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.

We arrived on Saturday night and were able to meet with my father in law for lunch the next day. MJ and I worked Monday through Wednesday while our new au pair settled in with the boys and started exploring the area with them (library! trampoline park!). As we prepared for the holidays, the boys and I set up the Hanukkah train (a vintage Lionel train) and put away the LEGO train we usually have out. When we were in town over the summer, we had stopped by Joe’s Train Station, our local train hobby shop, and picked up the Lionel Lighted FasTrack that we opened to use for the first time. Since our train is older, it didn’t come with modern FasTrack, and has a clip that went on the metal tracks, that also meant it didn’t have the standard power cable that’s often used. When I bought these lighted tracks, they also sold me the FasTrack Accessory Power Wire (6-12053) and I was left to figure it out myself. Thankfully, the model train community is very active! And eventually I found this post on Reddit helped me get the wires from my transformer connected the way they needed to be. I wish I had taken a better picture before I put the bottom plate back on, but it’s transparent so you can kind of see where I disconnected the power from where a plug would generally go, and replaced it with my wire. And then, voila! It works!

Well, it worked with some wires exposed and Adam was scared of being zapped (fair) so MJ put some connectors on the ends of the wires so we could not only more easily use the lighted track, but also switch back to the metal track easily. No more fiddly connections at all!

The light follows the train, now I just need to convince the boys not to put so many cars on the track at once.

Speaking of building things, the drawer on my desk has been unstable for a while, and finally broke entirely over the summer. I’ve been living out of some bins next to my desk, not optimal! MJ bought the wood and brackets needed to fix it, and the boys helped them with the repair this trip. Woohoo! A working drawer once again!

The boys have also been building a lot of Lego. I always thought that the skill levels for Lego sets were based solely on the complexity of the components involved, but we picked up a Bluey House set recently and there’s more to it. On the Bluey set the pieces are simple, but the instructions are also much more detailed and even show hands holding a specific piece and exactly where that single piece goes. I was helping Aaron (almost 5) build the house at first, but after a while he said he wanted to do it himself, and he did! So proud! Now he’s got the bug and wants to do a lot more.

On Thanksgiving we woke up and made Death Star waffles! And then I spent a big chunk of time in the afternoon making food for the potluck dinner we had at my sister-in-law’s house. I’m not much of a cook, but I could manage carrots, green beans, and stuffing, and everyone was quite happy with vegetarian brown gravy from a jar and cranberry sauce from a can. The dinner came together beautifully at her place and our usual chaotic family Thanksgiving was fun.

Being over there reminded Adam that she had a fire pit, so that’s how we ended up with an outdoor fire, in Philadelphia, in November. It was COLD! But I’m glad they got it going for him, they kids really enjoyed it.

As our visit wound down, we spent an evening at Astra Lumina, a nighttime walk through various light features in a forest in Jenkintown. We went with the parking option that used the shuttle, which we figured would be more fun for the boys anyway (yep!) and was a lot cheaper. The frequency of the shuttles made it quite a reasonable option. From there, we got to explore the lights! The boys love being outside and playing with lights in the dark, so it was a perfect mix of things they enjoy. It’s on the pricey side, but for us it was all worth it. Afterwards we had a great dinner at Vintage, a restaurant MJ’s grandfather was a fan of, and I had a spectacular seafood dish while Aaron fell asleep on the bench.

Following the weekend, it was back to work on Monday and then we packed up on Tuesday to fly home. If not for the kids going to school, we probably would have stayed through the winter holidays. Our next trip back east was just 15 days away.

That week my Aunt Mary Ellen and Uncle Joe were drifting through town following a conference in Napa and we made plans to meet up. The boys were excited by the prospect of a ride up to San Francisco, but then some plans shifted and it was rainy. We made the best of it though, instead of meeting up early for dinner, the boys and I took BART, MUNI
Metro, and then hopped on a Caltrain for a few stops before taking BART back downtown to meet for dinner. It was a lot of trains for what amounted to a big loop, but the boys have been asking to go on Caltrain for quite some time, and I figured this was the perfect opportunity. It was also a nice opportunity for us to pause and have some snacks since Caltrain is the one local train that they can eat on!

After the trains, I took the boys up to the roof deck at the condo (between tenants right now) to take in the gorgeous sights of downtown San Francisco at night. Adam actually gasped at the sight when we got up there. It really is beautiful.

