On Sunday I met up with my friend and former OpenStack/HPE colleague Sean Dague who now also works on IBM Quantum. We’ve kept loosely in touch over social media, but it had been a few years since we’d actually connected in person, so it was really nice to have some time to catch up. That afternoon I also had the pleasure of finally meeting my colleague Rishi Misra in person, who I’ve worked closely with for years on s390x porting work. A nice start to a great week!

Monday kicked off with a series of opening keynotes. The other day I wrote a long, rambling blog post about open source and AI, so I won’t talk too much about the AI-heavy keynotes, except to say that there were some hopeful observations alongside the concerning ones around data and security. It was nice to see where the Linux Foundation was taking action to make sure we continue having an open source driven future. My favorite keynote of the morning was from Sean who talked about, you guessed it, IBM Quantum! Not only was I personally delighted to see Sean up on stage, I’ve always been fascinated by Quantum computing and have enjoyed seeing the progression over the past several years. His talk gave a whirlwind tour of the ecosystem and presented opportunities for developers that are still being offered by IBM. Also, it was a nice break from AI talks. Google and Microsoft also spoke on AI-related topics, with Microsoft also happening to mention an update around Azure Linux, which Steven Vaughan-Nichols helpfully covered here: Microsoft surprises with its first server Linux distribution: Azure Linux 4.0.

The next few talks I attended were around Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs), the first was a panel around scaling them, where I was happy to see a wide range of experiences presented from across industries, including Ford, Geico, and CISCO, with a moderator from GitHub. There’s definitely a trend of using AI tooling to help the work in OSPOs, especially as the work and importance of these organizations grow. I also enjoyed Dawn Foster’s talk on “Strategic Approach To Demonstrating the Value of OSS Efforts” where she presented the highlights of the Demonstrating Organizational Value Practitioner’s Guide that she co-wrote.

From there I dipped into a couple of MCP talks, starting with Automating MCP Server Testing from Neethu Elizabeth Simon of Arm. It was an interesting talk overall, but my big takeaway was the server she demonstrated with: the Arm MCP Server, which is “An MCP server providing AI assistants with tools and knowledge for Arm architecture development, migration, and optimization.” Cool. I took notes and was texting with Rishi about how we might be able to leverage something similar in the s390x world. From there I went to a talk on ContextForge in the context of managing MCP sprawl. It was also a timely talk for me since we had just on-boarded the project to our GitHub Actions runner a few weeks before and I’d been meaning to learn more about it. Done! It was also nice seeing Dave Neary and his What Developers Should Know About Hardware Architecture talk, where he throws out lots of interesting facts about things that matter in architectures, along with other topics like just how slow spinning disks are, especially compared to CPU caches.

Monday evening was the conference reception at the Mill City Museum. It’s a museum I had wanted to go to anyway, so I was happy to learn that was the reception venue. It was a nice museum about the history of flour milling in the city, and the elevator they converted into a “ride” that takes you up and down several floors through a history of the mill was an absolute delight. The views from the top where you’re let out were beautiful, especially since the rain hadn’t rolled in yet! Unfortunately, the rain did eventually come in, just as the scheduled drone show for the 35th anniversary of Linux was to start. The drone show still happened, but it wasn’t really dark enough and drizzle quickly turned into a thunderstorm.

Tuesday’s keynotes got us back in the realm of AI, with talks on Strands Agents from AWS and AI used in robotics. They also had a panel on the value of open source software foundations for projects, which surprised me as a keynote topic for an open source conference, because most of what was covered struck me as pretty basic, and I think a lot of folks in the audience had experience engaging with projects within foundations.

From there I went to a talk on Package Testing Across Distributions and Architectures at Scale where the presenter walked through a move away from dozens of servers and consolidated on x86 and arm64-based cloud servers, using Ansible Molecule. Alas, not immediately applicable in our s390x porting work, but it was an interesting tour of what they had done and how much disk speed impacts package building performance. An afternoon session from the OpenSSF that gave a whirlwind tour of their projects was also interesting, since it can be a little tricky to keep up if your day to day work is unrelated to security.

