IBM does cool stuff, and looking back, this is no surprise given the portfolio the company has had since inception. There are a few conferences where this is showcased, but IBM TechXchange is the one that they’ve had a lot of fun with that’s targeted at developers and other folks who are deep in the […]
Archive for the ‘work’ Category
Mainframe Open Source at IBM TechXchange 2025
November 7th, 2025 by pleia2
One of the highlights of my year at work these past couple years is helping organize The Open Mainframe Project presence at the IBM TechXchange conference. Our event main is held on Monday, during the community or user group day, and every year we’ve been able to make the process more streamlined, make more connections […]
Philly summer 2025 begins!
July 21st, 2025 by pleia2
Our flight to the east coast on June 19th didn’t quite go as planned. A massive storm on the east coast caused an hour delay leaving San Francisco, and then we were circling in the midwest for another hour as they waited for it to calm down further. The plane then went south and we […]
Our IBM LinuxONE AI Arcade & more at the Red Hat Summit 2025
May 29th, 2025 by pleia2
Back in 2019 I participated in my first Red Hat Summit. It was my second week working at IBM, and the whole thing was quite a whirlwind tour of exploring a vendor-specific event and getting to meet a whole bunch of people at IBM who I’d come to know a lot better in these past […]
IBM z17 and LinuxONE 5 launches
May 13th, 2025 by pleia2
One of the several things that has kept me very busy at work lately is the launch of the new IBM z17 and it’s sister system, the IBM LinuxONE Emperor 5. I have a lot of fun with these launches, but they’re also a lot of rather high-stress work based around tight deadlines, regardless of […]
SeaGL 2024
December 23rd, 2024 by pleia2
Back in 2018 I attended my last conference before we welcomed our first child, the Seattle GNU/Linux conference (SeaGL). I was about 5 months pregnant and gave one of the keynotes! It was a great final adventure before parenthood, and I’m grateful to have had the opportunity. I wrote about it more here: SeaGL 2018. […]
Lego, hardware, and a typewriter at IBM TechXchange 2024
November 21st, 2024 by pleia2
One of the things I’ve learned in my five years at IBM is that the enterprise nature of the company means that our IBM-branded events are incredibly important to our ecosystem, and people are really excited to attend them, me included. Brand events are something I’ve definitely seen in my two decades in the tech […]
Open Mainframe Project at IBM TechXchange 2024
November 19th, 2024 by pleia2
A few weeks ago I had the privilege of traveling to Las Vegas to participate in the IBM TechXchange 2024 conference. My big project there was as one of the leaders of the Open Mainframe Project event, which we’d been working on for months and took a bunch of my time (and stress!) during that […]
IBM Telum II at Hot Chips
September 12th, 2024 by pleia2
Back in 2021 the IBM Telum processor, the heart of the IBM z16 mainframe, was unveiled at Hot Chips (video here). I watched the recording when it came out, absolutely glued to each little detail that was presented, even the ones I didn’t fully understand (after all, I’m not that much of a processor expert). […]
Open Source Summit 2024
May 1st, 2024 by pleia2
My journey to the Open Source Summit North America came on the tail of the Texas Linux Fest, so I flew to Seattle from Austin on Sunday afternoon. A quick ride on light rail put me in downtown Seattle where a short walk got me settled in to my hotel that I’d call home base […]