We met MJ in the city and met my aunt and uncle for dinner at Fogo de Chao for a lovely dinner. It was really nice to see them, it was our fourth attempt to see them in the span of 18 months, which every other plan being ruined by illness (COVID, flu). We had a nice time finally catching up, and it was the first time that Joe was able to meet the boys, and the first time Mary Ellen met Adam. They boys did great, actually engaging in conversation rather than instantly demanding their phones for TV, which was nice. We definitely kept them up too late though, Aaron fell asleep on his chair toward the end, and they both zonked out in the car on the drive home. Carrying Aaron out of the restaurant, I completely forgot to get a family photo! Whoops. Next time.

The first week of November concluded by celebrating Gaby’s last birthday with us. I finally succeeded in making brigadeiro! With her help. And we picked up a custom cake that I had ordered the week before. Adam decorated, which is how we ended up with jungle animals on the tablecloth, hah!

We then had a rather chill Saturday that concluded by attending the Castro Valley Light Parade. It’s funny, we’ve lived in Castro Valley since 2018, but this is the first time I actually managed to see the parade! I was either working or traveling, and one year life with little kids meant we simply made it out of the house too late to see the parade. But I finally saw it!

Aaron got a light-up balloon that he swiftly asked me to hold (I’m glad we only got one!) and after about 45 minutes of parade the boys had enough and we walked out to our favorite restaurant just down the Boulevard. It was enough to get a nice taste of the parade though, and we really love enjoying events in town with the rest of our neighbors.

MJ flew out for a work trip later that night, so the boys and I had Sunday to ourselves as we did swim class, haircuts, and a trip to one of their favorite playgrounds. That evening, Aaron and I made banana bread for his monthly school project where he also got to draw the ingredients and take pictures. For a quiet weekend, it was surprisingly tiring!

We spent the week with normal life stuff, lots of school and work and random things like appointments, including a follow-up to check on Aaron’s infection (getting better!). The next day, he fell off his bike and landed on his face, earning him another visit to the urgent care. Thankfully, he was OK, having narrowly escaped getting stitches on his lip. Yeesh. Kids.

The next morning we were up bright and early for a Saturday morning garage sale! The boys and I go to a lot of garage sales, and Adam has been talking about his desire to have one of our own for over a year, but we’d never done one ourselves. We didn’t take the request very seriously because sitting in our yard for hours for a few bucks doesn’t sound like fun, but with Gaby heading back to Brazil soon she was looking to sell a bunch of things so she could have a lighter collection of things to bring home. Well, if Gaby wanted to do a garage sale, we might as well toss some of our things in too!

I don’t think I thought it through completely. Garage sales are actually quite a bit of work, from developing the listing online and putting signs around the neighborhood, to figuring out what we’ll get rid of. Then actually setting up, and then cleaning up when we were done! It was nice to get rid of a bunch of stuff, and the $100 we got for it was nice, but it wasn’t nearly enough to make me want to do it again any time soon. Next time we’re going to just make some donations, maybe sell the higher value things on a local Marketplace board or something. Don’t tell Adam, he’s already making plans for our next one.

That evening, we picked up our new au pair from the airport! She had a week of overlap with Gaby so she could settle in and get shown the kiddo care routines. I was grateful for all of this, since both MJ and I have been slammed with work lately, and it would have been a real challenge for either of us take off time from work right now.

The weekend wound down with a visit to our local Lego reseller shop where we all had some fun digging through Lego bins for a couple projects we have in the works (including one related to work which led to: “We have to go to the Lego store.” “Have to?” “It’s for work!” “I doubt it.” hah!). We also started prepping for our Thanksgiving trip to Philly and generally trying to get things in order for the winter holidays.

Mix in with all this, I’ve also been doing a lot more cat care than I expected. I haven’t written about it much here, but it turns out our beloved Zara came to us with a paw and tail wound that have been taking forever to heal. Her paw seems better now, but the tail wound became infected with MRSA and is proving to be a lot more stubborn. We’ve tried a whole slew of treatments which I’ll write about at some point, but it’s been a lot.

Still, she’s an absolute sweetheart who continues to love her wild human brothers, so she is still the right cat for us. Thankfully, as Gaby enjoys some vacation time before returning home, she agreed to watch Zara and take care of her, even taking her to a specialist vet visit that was really tricky the schedule. I hope she starts to heal up soon, but at least she’s in good hands while we’re in Philly this week.