That evening was the Tux Trek in the expo hall, and in addition to some great conversations, including one where I got to nerd out about mainframe stuff to someone who was curious, I got a tux cotton candy! I then got to have dinner with Rishi and a colleague who I didn’t expect to see there: Cheryl Fillekes! She’s worked on various OpenShift products for Linux on IBM Z, and we’ve connected on various topics over the past several months (mostly when I needed something, hah!). It was really nice to meet her in person. I was also pleasantly surprised when she suggested our dinner adventure should include finding some Guinness 0 (non-alcoholic). You see, I’m a beer fan, but I got a bit sick back in March and have been taking a break from drinking until I feel better. Guinness 0 was a nice treat, and surprisingly good!

Day three began with the obligatory keynote discussion with Linus Torvalds, followed by another keynote about AI agents, but this time with a focus on specifically how they can help open source software maintainers. I really enjoyed Kate Stewart’s keynote on the Zephyr project though. Zephyr has been on my radar for a while, but playing with it is another one of those projects I am not sure I’ll get around to anytime soon. But hey, it turns out my RISC-V board is supported by Zephyr! That gets me one step closer!

The final keynote on Free to Use, Not Free to Run: Reinventing Package Registries is one that stuck with me. Basically, open source communities are running registries (PyPI, RubyGems, crates.io, etc) that companies using the ecosystem depend upon, but they’re becoming expensive to run, and projects are now hyper-aware of security and supply chain concerns that they need to take very seriously. So they’ve launched a Sustaining Package Registries Working Group to discuss concerns, and develop solutions together, up to and including starting to charge for industrial scale traffic. I’ve seen the thankless work that goes into things like PyPI. Helpfully, Stephen wrote about this too: 10 trillion downloads are crushing open-source repositories – here’s what they’re doing about it.

Most of the rest of my day was spent meeting up with people, but I also happy to make it to Rob Landley’s Building the Simplest Possible Linux System talk. I’ve seen Rob speak a few times over the years, and I love the enthusiasm for the work that he brings to it. He’s also been friendly in the realm of s390x porting, and I was delighted to see on his screen as he was preparing to begin that the emulated build he had up on the screen was s390x.

I talked a lot about sessions in this blog post, but ultimately what makes these events is the people. Connecting in person make a huge difference, and there were a lot of people I saw there who I hadn’t seen in a couple years. And this time I made sure to take lots of pictures!

With that, the summit came to an end. To close things out, I went out to enjoy another round of Guinness 0s with Cheryl before it was time to call it an early night before my 7AM flight home the next morning.

Thursday I was able to spend time after the conference going to World of Coca-Cola, a Coca-Cola museum located just blocks from the Coca-Cola headquarters in Atlanta. I have mixed feelings about paying for a museum dedicated to a brand. And felt even worse about it when the introductory video to the museum was a montage of sweet human stories that make you cry, oh, and all these people have a Coke, because Coke is part of life. Wow, big ick. Couldn’t you just give me something informational instead of making me feel like I’m being manipulated?

Anyway, I do appreciate the historical aspect of Coca-Cola as part of Atlanta and American history and I like history. And even though I’ve joined the bandwagon of eschewing soda consumption these days for health reasons, I do really, really like Coca-Cola. Sigh. So I enjoyed walking through history a bit and learning about the company and the “secret formula” story was amusing. Worth the time and $25? No. I probably should have looked for a more interesting way to spend my afternoon. But at least I can answer in the affirmative next time someone asks if I’ve been!

Still, I got the $5 cup which allows you to take a full cup of whatever region soda you want to-go. Royal watermelon soda from the Philippines is pretty great and I enjoyed it as a treat as I sat in the Centennial Olympic Park for a little while to read.

That evening I hopped on MARTA to meet some family for dinner at Fox Bros Bar-B-Q. I was actually born near Atlanta because that’s where my father was working for a few years, and it’s not too far from where my uncle (father’s brother) and his family lived, and still live. I was able to reach out to them and gather my aunt and uncle, as well as my three cousins. It’s been a very long time since we’ve all gotten together, so I was grateful they were able to make the time. Plus, we’re basically a whole crew of liberal tech nerds (my uncle retired from IBM), so I truly enjoy spending time with them.

