In order to celebrate hitting the milestone of 60 years since the release, IBM hosted internal events around the world. I happened to be in Philadelphia during the celebration day on Thursday, April 4th, and decided to make the trek up to the place where much of the research and development, and ultimately the launch, happened back then: Poughkeepsie, NY. I’d been to the office once before, back in 2019, but I was definitely overdue for another visit to the IBM mainframe homeland. This was a perfect opportunity.

I took an Amtrak up from Trenton, through New York City where I was treated to visiting the beautiful new Moynihan Train Hall at Penn Station.

From there I enjoyed the second leg of my journey that took me straight to Poughkeepsie, where I was met by the social media famous Pasquale “PJ” Catalano, who brought me to the office and introduced me to folks who worked on the test floor. Then I got to visit the test floor itself! He posts about it frequently on social media, what feels like a rare and remarkable glimpse inside an IBM facility, so I had a passing familiarity with various locations, but an in-person visit is something else entirely. 200+ mainframes humming away in various states of testing, it was like nowhere I’ve ever been!

It’s also a lovely datacenter. It’s obviously an active, used, test floor, but it’s well-organized and tidy, clearly the team has a level of discipline that many production data centers would envy. I think part of this comes from the culture at IBM in general, but I’m sure some of it is also hard-won from experience, if you fail to label something or are careless about routing, it will come back to haunt you, and waste a lot of time in the future.

I got to hold a memory chip and a heatsink for an IBM Telum for the first time!

Plus an actual dual-chip module holding a couple Telum chips (I had previously held just a Telum in a case back at TechXchange in September).

I got to check out a rack-mount z16 for the first time.

And to my delight I finally got to see the beautiful IBM LinuxONE doors!

Visiting the mainframes of today felt to be a truly fitting way to honor the 60 year legacy of the IBM System 360, but after getting to see some other mainframe goodies while PJ got some work done, we made our way to the cafeteria for the real party. The IBM Corporate Archives had put together a whole hallway of displays!

They even graciously honored PJ’s request to open up the IBM System 360 they had on display and let us get some pictures “inside” it. Bliss!

Let me tell you, I had a wonderful time geeking out with these folks. I’ve always loved history, and with my work in this space I’ve developed a true appreciation for how legendary IBM is, and this is the heart of it. I also fear I talked the ear off of one woman from the archives who had a typewriter skirt on, as I shared all about my collection. Next time I’m in Poughkeepsie I’m definitely going to ask to see their own typewriter and mechanical calculator collection.

From there we grabbed some lunch and then went to the celebration itself. I ran into several folks I didn’t know worked out of Poughkeepsie, so those were all delightful surprises. Career-wise I’ve definitely gained value in meeting up with colleagues in-person from time to time, as it really does help solidify those bonds that keep us working well together at a distance. I also finally got to meet our fearless leader in IBM Z and LinuxONE, Ross Mauri!

And then there was cake! After which I took some time to meet with a couple other colleagues, and concluded my day meeting with a long time friend who came down to visit from the IBM Quantum division. We had coffee and then he graciously dropped me back off at the train station for my 5:30 train back to Trenton.

In all, a long day but one that was incredibly satisfying. And I already have a list of people to talk to and things to see during my next visit, maybe some time over the summer?

First up, I arrived in Raleigh on Saturday, so that evening I took myself out to dinner at Death & Taxes. I mentioned in a previous post that I’ve found great joy in solo dining while I’m traveling, and in this case one of the benefits shown through: it was a Saturday night and I didn’t have reservations, but they could squeeze in a single diner at the kitchen bar! There I enjoyed bread, oysters, and a lovely mussels dish before retiring back to my hotel room for a relatively early night.

On Monday I enjoyed some noteworthy food thanks to The Mecca Restaurant for lunch. It was an incredibly classic little southern place where I enjoyed fried shrimp, mac & cheese, cole slaw, and hush puppies, and I was full for ages.

Sunday and Monday were solid conference days, but Tuesday morning I ducked out for a couple hours in the morning to visit the IBM office in the Research Triangle Park (RTP).