To celebrate, I wanted to bring our success story and opportunity for projects to GitHub Universe this year. I was lucky that it was taking place in San Francisco, so there were no travel costs for me, and doubly lucky that the IBM team sponsoring the booth was willing to have me join them. It was a great experience working with the organizers and my fellow booth staff, we had representation from various parts of IBM so it was easy to direct attendees to someone helpful based on what they were interested in. For my part, I wish I had brought along a bigger sign saying something like “I give free stuff to OSS projects!” so the hobbyist contributors weren’t scared off by the more enterprise nature of IBM. Maybe next time. I was able to have some great conversations though, and could show off the work we’re doing with a screencast of the on-boarding process that I prepared on my tablet.

And I wasn’t the only mainframer there! Folks from Broadcom had a booth where they were showing off their Code4Z products that integrate into a standard VS Code environment.

It was a great event for me to be at to show off mainframe goodies to a distributed tech world that’s less accustomed to them. I was even able to clue in a few IBMers to the business we’re doing over in IBM Z land.

Personally, it was a wonderful event to be at to catch up with folks I haven’t seen in a while from across my tenure in open source.

I think my two biggest takeaways from the conference were 1. Wow, AI. and 2. How different conferences are when the talks aren’t necessarily the centerpiece.

Most of us in tech have a very different immediate relationship with AI than people in the general public. For us it’s less about results from ChatGPT and AI-created images, and more about what AI that knows how can code will do to transform the tech industry and what’s possible. We all knew that basic Python coding tasks would start to be replaced by AI, but we’re actually seeing that in practice now. No longer just autocomplete, we can vibe code a whole application.

One of the keynotes showed the presenter finding an old Bluetooth-enabled Furby in a closet and using an AI coding assistant to update an old open source software library so he could use it in 2025. The story here was that as a silly fun thing, he probably wouldn’t have ever had time to tinker with it, but now it’s easy. I’m not saying anything new here, and I do understand the difference between vibe coding a Furby and writing a production application, but in the near term it clearly will make some of the more mundane tasks easier to pass off to AI. I really would like one to automatically keep up on Node.js dependencies for me, it’s the most dreadfully tedious task.

All of this is to say that at the conferences I attended this year, I saw a real maturity turning point in the AIs-that-can-code realm. And GitHub is a big player here because of how integrated their code tooling already is in so many organizations, and throughout open source software communities.

Phew.

As for my second point, the talks not being the centerpiece. I’d say there’s still the spine of what holds the conference together, but there were fascinating experiences scattered throughout the event, both from vendors and from GitHub. The vendor booths was woven throughout all the buildings, and there was often a seamless transition between GitHub activities and vendors. One moment you’re designing your own Octocat sticker, and the next you’re getting a coffee while chatting at the IBM booth.

I enjoyed the building activities, our options were a GitHub light or a GitHub Copilot Lego model, and I went for the Lego. It was a nice little relaxing break from conference chaos.

The venue of Fort Mason was also lovely, and they had regular shuttles from downtown San Francisco which made the hurdle of transportation a more surmountable one. Both mornings I had an easy journey on BART to a shuttle that left from Embarcadero station. Once there, the gorgeous San Francisco weather we enjoyed offered the perfect backdrop. If I needed some air, I could walk down a pier and get a glimpse of the Golden Gate Bridge. They also cleverly placed a giant GitHub sign so that you could see beautiful Alcatraz Island through it.

They served good food and we had lots of places to sit and enjoy it. And after one tour through the main keynote building where I played a game to get a juice, I had no problem finding a shady spot to sit down and do a half hour of urgent work that I had to knock out.

The electronic badges were also a lot of fun. You had the option of getting one during registration, and they were little devices powered by an ARM SBC. As “hackable” badges you could play with them as-is, but also make some changes to the code included on them to do things like show your GitHub stats and they had a whole area with laptops that would allow you to do this (good thing, I can’t plug anything USB into my work laptop!). Once mounted on your device, they have a whole website of activities and other tools you can add to them. Cool. The scavenger hunt was also fun. I found they held a charge for about 10 hours, depending on use, so while I charged my overnight and took it off the charger at 7AM to head to the city, it barely made it to 5PM. I brought my digital badge home and it’s sitting here by my desk, maybe I’ll vibe code some new stuff for it, haha!

I’m certain that having such a fun and engaging space is all designed for encouraging brand loyalty. People have a great experience at these events in addition to learning things. I have always had mixed feelings about GitHub, and I still do, but some of the high points are definitely around usability, in spite of being built around Git, a tool that’s notoriously difficult to use! And usability includes feeling comfortable, which GitHub Universe did beautifully this year.

