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Open Source Summit NA 2017

Thursday, Sep 28th, 2017 by pleia2 | 2 Comments

I recently attended my first Open Source Summit, formerly LinuxCon. It’s strange that having worked in the space of Linux for so long that I kept missing these Linux Foundation events, I think the only event of theirs I’ve been to was the Linux Collaboration Summit in 2010. I always had conflicts, then differing priorities with regard to events, especially since I’ve rarely been paid to actually do work directly on Linux, it’s always been a hobby or base for other projects and infrastructures I’ve worked on. The co-location with MesosCon and shift to general open source conference changed the game for me, so I could finally attend and speak at this North America edition in Los Angeles!

I was thrilled to have a talk accepted at the Open Community Conference run by Jono Bacon. My talk was on Building Open Source Project Infrastructures where I explored the current state of proprietary infrastructures used to assist open source project and asked the audience to consider the benefits of self-hosted and open source solutions for their projects. The OpenStack project and others listed on opensourceinfra.org have open sourced various parts of their project infrastructure to allow for outside contributions and even assistance from the community in hosting. Both the Xubuntu and DC/OS projects have websites that are hosted in revision control. Several projects are using open source tooling for their continuous integration work, and publishing your build system helps contributors replicate releases when adding their own patches and improvements.

I then walked the audience through steps to opening up their infrastructures more, including finding talent (systems administrators do exist in open source projects!), determining what hosting is required, and seeking funding to support anything your project may end up needing to pay for. The talk concluded with a closer look at OpenStack and Xubuntu to walk through the different ways these projects are maintained and the various pieces of the infrastructure we put in the hands of community members. Slides here (PDF).


Thanks to Shilla Saebi for taking a photo during my talk! (source)

On Tuesday I spoke in the ContainerCon track on Advanced Continuous Delivery Strategies for Containerized Applications Using DC/OS. This was actually a talk submitted by a colleague who wasn’t able to participate, so he handed it off to me. I was able to take some slides from other talks, but I always have to do a fair amount of rewriting to make a presentation my own. In this talk I walked through modern continuous deployment pipelines and stressed two things in a containerized infrastructure: running everything in containers and organizing workloads efficiently. DC/OS does this by running both services (Jenkins, GitLab, etc.) inside of containers and software actually being tested. Jenkins has a really nice plugin for Mesos which allows it to farm workloads out to the Mesos cluster automatically, negating the need for something like Nodepool that we used in OpenStack land. The use of containers lends to the second bit, being able to run multiple, isolated workloads across the same hardware instead of using discrete, dedicated servers for various services. Additionally, by using something like DC/OS you can give developers the flexibility they want to use their own tooling without the additional infrastructure administrative needs that exist on for each team running their own hardware/VMs themselves. Everyone gets a chunk of the Mesos cluster and they install what they want, only having to worry about maintaining versions of the applications themselves.

It was after this talk that I learned something fascinating about my references to container. My colleague Jörg mentioned to me that a lot of folks he interacted with automatically assumed “container” to mean “container image” rather than the concept of a running any generic container in the operational sense. I was puzzled by this until I went to a talk later that day by another one of my colleagues, Jie Yu who spoke on Containerization in Mesos, Embracing the Standards. It dawned on me that the communities Jörg tended to work in were developer-focused and mine were operations-focused. It makes sense that we’d see those views in our work. It did cause me to be more cautious about my definitions though, the assumptions I made about what people mean when they say “container” and would indeed be a bit confusing if the assumption is that I’m talking about an image.

Terminology revelations aside, Jie’s talk was an interesting one. He gave some introductory details about how Mesos works, but then dove into the history of containerization in Mesos. This was a history I had mostly pieced together over the past 8 months as I learned about the Mesos containerizer and how Docker fits into the Mesos world, but it was great to see it presented formally, in chronological order so I could more deeply understand the progression and design decisions throughout. He then got to the heart of his talk, where he linked many of the changes being made to improvements users were asking for, as well as the importance of standards in the container space, specifically saying we needed:

  • Stable interfaces
  • Backward compatibility
  • Multiple implementations
  • Vender neutrality
  • Interoperability

He specifically called out efforts by the Open Container Initiative, the Container Network Interface (CNI) and the Container Storage Interface (CSI).

Moving on from my own focus at the conference, I enjoyed the keynotes I saw on Monday and Tuesday (most of the videos can be found here). Though I wasn’t nearly as star-struck as some in the audience, it was particularly interesting to hear from Joseph Gordon-Levitt about hitRECord where they’ve built a community very similar to online open source communities, but for content creation. I believe in the principles of open source, but it’s still inspiring to see that the key concepts of online collaboration are transferable to things beyond software. He also dove into monetary compensation for artists (and developers), which is something we’ve spent many years shying away from as a community. Many of us are paid for our work in open source today, but as someone who came up as an unpaid community member for most of my career, honest, open, discussions about it are not as frequent as I’d like. Video here.