The video I was recording was a 5-minute YouTube lightboard video with about Linux on IBM Z, with a focus on some of the features that can be enjoyed by using the combination. It turns out, these videos take a tremendous amount of time to assemble. The content is outlined, then you diagram out what you want to write on the lightboard during the video, and then you chop 75% of that content because it doesn’t fit in a pithy video. Plus, for someone like me who is more used to conference talks rather than YouTube videos, delivery has to be turned around a bit to keep interest of a distracted online audience watching the video. It all comes together in a couple prep calls prior to arriving in the studio, and then during the 2-3 hours spent together on the day of. Phew! The video should be released soon, but in the meantime my colleague Wyatt captured this behind-the-scenes glimpse of our recording:

Tuesday evening had me out enjoying sushi and a sake flight with a friend post-conference. The next day was our virtual IBM Z Day 2023 and I needed a place to work that was quiet and had good internet. So I was up bright (well, it was still dark) and early to walk a couple blocks to the Red Hat office in downtown Raleigh. I had scoped it out earlier in the week to make sure I could get in, and things went pretty well.

I was settled in to a small meeting room by the start of the event at 8AM, and was able to participate fully in the whole virtual event. The event itself went well too, our speakers showed up and delivered solid content (which is always a relief after months of putting it together!) and we only a few technical issues, which our speakers and panelists handled like the professionals they are.

When the event concluded, I had just enough time to meet up with a friend for an hour at the nearby North Carolina Museum of History. It’s a lovely museum with a lot of notable exhibits and items, like the 1920s Drugstore and the North Carolina A to Z exhibit – which had a COVID-19 component! I wish I remembered which letter it was, but it cataloged some of the historic diseases that have plagued (see what I did there?) the region, and the response to and innovations that came out of it in North Carolina. They had an iron lung made famous from the polio era, information and artifacts around the 1918 pandemic and yellow fever, and a few artifacts from the COVID-19 pandemic, including telling the story of how we created home-made fabric masks at the beginning when there was so much uncertainty. We’re all always living through historical events, but seeing it so meticulously laid out alongside other major health crises made me a little emotional.

After the museum we went over to Brewery Bhavana where I enjoyed some delicious sour ales and a wonderful dim sum menu.

The morning of my flight I was able to make one last delicious stop, at Big Ed’s Restaurant. Eggs, potatoes, turkey sausage, and a giant buttery biscuit accompanied by a sweet tea? Yes, please!

In all, it was a great trip. Great technical events, fun office visits, lots of good friends and food, and even some precious down time and rest by making sure I went back to my room at a reasonable hour. I’m so glad I was able to make this trip before the chaos of Halloween and the holiday season descended upon my schedule.

The first week I was with IBM I went to IBM TechU. Given the technical nature, the new IBM TechXchange conference feels like the spiritual successor to this event, so I was really happy to have the opportunity to attend this inaugural event. I will start out by saying it was personally a real pleasure to finally meet so many people I’ve worked with over the years in person, so it was a bit of a selfie extravaganza!

Naturally, after the event you realize how many people you didn’t get photos with, especially and paradoxically, if you spent a lot of time together! Next time, my friends.

To set the stage for the week I attended a few keynotes here and there. The first was In a world where AI writes code, what is the role of the developer? following much over-hyped discourse around the obsolesce of developers if AI is writing code. It has long struck me as an odd position to take, so it was nice to see IBM pushing hard against it and stressing how importance it is to have humans in the mix who can focus on the problems that computers simply can’t solve. We still get all the interesting work, and there will always be more of it. I’m looking forward to using AI-infused tools to help me write Ansible playbooks for scenarios that I’m not fully familiar with the syntax of yet.

The thing about the keynotes is that they’re recorded, so I could go back and watch them later. Since there were regular, unrecorded sessions happening during the keynotes, I generally preferred to take advantage of my on-site presence there to attend those instead. Since this was my first time at this event and it had been quite some time since I’d been to an IBM-focused event, I decided to focus on my particular area of interest, IBM Z and LinuxONE, rather than branching too much out into other sessions around Power or Quantum. Part of my role at this event was also as a room moderator, so there were several sessions that I was required to be at, thankfully the colleague who was assigning the room monitoring duty was aware of our interests and they were sessions I wanted to be in anyway.