One evening after school we went over to the pumpkin patch and handful of carnival rides that we can see from the highway. It’s expensive for what it is, with the rides all being pretty quick and forgettable, but I kept our activities within some clear parameters as we all had a good time, even if I still hate bumper cars.

A week before Halloween was the Halloween carnival at the elementary school. This is always a fun one for the boys, and it was the first year that it was Aaron’s school too! As usual, they had lots of little activities set up around the schoolyard to play and win prizes at. I really enjoyed the photographer who got a great picture of the boys and I (rare, since I’m usually holding the camera!) and I’m grateful that the pumpkins the boys picked out from the little pumpkin patch there weren’t too big for the walk back to the car.

Over the weekend we met up with my friend James at Hiller Aviation Museum. With MJ traveling throughout a chunk of October, it was nice to have another adult join me on a Halloween-themed adventure! In this case, it was a pumpkin drop from a helicopter, because, why not?

They had kids sign their name on the pumpkin that would be dropped, which was fun until Aaron realized the pumpkin would be completely smashed upon landing, along with his name. Oops.

They had Halloween-themed games and crafts set up throughout the space, and then a “Haunted Hanger” with a TON of spooky decorations throughout their exhibit space. We enjoyed making our way through the exhibits before the pumpkin drop, but we wasted no time getting outside in time to see the pumpkin get loaded into the helicopter and take off.

They had everyone stand behind a temporary fence and look away as little rocks and dust were kicked up during take-off, and then we all got to go over to the runway fence to see the helicopter actually drop the pumpkin. It did a couple loops before the drop and I have to admit, the actual drop was a little anticlimactic. We were close, but a pumpkin compared to a runway is quite small! Still, it was an amusing activity, and if nothing else the boys LOVED being so close to a running helicopter. Me too.

See that little dot? That’s the pumpkin.

The next day the boys and I glimpsed outside to see some gloom and potential rain, but there was another Halloween activity to get to! The park next to the school the boys go to was hosting a Halloween Make-a-thon where kids got to go to various tables to do crafts. It’s the first year they did it, and all of the volunteers seemed pretty overwhelmed with the constant flow of kids clamoring to do the crafts – even with the threatening weather! I suspect they need a bit more organization and volunteers next year, but I see a lot of potential.

As the event wound down, we went to the indoor space where I enjoyed making Halloween-themed magic wands more than anyone else, but Adam got to finish his scavenger hunt, which was quite satisfying for him. When we went to leave, the rain had finally showed up, so we waited a few minutes for it to calm down before our soggy walk back to the car, but thankfully we didn’t get too wet.

The final activity before Halloween was pumpkin carving. After work on Thursday, the day before Halloween, was the time we chose for it because of how quickly the pumpkins grow mold here, even when outside in the shade. We had someone over who has been helping with the boys, and she was delighted to help Adam carve his giant pumpkin into a cat, and Aaron and I got to work on the bat design he picked.

The both came out beautifully, but I’m glad I didn’t give in to their request to carve any more, because as expected, the adults did the vast majority of the work. Still, we had fun and the boys were enthusiastic throughout the whole process.

And then it was Halloween! MJ was home for Halloween and donned a Zoo Keeper costume, since he’d be herding around a cat and a bat all evening as we trick-or-treated. I went with a witch costume, and joked we were going with the classics this year. Our old au pair and current au pair joined us for the evening as well, which was really nice. We stay always stay in our neighborhood for Halloween, which gives us an opportunity to see and meet neighbors.

We also have several neighbors who go all out with Halloween decorations and activities, some of which are scarier than others. And enough of our neighbors in general participate in the holiday so the walking:candy ratio is perfect for us.

The boys got to bed much later than expected as they raided their candy bowls, enjoyed handing out candy to other kids who came later, and generally got to enjoy spending time with Gaby and Rebeca. It was a great night.

But first, we decorated! I’ve been putting up Halloween lights for the past few years, and the boys have enjoyed putting up their own decorations that they buy at the dollar store or Target. Adam asked for a smoke machine and a lot more elaborate decorations, but he’s still only six years old and if carving pumpkins is any indication, I’d be the one doing all the work 10 minutes after he got bored with it, hah! Maybe in a few years.

The first Saturday was spent at Joan’s Farm and Pumpkin Patch in Livermore, which we arrived at just after they opened at 10AM. I’d been searching for an autumn activity with the boys that had the right mix of activities that we’d all be happy, but also wouldn’t be overly expensive. This place checked all the boxes. It was a little bit of a drive out to Livermore, but I got wristbands for the boys so they had unlimited activities, from a giant bouncy slide to pumpkin bowling, a corn maze, and hayrides.