I also really appreciated the keynote from Dan Lyons, author of Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble. The talk began by poking fun at the culture of startups, but a third of the way in took a turn for the dark about the dangers of startups and what the fun is hiding. Workers are increasingly being exploited in and around our industry, we need to see this turned around. Video here

During the summit I had the pleasure of meeting Ed Warnicke who gave a lightning talk on Tuesday afternoon about Bringing Network and DevOps People Together. He’s a Principal Engineer at Cisco and was raising awareness around the disconnect between networking and systems folks. This talk hit home for me, literally. When we got married, my husband was working as a network engineer and I was working as a systems engineer. Whenever we talked about networking-related topics, we’d talk past each other. This became even worse when I was working on OpenStack, and then my OpenStack book. I had a networking chapter that I wrote with a fellow systems engineer in the OpenStack community and as soon as I showed it to network engineers, they were confused. I probably spent more time on this chapter than any other because I had systems and networking reviewers pushing back and forth at terminology and ways I explained things and more fundamentally how OpenStack was doing certain things.

Coming back to the talk, Ed stressed that with the future we’re heading into with microservices, we can’t afford to talk past each other and the DevOps world shouldn’t be ignoring the expertise of the networking community that’s been solving problems for decades. His own call to action was for all of us to talk to someone from the other discipline. Done and done! Video here.

There were bunch of other talks I enjoyed as I moved between the Open Community and Containers tracks. It was a little disappointing on Wednesday when my attention was pulled over to the MesosCon Hackathon, but I did make it upstairs to see the puppies.

The event was also great for meeting up with people I hadn’t seen in a while and meeting new people. I enjoyed a women of open source lunch on Monday where we heard an intro blurb from every woman in the room (there were dozens!) and I just happened to sit down next to someone I know online via following each other on Twitter.


First two photos: source, source, Mesosphere Developer Advocates, LinuxChix LA!

…and this collage only captures a fraction of the people I managed to chat with. Great conference.

More photos from the Open Source Summit here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157687000663014

Filed under: events, tech, travel

MesosCon NA 2017

Tuesday, Sep 26th, 2017 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

I recently attended my first MesosCon, the North American edition hosted in Los Angeles. There are three such events per year, the other two held in Asia and Europe. These events bring together various companies and other organizations working with and on Apache Mesos so I was really eager to finally meet some of the folks I’ve only interacted with online.

The event began on Wednesday with a Mesos community Hackathon and a customer-focused DC/OS Day run by Mesosphere. Given my role and background, I joined the Hackathon where my colleague Jörg Schad kicked off the event by encouraging attendees to collect ideas for projects they wanted to tackle throughout the day. Topics ranged from documentation improvements, creation of a Kubernetes-related demo for SMACK, work on frameworks and further work on an autoscaler for several cloud platforms where DC/OS runs. Plus, there were mini cupcakes!

The main event for MesosCon began Thursday morning with an introductory keynote from Ben Hindman, Co-Creator of Apache Mesos (and my boss), where he covered some of the latest features in Mesos over the past year that he’s most proud of. These included the introduction of nested container support, adherence to standards through the Open Container Initiative project and beyond, and general expansion in usage and community. Mesosphere Co-Founder Tobi Knaup also got on stage, joined by Tim Hockin of Google for a demonstration of the new beta availability of Kubernetes on DC/OS. One of the really distinctive things about this implementation is that it’s running pure upstream Kubernetes, among other things, this allows for migration of a pure Kubernetes environment (on Mesos or not) as well as known functionality with the tooling written today for pure upstream Kubernetes.


Ben Hindman sharing new and noteworthy improvements to Mesos

These talks were broken up by a pair of panels, the first talking about Mesos in the Enterprise with Michael Aguiling at JPMC, Larry Rau (Verizon), Cathy Daw (Mesosphere), Stefan Bauer and Hubert Fisher (Audi), and Josh Bernstein from {code} as a moderator. At the enterprise level, a lot of interest was around distribution of resources across cloud vendors and on-prem, the introduction of open source software in companies unaccustomed to it, general scaling needs required by large companies and a standards-driven future so they can continue to integrate container technologies into their infrastructure.

The final keynote panel of the morning had Ben Hindman sitting down with Neha Narkhede (co-founder and CTO of Confluent) and Jonathan Ellis (co-founder and CTO of Datastax) for a fascinating discussion about the role of Apache Cassandra and Apache Kafka in the fast-data driven world powered increasingly by the SMACK (Spark, Mesos, Akka, Cassandra and Kafka) stack. The main message in the panel was how fast data is essential in the interaction with customers today, and their Internet of Things gadgets that create an expectation of immediate response. This panel was also where I heard a theme that would be repeated as the conference progressed: people move to microservices incrementally. There are a few ways of moving an environment which is microservices driven, but whether they convert old systems slowly or adopt a policy that all new projects must be built with them, it’s incredibly common across the industry. As a developer advocate these days, it was also nice to hear from Neha that the open source nature of the components are empowering developers, which makes my role in getting out there to talk to developers and operations folks who are on the ground with the technology particularly important.