I woke up around 3AM the next morning to catch the first of two flights that would take me to Minneapolis. It was an easy journey, even with a connection, and I was in Minneapolis by noon. That gave me time to check into my hotel, walk over to Target for some breakfast food to have during my stay, and then hop right back on the Metro for my first adventure: The Mall of America.

It’s an unusual destination for me because I don’t really like malls, but it’s the biggest mall the country so it’s also a bit of a tourist attraction too. The big draws for me were the M&M store and the Lego store, both on behalf of my kiddos. Aaron’s favorite clothes over the past couple years have been his LOTS OF M&Ms hoodie and pants, and he was pretty sad when he grew out of his M&M hoodie (twice, I bought a second when he outgrew the first). I bought him pants when he outgrew the hoodie, but he was also outgrowing the pants! I was thrilled to find everything at the mall.

The Lego store was honestly a bit underwhelming. They had some big Lego builds on top of the store, but inside? Just a Lego store. It would be fun if stores in interesting places did exclusive things, but the only thing they had was custom mini-figs which had the city on it, which was fine. I made a couple of those for the boys.

I think a big draw of the mall is that it basically has a small amusement park inside it, complete with indoor roller coasters. That’s fun, but I’ve also been to the West Edmonton Mall which also has a lot of this and I did ride a roller coaster there, so I didn’t feel compelled to partake this time. I 100% would have done Moose Mountain Adventure Golf if I wasn’t there alone though, that looked like fun.

On Saturday I decided to go to the Minnesota Zoo. It’s a large zoo and I was able to pretty easily take public transit there (train + bus), even if it took a while. I realized as I was plotting out my route that I wasn’t actually crunched for time for the first time in a while, so I brought along my ebook reader and enjoyed reading during my journey through the Minneapolis suburbs. It was nice. The weather was nice too, it was sunny and in the 70s, making it perfect weather for walking around. I only spent a couple hours there, and started by checking out the penguins. From there, I decided to walk the 1.25 mile loop on the Treetop Trail, which gives you a pretty good glimpse of several of the exhibits from above. I was delighted to be able to see a tiger taking a swim with my lofty view!

It’s also just a nice nature walk, and Minnesota has some really nice nature to enjoy. From there I walked down to Grizzly Coast where I got pretty close to a big bear. Very cute. I concluded my day by having lunch at the zoo cafe and got my first round of fried cheese curds and local root beer. Yum. And then it was back on the bus to make the journey back.

Saturday night I had tickets to a Twins game. I enjoy baseball games, and I have gone to them on my own, but I wasn’t sure about this one because I also enjoy resting and it had been a busy couple of days! Then I learned it was Star Wars night. Well, now I have to go! I’m glad I did, it was a beautiful evening for baseball.

And I might not have gotten the Star Wars night Grogu bobble-head (those tickets were long sold out), but I did get a cool Luke and Leia Twins t-shirt (you see, they’re TWINS!).

And with that, my side quests came to a conclusion. Sunday I started meeting with folks who were in town for the Open Source Summit, which is how I spent the rest of a great week.

This year we were just a small component of the booth, and had a monitor that was set up for going through technical demos (shared with Storage and Cloud), and a small table in front I could put my conference laptop on to walk attendees through an activity. But we could work with that.

First stop in prep: Activity criteria.

As an open source advocate, my goal was to bring in as much open source to the activity as possible. Leadership wanted a demonstration of Red Hat OpenShift AI. And so began my search! IBM Z has an excellent technical sales department and we also have a variety of teams that do cross-training across the company and out to our clients, so I knew there would probably be something out there that I could use. It took a few weeks, but I was finally introduced to Artem Minin who presented a workshop at SHARE late last year, and a portion of which beautifully met my expectations. As a bonus, it not only relied upon LinuxONE, but the new IBM Spyre card that I hadn’t had an opportunity to interact with.