Of particular note, were the sessions about the rack-mount IBM z16, and there were a pair of sessions that dove deep into this. The first was Explore IBM Z’s first-ever rack mount options for IBM z16 and IBM LinuxONE by the legendary Kenny Stine. It was a real pleasure to meet Kenny after years of me begging him for technical review and early access to IBM Z internals photos so I could prepare my technical “tour” blog posts that I publish on IBM Developer. Given that I’m already pretty deep into the technical territory here, including a blog post on the topic, I knew what I was getting into when I joined his session, but I always leave these with a few more tidbits than I knew before. In Kenny’s talk I really benefited from the historical perspective that he brought to the discussion as he was comparing the systems over time and explaining just how different the IBM z16 with the IBM Telum chip is from its predecessors.

Bonus, he had a Telum chip with him that he passed around the audience. It was my first time getting to hold one!

The other talk of note on this topic was Interactive Step-by-Step Planning for new rack mount format for IBM z16 and LinuxONE 4. This session featured hands-on experience from Jim Fyffe of Evolving Solutions, Inc. where they received a rack-mount z16 and shared the unboxing, installation, and general impressions of putting it into production. I listened to an IBM z/Action! podcast that he was on back in July, but I loved this presentation because it had photos of their installation process! And a lot more details than the 20 minute podcast. Plus, I learned about the IBM z16 Rack Mount Bundle (3932-AGZ) section of the documentation that has lots of cool documents around installation, port planning, and cabling best practices. I’m not even being sarcastic, I used to work in data centers and this stuff is pure gold when you’re planning a setup.

I went to several sessions around implementation of a hybrid cloud design, with the mainframe remaining a key component of the infrastructure while bringing in cloud-based services, and Kubernetes. One of the last sessions I went to of the entire event was even focused on breaking up the monolith, and clarity around the journey you’re about to embark on if you’re migrating very old systems that still work.

I was also invited to participate in an open source on IBM Z panel on Tuesday afternoon, “From Ansible to Zowe: Opening the mainframe for a modern, scalable, inclusive & secure enterprise.” Due to shifting travel schedules, the panelist lineup was shuffled up a bit last minute, so I was a late addition and we only had a single sync up call prior to the panel. Thankfully, Joe Winchester was a great moderator, all of us panelists seemed to work quite naturally together, and we had a thoughtful and engaging audience.

The event featured a “Sandbox” which was basically an Expo Hall where IBM, partners, and related organizations showed off their latest featured products. It was particularly fun for me though because I finally got to “meet” the life-size IBM z16 LEGO model! Since I first learned about it via Think 2023, I’ve been quite enamored with it and I even took some time to interview the masterminds behind it for a blog post on IBM community: All about the life-size IBM z16 LEGO® brick model!.

I even got my wish granted to flip the colors to “orange” so it was effectively an IBM LinuxONE (sans badge, bummer!).

It was also technically the first time I got to see an IBM z16 in person. I haven’t been traveling as much this year, so I haven’t made it to a client center or otherwise to see one, with the proper doors. This was the plexiglass version though, which has all the fun lights that allow you to see the internals.

It was the first event I’d been to since 2020 that lasted more than a couple days, so I received a fast refresher in what these longer conferences are like: tiring and inspiring! I walked away with a lot of notes based on conversations I had with people that inspired ideas and plans. Once this year’s IBM Z Day extravaganza is behind us and I have some breathing room, it’ll be great to get to work on those ideas.

The event was co-located with the 2023 IBM TechXchange Conference, which provided a venue and platform for the event.

The day began with a series of keynotes, led off by a welcome from IBM’s Jason Gartner, directly followed by the Open Mainframe Project Executive Director, John Mertic, who shared various stats and updates about the project.

From there, Joe Winchester showcased a series of clients, personas, and use cases for Zowe, which makes everything from critical operations to training easier on z/OS.

A diversity panel followed Joe, where several women from various aspects of the mainframe ecosystem offered up their experiences, and an ally on the panel shared how you can help support minorities in tech by elevating their voice and offering a seat at the table. The final keynote was on mentorship, and it was mine!

I was really thrilled to be asked to give this keynote session. I was wrapping up our summer session with a pair of great mentees when I pulled together this session, so it was especially nice to have that fresh experience as I put together an overview of the program, along with suggestions for both mentors and mentees. I have uploaded a PDF of my slides here: Open_Mainframe_Summit_-_Illuminating_Pathways_for_Our_Future_Innovators.pdf

Thanks to Sudharsana Srinivasan for taking a photo during my talk!