The keynotes concluded and we dispersed into three tracks, on SMACK, Ops, and DevOps, and a new addition to the conference called MesosCon University where attendees could attend an 80 minute hands-on session on making applications production-ready, securing Mesos clusters, or building stateful services.

I was the track lead for the DevOps track along with Julien Stroheker from Microsoft. Leading up to the conference Julien and I reached out to the speakers to get slide decks and answer any questions, then the two of us met up to chat about the track in San Francisco the week before. The day of the track everything went smoothly, with Mark Galpin of JFrog getting us started by talking about the development and deployment of three key projects: Artifactory, Bintray and Xray. They learned quickly that the application and configuration layers had to be configured separately and that it was best to plan for enterprise and high-availability early on, rather than trying to build it in later. He also discussed importance of good startup scripts and package management in a microservices world, since you don’t simply use an RPM anymore to install things… but you do still need RPMs because not every customer will want to adopt a microservices environment just yet! Standardization was also important, customers wanted the ability to hook into their existing storage and network backends, and often had unusual requirements (for example, “my nodes have no outbound internet access”). He concluded by stressing that everyone in the DevOps organization should be involved from the beginning when working to develop the products and how they’re being deployed so that they consider every aspect of how the tooling will be used and deployed.

The next talk was by Aaron Baer from Athena Health who brought us deep into the world of healthcare information services where monoliths rule and shared his experiences working to bring new technologies build on microservices into the fold. Like I heard earlier in they keynote panel, he’s been working on a path to incrementally move from monolithic and relatively inflexible services over to microservices. In addition to building new infrastructure where they can begin using containers, they’ve also been using their legacy database as a canonical resource and storage, and doing data processing and delivery through faster, more modern data storage and processing tools. He’s also a proponent of code as infrastructure (me too!) so it was great to hear him talk about how essential API-driven infrastructure engineering and automation is to getting our infrastructures to the next level.


Aaron Baer on the progression of monolith to microservice

After lunch the track continued with Chris Mays and Micah Noland from HERE Technologies sharing details about the Deployment API they built for DC/OS. They wanted a simplified version of the core DC/OS API which was deployment-centric and needed an open source option that would improve upon Marathon-LB. The API they’ve developed has just recently been open sourced and can be found here: https://github.com/heremaps/deployment-api. During the talk Micah provided an in depth tour of how straight-forward their YAML configurations were for a sample deployment of a Jenkins pipeline. The API theme continued in the next talk by Marco Palladino of Mashape, the makers of Kong. Kong is an open source gateway for APIs which allows you more control over access, including security, authentication and rate limiting. He stressed how important this whole ecosystem of support is for microservices, and his talk also touched upon the steady migration needed by most organizations from their old stack to the new, which also meant keeping a lot of pieces like their legacy authentication system intact but that adding too many layers can leave to unforgivable latency.


Lively booth area break before the final two sessions of the day

The day concluded with talks from Will Gorman of Cerner on Spinnaker and Imran Shaikh of YP on hybrid clouds. I enjoyed the entire DevOps track, but these two talks really went to the heart of what I’ve focused on infrastructure-wise in the past five years. Give my CI/CD background, I’ve known about Spinnaker for some time, but never made diving into it a priority. This talk inspired me. As you may have guessed, Spinnaker is a continuous delivery platform and Will began his talk by covering the basics about it before getting into integration with DC/OS, including the ability to hook into Metronome for jobs. He also touched upon controls Spinnaker has for the deployment phase to complement Marathon’s own attempts to deploy and restart processes. I’ll definitely be digging into it on my own very soon. Imran’s talk on the importance of being responsible for your own infrastructure was very satisfying for me. He led his talk by talking about how moving to the cloud doesn’t absolve you of the responsibility of making sure you have a good disaster recovery plan, reminding the audience that your business relies upon a good failover plan, and your cloud provider has different goals. Throughout his talk his talking points revolved around vendor independence, distributing risk and the importance of your processes being portable to other solutions.


Will Gorman showing how to execute a Metronome job as a step in a Spinnaker pipeline

Thursday evening had another MesosCon first, Town Hall sessions. A big hit with attendees, these were casual evening gatherings on various topics (Mesos, DC/OS and Marathon/Chronos). They allowed community members to gather and talk about whatever they wanted, swap war stories, share tips, anything! Sadly I had to miss this, participation in the Open Source Summit earlier in the week and with a panel to prep for, I was running low on energy. I’m looking forward to attending the ones we host at MesosCon EU coming up at the end of October.