They got to visit with animals on the farm, and pick out pumpkins, with Adam naturally picking one of the largest he could find. We even managed to get lunch there, which both the boys actually ate, before running off to activities again.

Back in town, we grabbed dinner at one of our favorite local restaurants before heading off to our evening activity: A dinosaur-themed unhaunted house at a local nature center! Parking was a bit of a nightmare and I don’t think we scheduled enough time to enjoy the Halloween carnival, but these are good things to know for next year. The unhaunted house was fun, with Aaron getting to pet some animals and all of us learning a bit about dinosaurs and their descendants.

The carnival portion was pretty cute, with various little stands set up where the boys could play games and then their favorite activity, jumping around in a big inflatable bubble with balloons floating all around.

We spent the next day closer to home. After morning swim class, the boys helped me replace the artificial grass in the back yard that we have covering a section of tile (mostly broken) and slab concrete we have out back. It’s not the solution I want for the back yard, it feels quite wasteful to change out the fake grass every few years, but until we can plan for a nicer back yard, this is a good middle ground to making it usable.

Adam also helped me rearrange the furniture and play things out there, which has all been a nice change. What was not a nice change was discovering wasps in our big umbrella out there, but fortunately the cooler weather seems to be dispensing with them naturally.

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.

Things kicked off on Monday as I worked with Maemalynn of The Linux Foundation to get ready for our full afternoon of Open Mainframe Project talks in two rooms beginning at 1:30PM. I want to start off by saying that I had a wonderful time on the Program Committee this year with Mae, Fernando Rijo Ceden, and Donna Hudi. We have fun together, and everyone brings a unique perspective to the line-up, any one of us missing from the committee this year would have changed the agenda quite a bit. Plus, we were all on top of last minute schedule changes due to speaker cancellations and adjustments that needed to be made. I think this comes from all of us deeply caring about the topic and community, which is so important

Lyz, Mae and Fernando, and I know Donna was with us in spirit even though she couldn’t make it to the event!

One of my favorite things was setting up a “birthday card” to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the project, where we had people write notes and sign their name – and they did! We had great support from speakers too who would remind people to sign it.

Birthday card part one, there was a whole second one!

Our rooms had a great location in the venue, right across from secondary registration at the Hilton. Sarah Julia Kriesch and I gave a talk in the opening time slot to a packed room – a trend that would continue all day. Next year we’ll request bigger rooms! We gave an update on the Linux Distributions Working Group and gave a lot of information about how others can get involved in the mainframe ports of various distributions. You can grab a PDF of our slides here: How_to_Contribute_to_Linux_on_the_Mainframe_-_IBM_TechXchange_2025.pdf

From there I saw Galasa talk from Louisa Denly. I’ve watched the progress of Galasa since before it was an Open Mainframe Project and it was being presented on Terminal Talk, back in early 2021. The induction into The Open Mainframe Project has been a great move to improve visibility to the project and do things like participate in the summer mentorship opportunities run by The Linux Foundation. Louisa’s talk covered some key ways that the project has progressed technically, and it was really great to see.

Then Kathleen Nordstrom of Broadcom gave a talk on “Skill Up! Mainframe Learning for All” where she quickly covered the work of the Mainframe Open Education project. If you haven’t seen their work and are interested, I have really enjoyed going through their Mainframe Open Education GitBook again and seeing how it’s grown (and where it still needs to fill in some gaps!). There’s a ton of free, entry to medium level education out there for folks who are mainframe-curious and this is a great place to start.

A group photo was taken before I found my fellow panelists and headed over to the Open Source track. It meant that I missed the last couple hours of The Open Mainframe Project event, but having additional content in another part of the event expanded our reach that much more, and I was delighted to learn that all the talks were still quite full! My worries of splitting the audience turned out to be unfounded.

Over in the open source track I joined my fellow mainframers, Len Santalucia, Steven Perva, and Louisa Denly, on a panel called “Dispelling the Myths Around Open Source on the Mainframe.” In this panel, we talked about security, support, and contributing, but it was also very audience-driven. One of the thing I learned while on this panel was from an audience member who shared how self-driven the next generation of technologists are, and how they expect to get support from their peers online, and generally expect documentation and other things to be public. This is definitely a departure from what I’ve traditionally seen in the mainframe world, and an interesting evolution in technology in general where open is becoming the default. I think this is doubly true in a world with AI chat bots that you can feed public documentation from and get answers without digging through 300 pages of dense technical documentation.