While I was there, I also was able to meet up with John Mertic who signed my copy of his book, Open Source Projects – Beyond Code. He also signed another copy of the book that another participant brought, and told us then that these were the first two he had signed, exciting!

Later in the day, I teamed up with my co-lead of the Linux Distributions Working Group, Sarah Julia Kriesch, to give a talk on the progress the group had made over the past year. Of particular note, we’ve continued on the path of collaborating on bug fixes and were excited about the launch of openQA for several of the distributions that includes the health of s390x too. It was also a nice time to showcase the new listing of Developer Resources available to open source projects for development on s390x. A PDF of slides from our talk are here: Open_Mainframe_Summit_-_Linux_Distributions_WG_2023.pdf

Throughout the day I spent a bit of time in COBOL sessions, learning about the latest with the COBOL Programming Course and how COBOL Check has been incorporated into the latest installment of their course. COBOL Check itself had a dedicated session, where we learned about how they were influenced by JUnit to support test-driven development for COBOL.

I also attended a couple sessions about work being done around z/OS Open Tools, which includes a sort of software “package” manager, and an example of how one organization is managing program versions and environment in production. I also enjoyed a session around hybrid cloud where IBM Z is being incorporated into environments that also include the cloud, with a strong focus on the use of OpenShift. In another sessions, they went deep into how they maintain air-gapped OpenShift deployments on IBM Z, an important topic that doesn’t just impact IBM Z, but is important to keep active for other environments that are more sensitive to network connections inside their environments.

In all, it was a very rewarding event for me. There were some great conversations and I have some new ideas of things to work on in the coming months. I had a debriefing meeting with the rest of the program committee this week about ways we can improve things for attendees, especially around making sure people know where/when the sessions are in such a big venue! I’m happy to chat with anyone who has further feedback though, so please do reach out.

In case you missed it, there will be a second Open Mainframe Summit coming up on November 1st in New York City, and co-located with Open Source in Finance Forum. I won’t be at that one, so I’ll need people to tell me how it went!

But I already had a z15, so I wasn’t going to use this STL myself. Or was I? I clearly now needed a LinuxONE!

A colleague (thanks Joris!) hollowed out the STL to make it cheaper to print, and I removed the Z. Voila! I had a LinuxONE file to send off to get printed.

In the future, I may try to get it printed in the color I actually want, but I went for a quick quote and cheapest printing option that made sense from Xometry. I also used their tool to shrink it a little so it was the same size as my z15.

(As an aside, I’d love to own a 3D printer some day, but they’re expensive and require maintenance and all kinds of things I don’t currently have time or space for. Maybe some day!)

Since it came in white, I had to spray paint it just like the first (see my previous post for paint details).

Then I had to put down a coat of white in the inset areas, since the orange paint wouldn’t show up well on the black.

I went with the Orange Golden Artist Colors acrylic paint, the same brand and type I used with the z15.

The orange ended up being quite a bit brighter than the real LinuxONE, but I’m OK with that. I’m using it in a lot of photos and social media, so it’s fun that it’s more visible. That said, the “LinuxONE” and “IBM” text was the trickiest part about this model. When I shrunk the design, the IBM logo got a bit too small, and I didn’t have anything for LinuxONE. Ultimately, both spots were too small for proper logos, so I kinda just winged it with “IBM” and just drew a couple of lines to represent the spot where the LinuxONE branding should go.

It turns out OK! I still need more practice on miniature painting, but it’s not meant to be a perfect model, it’s just a bit of fun.

So I had a bit of fun, first with some cloud and Linux photo shoots!

And one with the System/360 bannerhead I have (grandpa!)

And finally, in action. I “brought” them along to the recent IBM Z Day we hosted, and included them in the pictures I took during the event.

Want to join in the fun? Grab the STL file and print your own!

I’m also glad to have a little time to myself. I had a revelation one morning when I “got enough sleep” but was still tired, that it wasn’t just physical exhaustion that was hard on me. I am an introvert, and being with the kids all day gives me no time to recharge on my own. Now that I’m aware of that, I can be more strategic about rest. In most cases, if I’m up at 6AM and got over 7 hours of sleep overnight, it’s more restful if I get up and spend an hour alone before anyone wakes up, rather than attempting to sleep for another hour. I’m still tired all the time, which is unavoidable until the baby sleeps through the night, but at least I’m understanding myself more so hopefully I can handle it better.