Friday morning came quickly, and I’ll let you in on a little secret: I had breakfast with my Future of Cluster Management panelists. The panel was made up of Sharma Podila (Netflix), Sam Eaton (Yelp), Ian Downes (Twitter) and Zhitao Li (Uber). As the panel moderator I had worked with them on questions and spoke with them via video conference, I hadn’t met any of them in person. A casual, leisurely hotel breakfast was a great way to break the ice and answer any lingering questions folks had, including myself (“none of you are going to surprise me with the answer you give about the importance of open source, right?”). I highly recommend such a gathering for other moderators if it’s possible, I’ve been a panelist a few times and on stage ice-breaking is not always the best way to go.

Jörg was the MC for day two of keynotes, and after a community-focused introduction to this second day (the first day was more enterprise-focused), he brought us on stage. Talking about the future is always fun, and this panel was no exception. After introductions, we covered the importance of open source in our ecosystem, something that is near and dear to my heart. Theme-wise we talked about the move from perfecting deployments on containerized systems to a focus on maintenance, and the tools they’ve had to built outside of what Mesos provides to manage their clusters. The question of how they handle mixed workloads (stateless vs. stateful, batch vs. long-lived) and what improvements could be made here. The conclusion centered around the future of artificial intelligence of clusters, which led us to learn that some of them are already using machine learning to teach their clusters about load and behavior, which was later explored in a track talk from folks at Twitter who are doing automated performance tuning using Bayesian optimization. The last question I had for the panelists was what they wanted to see in 5-10 years, and their answer was identical: they don’t want to care about the underlying tech, they just want their workloads to run.


Keynote panel: Future of Cluster Management, thanks to Julien Stroheker for the photo (source)

The morning keynotes continued with a talk from folks at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency that spoke to how they’re using Mesos at scale inside of their organization. Keynotes concluded with one from Ross Gardler from Microsoft who explored the question of where we were in the hype/actual production cycle for microservices and containers. He expressed that there’s still a lot of diversity in the field, and that with so many early deployments there’s no clear “winner” in the space of containerization. Today, he shares, the focus should be sharing best practices and methodologies across platforms so that all of the next iterations of our various containerization platforms can be that much better.

Just like Thursday, after keynotes we shuffled off into various tracks, with Friday featuring tracks on Mesos Internals, Ops, SMACK and the one I took over as track lead for, Mesos Frameworks. My focus in my role at Mesosphere had largely been on higher level operations, so it was a very interesting track for me to sit in on for the day. There’s a lot of really interesting work being done in the Mesos ecosytem that I’d love for my team to be a part of drawing more attention to. This day was great for that.

The first talk was on the juggling that happens around optimizations, service guarantees and how those trade-offs manifest by Sharma Podila of Netflix, who I’d just met earlier in the keynote panel. He began by asking some questions about your cluster and explaining the heterogeneous nature of the hardware they have at Netflix, you never know which generation hardware your workload is going to land on. He then dove into the challenge of scaling down, showing off the open source Fenzo, “a scheduler Java library for Apache Mesos frameworks that supports plugins for scheduling optimizations and facilitates cluster autoscaling.” His talk was followed by one from Wil Yegelwel for TwoSigma who joined us to talk about simulation testing. In spite of my deep interest in CI/CD, simulation testing is something that’s largely escaped my radar. Thankfully he gave an introduction to the concept and then shared how they used the scheduler they built at Two Sigma, Cook, to intelligently handle scheduling of workloads. The intersection of an intelligent scheduler and a policy of simulation testing meant they could run tests that changed configurations and see how they could optimize things as much as possible, and he explained that this has sometimes resulting in some surprising, non-intuitive discoveries that boosted performance. He also credited simulation testing with helping engineers become more familiar and comfortable with the infrastructures they’re running, which are growing increasingly complicated and difficult to fully understand.

After lunch we dove right back in with Joshua Cohen and Ramki Ramakrishna from Twitter who came to speak on the aforementioned Bayesian optimization talk. It’s well known that Twitter’s infrastructure is built on a lot of microservices. At that scale, they explained, manual performance tuning of hundreds of JVM options doesn’t scale, is error-prone, time-consuming and honestly leads to goal-driven engineers copying existing configs to get going, without fully understanding why the optimizations exist in specific places. They went on to stress that even if you do manage to get everything running well, it’s effectively undone as soon as you change or upgrade any component. Instead they shipped the problem off to an internal machine-learning driven technique that uses Bayesian inference to optimize performance. Bayesian became popular in my own operations world for spam analysis, but the methodologies as I understand them make a lot of sense here as well. Unfortunately they haven’t open sourced the Bayesian Optimization Auto-Tuning (BOAT) tooling, but knowing that it’s been done and is successful for them is a good start for others looking to do similar machine-learning inspired performance tuning.

