated as a family together on Sunday, the day before my actual birthday.

And in spite of both of us having too much on our plate at work and a bunch of travel coming up, I convinced MJ to take my actual birthday off so we could celebrate by going on an adventure together.

Alas, it didn’t quite go the way I had hoped. First, I learned that the Boardwalk is only open on weekends now, so no rides! And in spite of my day off, I had an early morning meeting to attend, and so did MJ. And then I had to take Zara into the vet for an appointment at 9AM. We didn’t end up leaving the house until after 11 for the 80 minute drive down. The final wrench in our plans came when we realized that it was the only time we’d have all week to talk to potential au pairs, so our day wound down with 3 hours of au pair interviews lined up, taken from the car in Santa Cruz. I tried not to feel too disappointed by all this. We have a busy, complicated life with demanding careers, and sometimes it really is too much to ask to drop everything and go to the beach. C’est la vie.

But we still had some fun!

First was a stop at The Mystery Spot. The bumper stickers for The Mystery Spot are ubiquitous in northern California, but I never thought much about the actual place until I heard an episode of the podcast Lore a few months ago: Lore 261: Attraction. Among the roadside attractions covered in the episode was The Mystery Spot, and although everything about it is ridiculous, I knew it was a tourist trap I had to visit some day. How about on my birthday?

And it was 100% ridiculous, but for $10 a ticket, I couldn’t really complain. The guide was in good spirits and treats you to a series of optical illusions throughout your tour, explaining that it’s supernatural in origin, but I think we’re all in on it. They have tour participants stand in various spots and experience things in the crooked house that make it look like you’re defying gravity. It can be a little nausea-inducing as your brain gets confused by the illusions, but it’s mostly some good fun. At the end of the hour long tour they give you a bumper sticker.

From there, it was off to lunch! We drove down to the Santa Cruz municipal wharf and got parking near the restaurant, Stagnaro Bros. Seafood which hit the spot for some yummy fried seafood and a local IPA.

We then took a little walk and a call at the wharf before going to sit down by the boardwalk for a half hour or so to just take in the ocean view until our next call.

Our final stop before driving home was Pacific Cookie Company, where I got a decadent chocolate chip cookie ice cream sandwich that I couldn’t finish.

Most of all, it was just nice to get a day together as just the two of us. We need more of that.

I thought that was the end of my birthday adventures, but I was surprised when a few friends I met in my Ubuntu days happened to be in Orlando at the same time as I was for IBM TechXchange. Michael, Michelle, and Laura and her husband were in town for a big Disney trip! We made plans the Wednesday I was in town for dinner at the Polynesian resort at Disney World, and we all celebrated my birthday there.

It was delightful. We ate amazing food, watched fireworks, and they even got me birthday cupcakes.

I learned that you can take the monorail even if you’re not doing Disney, and my friends asked the train operator if I could get a look in the front cab, and I got to sit there as he gave me the 30 second tour of the controls.

Our evening concluded with the signature drink from Enchanted Rose Lounge at Disney’s Grand Floridian Resort. It was tempting to do the Disney World Monorail Bar Crawl, where you stop everywhere for a drink, but after three days of conferencing, I was more inclined to just go back to my hotel room to get some rest. Maybe next time!

So here we are at 44. Onward and upwards.

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.