Introducing kiddos to Studio Ghibli while I rested my sprained foot

Sprained foot aside, we did manage to have fun during my time off. The day before I sprained my foot, on May the 4th (be with you, Star Wars Day!), I dressed the kids up as little R2-D2s and we did a 5K walk around town. It was my first 5K with one of the virtual run websites, so I got my first 5K medal and everything! It was fun and I see more virtual 5Ks in our future.

I also received a case of sour beers for another virtual beer fest, but the event feed didn’t quite pan out, and after a series of failed streams they postponed it. Still, while I’m certainly looking forward to the pandemic being over, and technical glitches aside, this virtual stuff does have its benefits. As a new parent, beer fests are tricky to make time for right now, but one from the comfort of my own living room? And 5k I can do wherever and whenever I am able? I can do that!

Beer fridge in the garage, all stocked for the sour fest!

I’m trying to squeeze in some time for hobby projects. It’s so hard, but just like alone time, having a little hobby time is also important to my well-being. I decided to start playing with my SPARC Ultra10, which has been sitting in my home office since we moved in. I was pleasantly surprised to see it boot into Debian Lenny. So it still boots! And the hard drive was still functional! Of course Debian Lenny is ancient and I can’t keep running it, and Debian no longer supports SPARC64, so I’m going to have to install NetBSD on it. The next phase of my project was giving an install an attempt, but my CD-ROM started throwing errors. It’s old, so it’s not surprising. I think my next step will be giving up on the drive and doing a netboot install. Ultimately I’m not sure what I’ll do with the system once it starts running, but I am enjoying playing around, and I haven’t touched NetBSD in years, and never had a lot of experience with it.

In better health news, I got my 2nd COVID-19 vaccination a couple weeks ago, so I’m fully vaccinated! The side-effects this time were similar to last, but the exhaustion hit pretty hard and I ended up taking a three hour nap the next day. My life probably won’t change much though. With two unvaccinated kids at home, it’s not worth the risk to them just so I can do some indoor dining. With mask mandates being lifted state-wide in mid-June, things may actually become more dangerous for them inside public places, so we have to continue doing grocery and meal runs solo.

I also spoke to my boss about continuing the pause on travel. Thankfully, the company hasn’t even fully opened offices yet, let alone lifted all the work travel restrictions, but I wanted to get ahead of it in case I was expected to get back on the road before I believe it’s safe for our family. As the vaccines become available for the little ones and infection rates drop, we’ll continue to do risk analysis to see what we are comfortable with, but it’s good to know that I won’t have pressure on the work side in 2021. It’s also nice that my role has so many facets to it that while dropping the event travel is major, and even with other people start going to events in the fall, I’ll still be busy and effective without it in the short term. I have been doing some virtual events too. I did one for Mom Relaunch last week where I did a quick Linux on Z workshop. Next week I’ll be speaking at a virtual conference, giving a brand new talk on developing for non-x86 architectures. It feels good to be back.

As a quick aside, I learned about 3D printing services because one of the hobbies I wish I had time for is model railroading, so much so that I subscribe to a monthly model railroad magazine. Model railroad combines my interest in small electronics, Arduino type boards, 3D printing, and love for trains, so it’s a fascinating hobby that puts a bunch of the things I’d love to do into one package. In reading about model trains, there’s a lot of talk about “scratch” building of custom things for your model railroad layout. One of the things that makes this easier for model railroaders is 3D printer companies who will print, on demand, various parts for their scratch built items. Suddenly a world opened up for me. As much as I’d love to have a 3D printer, the truth is I have a lot of interests, a couple of small children, and very little free time. Until the kids are older, my options are limited. I had to seek out a 3D printing outfit if I wanted to print my z15 pencil holder, and so I did!

I went with Xometry because their quote process was simple and I didn’t need to research materials and whatnot. Since this was essentially a display item, I didn’t have many material requirements, and I figured this would just be the first of many baby mainframe models I’d be ordering. I ordered my model on April 15th, picked the slowest manufacture and delivery option (knowing I’d be taking a couple weeks off from work) and it arrived on April 23rd, much more quickly than I expected!