Next up was Tomek Janiszewski from Allegro who gave us 8 tips for Marathon Performance, summing them up:

  1. Monitor — enable metrics
  2. Tune JVM
  3. Optimize Zookeeper
  4. Update 1.3.13
  5. Do not use the event bus
  6. Use a custom executor
  7. Prefer batching
  8. Shard your Marathon

Marathon is a popular project in the Mesos ecosystem, so the room was quite full for this talk and the questions about it went well into the coffee break we had between sessions!

After the coffee break we were in the home stretch, only two more talks to go before MesosCon concluded! First up in this final pair was Dragos Dascalita Haut and Tyson Norris from Adobe Systems who where sharing details about their use of OpenWhisk as a Mesos framework. They quickly covered OpenWhisk, an event-driven serverless platform for deploying code. Their lively presentation was full of demos and they shared their Akka-based mesos-actor project before pulling in the OpenWhisk bits that brought together all the pieces of the work they were doing.

The final talk brought a pair of engineers from Verizon Labs, Tim Hansen and Aaron Wood, to share their work on fault-tolerant frameworks without Docker. They share some of my own opinions about the over-use of Docker where something slimmer would suffice, so I knew going in that I’d enjoy this talk. The talk explained why using Docker and the entire Docker daemon was often overkill for their work, specifically Tim saying that there was “no real need for an extra daemon and client when Mesos can containerize tasks.” So they instead directed the audience toward use of the Mesos containerizer and the CNCF’s Container Network Interface (CNI). To this end they developed Hydrogen, “High performance Mesos framework based on the v1 streaming API” and their own Mesos SDK, a general purpose Golang library for writing mesos frameworks.

As always, as tiring as the week was it was still sad to see it conclude. It was great to meet up with so many people, huge thanks to everyone who take time to let me pick their brain, or simply sat down for a quick chat. I learned a lot while there and had a wonderful time.


Clockwise from top left: With Yang Lei (IBM), Dave Lester (Apple), Mesosphere community team (minus Jörg, plus Ravi!), and Aaron Baer

More photos from MesosCon NA 2017 here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157689480391705

Filed under: dcos, events, tech

Chester Beatty Library and some whiskey

Sunday, Sep 24th, 2017 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

As I mentioned in my last post, at the end of August I traveled to Ireland with MJ for the second time. My first visit there in 2010 was pure tourism, and I hit all the major tourist attractions and historical sites and was able to visit with a local friend to learn about the Vikings, go to the Dublin zoo, see some Leprechauns, tour the Wicklow Mountains, take part in Guinness and Jameson tours, check out the Book of Kells, Dublin Castle and a couple cathedrals and visit Malahide Castle after feeding some seals in Howth. I even went to an Ubuntu release party. It was a whirlwind week, but I had a wonderful time and fell in love with Ireland on that trip.

It took me seven years to return and one of the first things I noticed was how much construction was going on this time. When I was there in 2010 the area was immersed in an economic downturn, but things had picked up considerably since then. The basic historic points of the city remained untouched, but between them were cranes and building of all kinds, particularly out where my husband’s office is down by Dublin Bay. Still, it was the Dublin I knew and loved, and my first order of business upon arriving on Tuesday morning off of an overnight flight was to visit some sights I hadn’t seen before. My jet lagged day began by making my way to the Chester Beatty Library, recommended to me by my friend Walt.

The Chester Beatty Library is now one of my favorite places in Dublin. As explained on their website:

Manuscripts, miniature paintings, prints, drawings, rare books and decorative arts complete this amazing collection – all the result of the collecting activities of one man – Sir Alfred Chester Beatty (1875-1968). Egyptian papyrus texts, beautifully illuminated copies of the Qur’an, the Bible, European medieval and renaissance manuscripts are among the highlights on display. In its diversity, the collection captures much of the richness of human creative expression from about 2700 BC to the present day.

Admission is free, photos are not allowed inside (though their online image gallery is nice), and it’s not a large museum, but it’s meticulously laid out to take you through a tour of what is largely a collection of religious manuscripts of various faiths. The illuminated manuscripts across various faiths were breathtaking, their Witness to the Word: Chester Beatty Library New Testament Papyri exhibit was fascinating, and I enjoyed seeing the mid-18th Century Astrolabe. However, the two things that stood out for me were the Qibla compass and the Mughal-era Indian collection of composite images. Walt told me about the Qibla compass so I made sure I specifically sought it out, I’m glad I did, I would have missed it if I hadn’t been on the lookout for it. As wikipedia explains, “a Qibla compass is a modified compass used by Muslims to indicate the direction to face to perform ritual prayers.” It’s a simple, yet clever device, which works, again consulting wikipedia, as follows:

To determine the proper direction, one has to know with some precision both the longitude and latitude of one’s own location and those of Mecca, the city toward which one must face. Once that is determined, the values are applied to a spherical triangle, and the angle from the local meridian to the required direction of Mecca can be determined.

I wish I had jotted down some notes about it while I was there, but just-off-a-plane brain wasn’t interested in taking notes. I have sent a quick note to the library through their contact form to learn more, fingers crossed that someone will get back to me with even the most basic details that accompanied the display.