From there we had three more open source plus mainframe talks in the room. First up was David Frenzel who gave an excellent talk on “COBOL Meets Gradle: Streamlining z/OS Builds with Open Source” where he shared the Gradle plugin they developed for building COBOL applications. This kind of tooling is so important for getting the rest of your organization on board with building mainframe tooling, and consolidating your tech teams. No longer should the mainframe team be separated from the rest of your SREs. Everyone should use open tools like Gradle, just like everyone should use open tools like Grafana! Which leads me to the next talk in the room, David Harris of Grafana joined Anthony Papageorgiou to talk about “Grafana for the mainframe: lifting the lid on the black box”. I really enjoyed this Grafana talk because once again, it’s integrating tooling that the rest of the organization is interested into your IBM z/OS workflows. Taking a step back, you can see what’s going on with ALL of your systems, without the previous silos between operating systems.

The track, and day, concluded with Sarah Julia Kriesch doing a talk fully devoted to The Linux Distributions Working Group where she gave folks in our open source track a tour of the group and how we’re achieving our goals.

But that wasn’t all our content for the IBM TechXchange 2025 conference! The Open Mainframe Project event page has details of other sessions we had scattered throughout the week, and the ones I had the pleasure of attending were great. Over in the User Group Pavilion, Fernando provided an overview of The Open Mainframe Project. Helpfully, it was 1. in the session catalog (unlike our talk last year!) and 2. scheduled right before a SHARE event in the same space, so in addition to the planned attendees, we saw mainframers start to drop in throughout the session, hooray!

I also had the pleasure of seeing Jan Prihoda of Broadcom present “Beyond DevOps: Unlocking New Possibilities with Zowe” at one of the Tech Stages in the expo hall. Integrating so many of the talks into the expo hall was an interesting move, and I thought I’d be really bothered by the noise, but for me I found that the space being gigantic and the use of microphones for the talks made up for most of that. Plus, it was great to just be able to wander through the expo hall and drop in on a talk. For Jan’s, the space was also overflowing, with only a few little cubes to sit on, we had dozens of people standing for his session. It was good too, I’m glad he’s out there promoting the various use cases of Zowe so it doesn’t get tagged as just a DevOps tool. His demonstrations of usage with Ansible in his session were excellent.

Finally, I was really happy to continue my involvement with Michelle Kovac and the Open Source team by scheduling several booth slots over in the Open Source Zone of the expo hall. These 2-hour slots allowed projects to more casually show off their projects and chat with attendees. I was able to grab Mae to do a shift generally on The Open Mainframe Project, where she also took the opportunity to get more notes and signatures on the birthday card! And then both Joe Winchester of Zowe and Louisa of Galasa did shifts for their respective projects.

It was definitely the best year yet for Open Mainframe at TechXchange, and I was able to continue that with the fully open source demos I was showing off at the booth, but that story is for another day!

This year for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we also finally got to attend services in-person! With chaotic young kids, and then last year with some colds sweeping through the house, we were glad to finally take advantage of this opportunity. We started small, by just attending the afternoon family services for both holidays, but it was nice to be back in-person for the holidays, and to start meeting people. We’ve also started on our path to get the boys to weekly religious school there, which we’re all looking forward to.

We also enjoyed apples and honey around Rosh Hashanah, and Aaron helped me make a round challah, which actually came out quite lovely this year!

Celebrations continued when I returned from a work trip as we went over to the synagogue for a young children event for Sukkot. They had a big sukkah set up, and in collaboration with PJ library had a bunch of activities arranged, from a story time to crafts and coloring, followed by lunch.

Kids also got to wave the lulav and etrog with our Rabbi, which Aaron took part in.

The kids were pretty excited about Sukkot and are really interested in building our own sukkah. Timing of my work travel this year made it impossible, but maybe we’ll see what we can do next year.

And unrelated to the holidays but related to family, MJ’s Uncle Dick and his wife were visiting San Francisco recently while on a cruise. Squeezed right between my work trip and one MJ had to leave for, we met them for a lovely dinner on the Embarcadero. I had only met MJ’s uncle once, and he’d never met the boys, so it was nice to get together, even if the boys were on the tired side and were mostly glued to TV on their phones.

Afterwards, we dropped them back at the cruise terminal where the boys were jealous that they got to sleep on a boat, but they did perk up a bit post-meal and were able to be a little social. I’m glad we were able to conclude the evening on that note.

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.