Since it arrived white, and we all know that IBM Z systems are black, my first step was painting it. I started with Krylon COLOR maxx spray paint in glossy black. When I do this again, I may see about getting it printed in black, because while this was not a very difficult step, the paint was strong-smelling and because I was rushing a bit (remember, 2 small kids at home!) I did end up with some drips.

From there, I went with a couple 2 oz tubes of Golden Artist Colors acrylic paints, one in Titanium White and another in Ultramarine Blue. Now that’s almost certainly not the exact blue of the z15 system, but it wasn’t bad!

I did some tests with the acrylic paints, and with the black base the white came out great, but the blue was too dark. So I was able to paint the “Z” and the “IBM” logos in white (though I believe strictly speaking the IBM logo should probably be silver?), and then the insets in the doors I first had to paint white.

From there, the coat of blue went on. I quickly learned that precision painting is a skill, and one I lack, even with a generic set of tiny paintbrushes. And again, I didn’t take as much time as perhaps I should have, because I was working on this in the naps and quiet time I had to myself between caring for the little ones!

Ultimately, this was super fun. But my next task? Getting permission to release these 3D printed files to the public, because I knew that my fellow fans of Z would be chomping at the bit to have one once I shared it. It took some time and being redirected to a few people, but I found the people I needed. They made a few adjustments to make it more in line with the design of the prototype, including closing the top. The design remains proprietary, but I secured the rights to share the file in public for anyone who wants to 3D print their own z15! You can hop over to the Fans of Z community where I posted this blog post: Print your own IBM z15 Model!.

I think my next project will be getting one print with this file. And do feel free reach out to me if you want to collaborate, or are interested in the original pencil holder files, and I’ll see what I can do. I’ve just started playing around with stl editors, so I have a ton to learn.

This year, with this extra background, I’m coming back with a hyper focus on Linux, and that’s making me appreciate the advancements with every Linux kernel and distribution release. Engineers at IBM, SUSE, Red Hat, and Canonical have made an investment in IBM Z, and are supporting those with kernel and other support for IBM Z hardware.

So it’s always exciting to see the Ubuntu release blog post from Frank Heimes over at Canonical! And the one for Hirsute Hippo is no exception: The ‘Hippo’ is out in the wild – Ubuntu 21.04 got released!

Several updates to the kernel! A great, continued focus on virtualization and containers! I can already see that the next LTS, coming out in the spring of 2022, is going to be a really impressive one for Ubuntu on IBM Z and LinuxONE.

Thankfully, there really is a light at the end of the tunnel now with the pandemic, and next year we should be able to celebrate with our community! Vaccines are being deployed quickly here in the United States and trials on younger people are progressing at a good pace. It will likely be the end of the year before our two very little ones can be vaccinated, but at least the rest of us will be able to get the vaccine soon and protect them from us bringing home the virus, even if it leaves things very uncertain with regard to family travel.

Before returning to work on April 1st, I managed to succeed in finding some toys for Adam out back. The first was a toy sink that cycles water and I discovered just how much Adam loves playing with water. He spent 45 minutes playing with the sink and various cups and buckets just pouring water between containers, that’s longer than he’s ever played with any toy!

I also got him a scooter, which he wasn’t super interested in until I got one too. We still have some learning to do, but they were both good purchases, I’m having more fun with mine than I expected.

On April 1st I returned to work. I took most of my maternity leave (I have eight months to use the rest), and it felt like the right time to return. I love my kids, but it was really nice to get back to mainframe stuff and having technical conversations again. I was lucky to have gone out right before the major US holidays, which means I was away while a lot of my other colleagues were also away around the holidays, so I didn’t miss as much as I would have if I took leave over the spring or fall. Even so, I am still working my way through my backlog of work, and it’s definitely going to take a couple weeks to get fully on top of everything.