Over the next few weeks Artem took the time to prepare the environment and run some tests based on my own criteria, using an IBM z17 technical document I prepared as a source for AI-driven document summarization and AI assistant engagement with the material. The goal was to use the open source tooling defined in the diagram above to integrate with OpenShift AI, all within the confines of your mainframe environment. Effectively, critical, secured data doesn’t need to leave your mainframe to benefit from leveraging the latest models and AI tooling. Once Artem got me access to the system, he was kind enough to more carefully walk through it all with me so I was able to rewrite his documentation from the SHARE workshop into a more concise document for use at the booth. Plus, Artem was able to join me at the Summit! On my end, I prepared the laptop with a fresh Ubuntu install, got the VPN we’d need set up, and prepared all the materials on the desktop to be ready for the summit. I also tossed a bright orange, 3D-printed IBM LinuxONE 5 and am [unofficial] Lego Telum II in my backpack so I’d have some props at the booth.

I arrived in Atlanta on Sunday afternoon, and had the pleasure of meeting up a few IBM Z colleagues for dinner at a local Mediterranean restaurant.

On Monday I got everything set up at the booth and by the time we opened at 2PM, we were ready!

It was a busy week at the booth. Artem and I swapped off shifts Monday through Wednesday, with Leon stepping in as well, and Catherine Guo from LinuxONE Marketing supporting us (and bringing some new LinuxONE swag!). Several others from the IBM Z and LinuxONE team came by throughout the week too, some of whom were participating in the broader event through talks and other client-focused direct engagements. IBM also had a firm come in to help with booth traffic, and they were great at starting conversations with attendees that lead to finding the right place for them at the IBM booth, including with us!

With Catherine and Artem

With Amit and Leon

With Amparo and Latasha

On Tuesday and Wednesday I had the opportunity to attend the keynotes. As expected, they were heavy on AI with some things like the RHEL Long-Life Add-On (offering even longer support for the distribution) sprinkled in. It was nice to also hear from users like NASA and Nissan.

Tuesday was also the day that I kind of hijacked the monitor where we were showing off demos. But listen. Storage was very happy to chat with folks around the giant interactive box they brought to show off near life-size storage demos, and Cloud wasn’t actively staffing the booth. Plus, I told everyone they could take it back to show off the tech demos whenever they wanted. The result was the lovely “Hero video” of the IBM LinuxONE and Spyre card running on a loop and looking really nice at the booth.

The conference wasn’t all work though. During my breaks I was able to explore the expo hall, which gave me time to catch up with folks from the community I’ve worked with throughout my career. It’s always nice to see how many people I’ve worked with through my involvement with Ubuntu and OpenStack are still around, and to find an opportunity to catch up. I never had much of a social life outside of a handful of very close friends, so these bonds I’ve made through contributing to open source are very important to me, and attending these conferences to connect in person gives me a nice burst of connection that I really long for.

The expo also had some fun little activities to do, like assembling a gardening kit that would go to children in the area and free play with white and red Lego bricks, which I really enjoyed as a decompression activity.

The conference reception was also a lot of fun. It was held a the Georgia Aquarium, which I hadn’t managed to go to! I missed the OpenStack Summit in Atlanta due to an unexpected surgery (gallbladder) and the last time I was in Atlanta was for TechU the first week I was at IBM, and I was juggling a bit too much at the time to enjoy any local attractions. But you know me, I love zoos and aquariums. The Georgia Aquarium is notable because they have a whale shark, and they’re the only facility in the Americas to have one. That means I’d never seen one! They are huge. It is quite the experience to get up close and see one gliding by, and I highly recommend it if you’re in the area. They also have belugas and penguins, and as an all adult event, the bravest among us crawled through the penguin tunnel to get a close up look at our favorite birds. I saw some people throughout the evening, but I mostly did the event solo, which was perfectly find for me as I enjoyed an evening communing with water-loving critters.

We’ll see if I continue doing these events. Booth work is a lot, and I think I can dig up other expertise within the organization, depending on what the focus is next year. I always enjoy it though, it gives me a deadline to learn a bunch about our latest tech, and in this case actually use a Spyre card in our booth activity, something I wouldn’t necessarily get to do in my day to day work.

Huge thanks to everyone who made it possible for IBM to participate this year, and it was a nice start to my two city journey for this trip. What was the next stop on my itinerary? Minneapolis for the Open Source Summit! But I’ll write about that later.

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.