Qibla compass at the Chester Beatty Libraryimage source (I wish I could be more specific as to source)

EDIT: They got back to me! Details:

Universal Qibla Finder
Made by Barun al-Mukhtari
Turkish text
AD 1738 (dated AH 1151)
Istanbul, Turkey
CBL T 443

Depicted on one half of this device is the Ka‘ba in Mecca and various near-by sites associated with the pilgrimage. On the other half is a map of Europe, Asia and Africa (regions north of the equator only), with numbers indicating the location of almost 400 cities, the names of which are provided in a colour-coded, numbered list beneath the map. A long pointer is attached at one end to the city of Mecca and at the top of the map is a small compass.

To determine the direction of Mecca and hence the direction of prayer from one’s current location, find the city in the list beneath the map, rotate the pointer until it points to the number (and colour) of that city on the map, and move the device until the compass needle points due north-south. When correctly aligned, the pointer will indicate the qibla, the direction of prayer.

As mentioned, the composite animal images (creatures whose bodies consist in whole or in part of human and animal figures) were the other thing that grabbed my attention. Specifically there was one of “A Peri Riding a Composite Lion” that captured the imagination. I knew nothing about the Indian tradition of composite animal art before visiting this museum, but seeing a collection together was really something. I stopped at the gift shop on my way out specifically to see if I could get a post card or a book with the composite lion image, and they didn’t disappoint, €7.95 later I came home with a coloring and postcard book of the images in their collection, including the lion!


“A Peri Riding a Composite Lion” circa 1700, Kashmir

I now consider the whole museum a must see when visiting Dublin.

Cultural enrichment behind me for the day, my next stop was a new whiskey distillery that I heard about, Teeling Whiskey. I learned there that the current iteration of the business launched in the 2015. However, the background of the brand, discussed on the wikipedia page and recounted during the tour, is interesting. In short, the Teeling family founded a whiskey distillery in 1782, but it sold and eventually shut down as a series of unfortunate events caused the entire Irish whiskey market to crash in the early 20th century and whiskey production move out of Dublin. After our history lesson, we were able to get up close to their on site distilling setup, including their big pot stills that the whiskey goes through for the traditional three-phase distilling process for Irish whiskey.

As we were tasting some of “their” three+ year old whiskey at the conclusion of the tour I joked about being pretty good at math when I asked “how can I be drinking a six year old whiskey when you were founded less than three years ago?” The history of their family explains, the current batches being sold under the Teeling brand actually came from the father of the founders, who founded the Cooley Distillery north of Dublin in 1987 and gave his sons a large collection of minimally aged whiskey. The results of these older barrels under the Teeling branding have already made their way stateside, but I’ll be keeping an eye out over these next few years for the ones with vintages older than 2015.


Teeling tasting

Teeling I did on my own, but a few days later was the final full day MJ and I spent in the Dublin area itself found ourselves concluding the evening with a stop at the Bow St location of Jameson. They have long done their distilling elsewhere, even in 2010 when I did the tour for the first time. However, this location is a nice tourist attraction that has a large bar and a tour. During my last trip it was more tourist-y and a bit kitschy, but I actually enjoyed it. We learned that week that they had recently redone their whole building and the tour, a perfect excuse to go back!


Fancy redone bar at Jameson

The tour is simplified now, much more refined with a greater focus on history and how the whiskey is made. They’ve also added several other tours for people who are more into Irish whiskey. I admit missing the old style tour a bit, but I’m a sucker for tourist stuff. The concluding tasting was enjoyable though, everyone gets to sample an American whiskey, Scotch, and some Jameson, to compare the styles and become our own experts at telling the difference. It was fun, and afterwards we all had a drink ticket for one final drink on the way out. Contrary to my typical “on the rocks” preference, my day called for a nice bit of Jameson, neat.

Our Ireland trip wasn’t all museums and whiskey though! Our trip to a transit museum and the long journey to the Cliffs of Moher are due in my next posts.

Filed under: travel

Chats about DC/OS and Apache Mesos in Dublin

Saturday, Sep 23rd, 2017 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

At the end of August MJ made plans to spend a week in Dublin for work with a team he has out there. This seemed like a great opportunity for me to go back to Ireland as well! The last (and first) time I went to Ireland was also to tag along, back in 2010 with his previous job when he was doing a rotation in the office out there. That trip landed in October of 2010 and I took the entire week off to explore the city and surrounding areas, this time I only took a couple days off, choosing to also spend some time getting to know some of the DC/OS and Apache Mesos folks there in Dublin.

First on my noteworthy agenda was speaking on The SMACK stack for the Dublin Apache Kafka Meetup by Confluent. It was held at the ZenDesk office just south of St Stephen’s Green. This meant I could enjoy a lovely mile long walk south from where I was staying near Trinity College to get to my destination. When I arrived, my gracious host for the evening was Andrei Balcanasu, an Infrastructure Engineer there at Zendesk. As attendees trickled in he made me feel very welcome and we had some great chats about the direction of infrastructure tooling over the past decade.