With Aaron still using my office in the morning to nap (he uses the nursery in the afternoon, when Adam doesn’t need it), I’ve been enjoying all the working spots around the house I created. Most mornings I’m up around 5AM to squeeze in a couple hours of work before the boys wake up, usually from the living room couch. Then I’ll spend the morning working from MJ’s office, which is actually quite the comfortable place! He hasn’t been able to set it up much, so it’s a clean slate decoration-wise, which makes it a good spot for doing calls and presentations. After Adam’s nap, I regain access to my office and can finish my day in the late afternoon so I can do a few chores before taking over kiddo care from our au pair. I’m not going to say it’s been easy, especially since the early wake-up means I also need to go to bed by 9PM, but I’m making it work. I do look forward to the pandemic winding down though, the ability to outsource some of the house tasks again will be such a load off, literally in the case of laundry!

Finally, pandemic cooking hasn’t been a big thing here. We’ve really just switched to a lot more take-out. But I was inspired by some shortbread cakes at the farmer’s market on Saturday morning, and along with a bunch of strawberries, I had most of the ingredients for strawberry shortcake. Now, MJ doesn’t do great with dairy, so the final ingredient was a non-dairy replacement, which I found at the grocery store in Silk heavy whipping cream, made instead with cocnout. I don’t have high expectations for non-dairy substitutes, but this one really came through, it whipped up really nicely and tasted great!

I may have had strawberry shortcake for dinner last night as a result. No regrets!

In these four months I’ve seriously attended probably a dozen online meetups, seriously participated in four virtual conferences, and gave four talks. As a whole, I am grateful that we can still connect and share knowledge with each other, but I’m really struggling with them, so here are some observations about virtual events.

It’s hard to stay focused on the event

Literally everything else in my life at home is conspiring to pull me away from participating in a virtual event. My family is just outside my home office door. Laundry is out there. I’ve really been meaning to re-organized my desk. Hey, a package has been delivered! And now it’s time for lunch, which doesn’t sync up with a break at the event because I’m in the wrong timezone.

I got to choose my own lunch and had a nice view!
But the session I wanted to attend was still during lunch…

And my “regular” work is still happening. During in-person events, I chime in “at work” when I can, but generally my colleagues know I won’t be responding quickly because I’m engaged in the event and out talking with the community. This is much harder with a virtual event, I’m right there! And engagement is considerably less, so I do actually have the bandwidth to hop on a meeting or reply to a work email when the current session isn’t essential to my participation.

All the conferences I’ve participating in have also been in a different time zone. That means I’m starting work at 7AM, but it doesn’t mean I’m stopping at 3PM to make up for that, colleagues assume I’m still around to my regular end of day. The other day I started at 7AM for an event, but I needed a sync up with a colleague in China, and so my last meeting for the day began at 6PM. Even if I am more flexible about my schedule on any given day (not working for a straight 12 hours), it’s still a long day.

I don’t attend things that aren’t essential to my participation

I’ll back up to this comment I made a paragraph ago. When I’m at an event, I book meetings with people and take advantage of the hallway track, but I’m an introvert and sometimes I find myself with some time, so I’ll duck into a talk that I wouldn’t normally go to, but I have a passing interest in. Sometimes it ends up feeling like a waste of time, but more often I learn something interesting, make a connection (technical or personal), or simply am happy showing up as a friendly, supportive face in a talk being presented by someone I know. This hasn’t been happening with virtual events. I have simply been avoiding non-essential talks, and even when something interesting does pop up, my attention often waivers, or I end up replacing it with an impromptu work call or other work-related tasks.

The worst part about this is that I don’t feel the impact of this immediately. I’m just using my time efficiently! But after the event I feel like I didn’t get enough out of the event, and that it was sometimes an echo chamber. Even if I learn a lot about and contribute to my specific focus for the event, I missed out on so many other cool things happening in the tech world!

Travel

This is a double-edged sword. Traveling is tiring and takes me away from my family, and it’s so nice waking up in my own bed every morning! I absolutely appreciated that a conference was made virtual in the midst of my worst pregnancy morning sickness.

But I love traveling. With most trips I take at least a couple hours to soak in the local sights, pick up some gifts for the kiddo, send a post card. I get such joy out of wandering around the world, visiting places (new and old!) and visiting with people I can’t see at home. It makes the long, exhausting days worth it. I now find myself with a serious case of wanderlust.

Things that helped me

1. Shorter talks.

I can’t stress this enough. It’s incredibly hard to sit through a 60 minute talk at home. I suggest maxing out at 45 minutes, but 15-30 is better. And take advantage of the lightning talk format!

2. An integrated chat mechanism during talks.

I say integrated because I went to a conference where they had a Slack organization for the event, which certainly had it’s strengths. It allowed attendees to congregate prior to the event, lots of channels were created for fun and interesting topics, and it wasn’t all centered around the talks, which I appreciated, since conferences are more than that! But as a participant, there was a much warmer feel to the sessions when I could see attendees chatting away and answering each other’s questions during the talk (often directed at the speaker, but quality answers from the audience are great, too!). When I was giving a talk, having a mechanism for attendees to send questions to me that came up in a section of my screen also reminded me that people were there and actually paying attention enough to ask questions.

Integrated chat!

3. Live attendee counts.

Virtual events are incredibly isolating, both as an attendee and a speaker. I can’t say how valuable it was knowing I wasn’t actually alone, and as a speaker that I wasn’t just speaking into the void.

4. Single track.

This is not going to be possible for a lot of events, but I the ones I’ve participated in that have been single-track gave me a much stronger closeness with the fellow attendees. We were all participating in the same sessions throughout the event, speakers could reference previous talks, and you gained some familiarity with the moderators and active participants in the chat.

Single track! Timezone mentioned! Integrated chat!

5. Visible themes.

You don’t need to have all of your speakers dressed up in costumes (though that does make things more interesting!), but even small things that make you feel like all the presenters are at the same event helps. That can be a custom slide deck theme that all presenters use, or a little toy or printed sign the speakers place on their desk during their talk. Just a little something that shows continuity instead of staring into an endless parade of home offices, living rooms, and kitchens.

As an attendee, I’ve also come up with a “visible theme” myself that has helped. I aggressively take photos at events to share on social media, and I wanted that continuity as I attended virtual events, but who wants endless pictures of my monitor? Well, there was no avoiding taking pictures of my monitor, but I kept myself entertained by having an ever-changing cast of stuffed animals joining me next to my monitor. Sometimes they’d be topical, with a penguin for an interview with Linus Torvalds and the SUSE chameleon for talks by SUSE employees, but just as often they were random. The key was that I got up between sessions to raid my stash of toys and brought a new one to each talk, also trying to mix up the camera angle as much as possible.

SUSE chameleon! Themed event slides!

At the one event, I also dressed for the occasion! Each day I wore a different t-shirt from a past iteration of the event and tweeted a photo just before the keynotes.

First day of the Open Source Summit, I wore my t-shirt from the event the year before!

6. Clear schedules.

This is one that came up for a couple the more corporate events. The headline sessions were promoted and highlighted extensively on the site, but there was no grid view of all talks, and it was a struggle to find some of the more niche topics.

This was frustrating as a participant and a speaker. A topic I spoke on was a bit niche (mainframes often are!), so it was nearly impossible to find on the schedule, and there were a few talks I knew were somewhere on the schedule, but I didn’t manage to find. Ultimately, I skipped all but a couple keynotes for one of these conferences, and only spoke at my own talks for the other. These two didn’t make the cut for my list of conferences I “seriously participated in” as mentioned at the beginning of the blog post, because the lack of a clear schedule just made it to hard for the event to be valuable to me.

And please, include the time zone on your schedule!

7. Encouraging social media presence.

Again, it’s hard to be drawn in and “feel” an event without fun pictures, but you can still lead the way in encouraging social media participation. As the event itself, keep tweeting! Retweet posts from attendees! Are you an open source project? Take some screenshots and tweet about speakers on your project!

It felt so nice to get a series of tweets from the Open Mainframe Project (image source)

Not all bad!

There are definitely upsides to virtual events. Many of them are free, or significantly cheaper than their in-person counterparts, allowing more people to overcome the financial barriers in place for attending. You have the opportunity to attract a more international audience because people aren’t required to travel.

MainframerZ Meetup! London-based, but I can regularly attend now that it’s virtual.

Giving the opportunity to share knowledge with so many more people at the actual event, instead of just videos posted afterwards, is not something to be overlooked. I hope that our experience from this year can continue the trend of some conferences being virtual and so we have the tools and expertise to improve these experiences for the future. Already I’m seeing changes in platform technology, and with every virtual event I attend I get a new experience and new ideas about how to bring us all together.