The presentation was an overview of the SMACK stack (Apache Spark, Apache Mesos, Akka, Apache Cassandra, and Apache Kafka) itself, but I did try to stress the value of Kafka specifically in this model. My experience thus far has been that Mesos and Kafka are the two components that are least likely to be swapped out as people tailor SMACK for their own infrastructure environment and industry. I concluded with Achim Nierbeck’s Iot Fast Data analytics demo which plots buses from the Los Angeles Metro on a map and is pure SMACK stack. Slides from the talk can be found here (PDF).

The evening concluded with beer and pizza, during which I indulged in my first Bulmers Cider of the trip as I spoke with attendees about their infrastructures and where they were planning on going tooling-wise. While I’d never call myself a social butterfly, getting able to geek out about open source infrastructure tooling is one of the areas where I can let my guard down and get really into it, so enjoyed the evening. During these conversations something that stood out most for me was a comment about the simplicity of the data source for the demo, as the stream coming in from the LA Metro is not what any of us today would call “fast” (just a few requests per second) so the use of Kafka is a bit overkill. It was a very fair point and I’ll mention it up the next time I use it in a presentation, but it is just a demonstration of a pipeline, and at that it succeeds at being reliable and effective.

Unbeknownst to me when I booked my travel, I came into town the same week as the Usenix SREcon17 held right there in Dublin. This meant that a whole bunch of people seeing my Dublin tweets assumed I was in town for that, and reached out to me to meet during the conference. Had I known about the overlap, I would have probably participated, but the CFP has closed long before I made plans for this trip and it was sold out attendee-wise before I knew about it. Still, this was how I ended up with the opportunity to meet up with DC/OS community members Levente Lajko, Luis Davim and Matthew Allen from PTC!

PTC has been an active participant in Working Groups we run for DC/OS so I was delighted to meet with them in person as they took time away from the conference venue to meet for lunch. Discussions centered around improvements we could make to the community involvement side of things, including being more public about our road maps so they can plan accordingly with what they build and lack of engagement around some tickets and pull requests. Nothing here was new for me and my team is actively working to make real progress on these points, but hearing it directly from community members strengthened my confidence that we’re working on the right things. Even better, they were a fun group of folks to spend a meal with and they were eager to make clear that the technology is worth the community-related road bumps.

Now to be clear, I don’t always intend on making vacation-centric trips include work stuff, I do need time away too, but I’m glad I did this time. With only 8 months under my belt at Mesosphere I was eager to spend as much time as I could interacting with community members, and in-person meetings like this are an important part of that. Having visited Ireland before also helped, I didn’t feel like I was missing out on anything, so breaking up tourist time with some work ended up being a pretty healthy use of my time.

Filed under: dcos, events, tech, travel

August visit to Philadelphia

Saturday, Sep 9th, 2017 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

As I’ve already written, in mid-August I road tripped with my aunt and mother up the east coast from central Florida to Philadelphia. They left on Wednesday, leaving me on my own until that evening when I had to drop the MDX off at the shop to get the windshield replaced due to a very unfortunate incursion with a rock while driving down the highway when MJ was in town back in July. I had dinner with a friend who picked me up there. Thankfully the windshield replacement went without a hitch and was completed by Thursday afternoon, so I was able to craft my work schedule that day to start early, get the car mid-day and be home to work until I had my next house guests, my Aunt Meg and cousin Melissa! The timing worked out well, they were driving up to New England from the Carolinas so I invited them to spend the night on their way up as a nice midway drive resting spot.

We had dinner at the nearby Toscana 52 Italian restaurant before settling in for the night. I saw them off the next morning before starting my Friday morning of work. That evening my friend Danita came over to spend the night, a weekend trip to New York City together, which I wrote about here, beckoned!

Monday arrived much too quickly. The day was spent once again working from the townhouse, which is working out really well. My office may be where we are storing piles of boxes, totes and furniture (most of which will end up in California), but in the midst of all that I have a really comfortable setup with everything I need to be productive. I just plug in my work laptop and go. Unfortunately during this trip I learned that the personal laptop that I keep there as my desktop has finally failed. The blink codes indicate that it’s the CPU or motherboard, which essentially means the laptop has reached the end. I’ll have to bring out a replacement next time I come into town.

However, Monday was eventful for another reason, it was August 21st, total solar eclipse day! I had piles of friends who braved the crowds to experience the totality zone, but in Philadelphia we just had a partial eclipse. During much of it we had cloud cover, but after the high point the clouds parted and I was able to get some nice glimpses through my pinhole camera box as I sat on the back porch. While sitting out there I flash backed to being 12 years old after school and doing the same thing. I have always enjoyed a good eclipse.

Monday evening I drove out to PLUG West to give an Introduction to DC/OS presentation (slides). Surprisingly, up until this point most of my DC/OS presentations had been more goal-oriented, so I really enjoyed doing a more holistic presentation about the “datacenter operating system” space, getting able to dive into more of the infrastructure geek bits of how DC/OS works as a platform on top of Linux for my fellow Linux-loving attendees present that evening. I also still know a number of folks who have attended PLUG meetings over the years, so it was nice to catch up and meet some new folks as a number of us adjourned to a nearby restaurant for a late dinner.

My next two evenings gave me time to catch up with friends over dinners, Tuesday night I had dinner with my friend Crissi. It had been a little while since just the two of us caught up in person, so it was really nice to get that time. Thursday I met up with my friend David to see RiffTrax Live: Doctor Who – The Five Doctors. I’d really been looking forward to this, and almost bought tickets for the actual live event in Nashville when they went on sale in the spring. This was actually a replay from the previous week, but as a Fathom Event in a theater, it’s hard to tell the difference. It was totally worth seeing. I don’t remember if I’d actually seen The Five Doctors before, I have seen a lot of old episodes but this movie is a bit ridiculous, even by old Doctor Who standards. A replacement of the first doctor (who had died a decade earlier), a cameo of the fourth doctor taken from footage shot for another production, and plot holes and continuity problems rounded out the basics of what made it so amusing. The Rifftrax of it was hilarious, even if they frequently took the opportunity to make fun of us old school Whovians.

On Friday morning MJ got into town! He flew in to visit for a few days, attend FOSSCON and so we could depart together on our trip to Ireland Monday night after work.

It’s hard to believe I was in Philadelphia for almost two weeks during this trip. With every visit the townhouse feels more like a home, I can relax and really feel comfortable there. Not sure yet when we’ll be back, but the end of year holidays are always a good opportunity since we have some off from work.

Filed under: dcos, events, family, philadelphia, plug, tech, travel

Summer weekend in NYC

Saturday, Sep 9th, 2017 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Several months ago I learned that they had made a Broadway musical based on the full-length animated feature from 1997, Anastasia. I quickly scoured the dates that Anastasia the Musical was being shown at the Broadhurst Theatre in New York City and learned that it would indeed overlap with one of my Philadelphia trips! I got a quick confirmation from my friend Danita that she was interested in seeing it and was available over a weekend I was in town, then booked us tickets for August 19th. We drove up Saturday morning after breakfast to park and drop stuff off at the hotel before we made our way over to the American Museum of Natural History.

This museum occupies a special place in my heart. I’ve always loved dinosaurs, and when I was a kid I visited my grandparents in north New Jersey. They brought my middle sister and I up to NYC for the first time and this museum is where I saw my first dinosaurs. My first impression? I thought they’d be bigger. Now, this was the 80s and since then we’ve learned much about dinosaurs, including discovering even larger ones that my kiddo self may have been more impressed with. During our visit this time I got to see the Titanosaur, a cast of a 122-foot-long dinosaur finally given the scientific name, Patagotitan mayorum just days before our visit. It was in a very large room, but it didn’t quite fit. In addition to wandering through the history of mammal fossils and more, we saw a show in the planetarium.

After the museum we stopped in to Heartland Brewery and Chophouse for beer and a huge pretzel snack and dessert before the show. It was a hot summer day in New York, so I was appreciative of the time we took to pause.

And then it was finally time for the evening show. Much waiting in line before finally getting into the theater. Inside the Broadhurst is lovely!

I hadn’t ready anything about the show before going in, so I wondered what they’d do about zombie Rasputin and his little bat sidekick. Turns out, they replaced them both with the more historically accurate and less fanciful Bolsheviks. It worked out well, and I totally have a crush on the Bolshevik general Gleb Vaganov. “The Neva Flows”? My new favorite song from the original cast recording!

After the show we grabbed another quick bite before a very late walk back to the InterContinential New York Barclay. On Sunday morning we enjoyed brunch at the nearby Lexington Brass before driving back down to Philadelphia. In all, an awesome weekend and allowed for a calm closing to my Sunday before getting back to work.

More photos from our weekend here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157685760317003

Filed under: travel

FOSSCON 2017

Monday, Aug 28th, 2017 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

This past Saturday I spent the day at FOSSCON in Philadelphia. My friend Stephen and his fiancee came into town for the event, and we hosted them up at the townhouse, so there were four of us heading down to the city. We aimed to get there a little early so we could spend a bit of time socializing with attendees before the keynote began at 10:20AM. During this time, I got to say hello to Charlie Reisinger who I’ve known for a few years through his work on getting kids using Linux systems at Penn Manor, and subsequently wrote The Open Schoolhouse. I picked up a copy when it came out and made sure I tossed it in my bag when I packed for the conference. He signed it for me!

The keynote was on “Why Community Matters” by Shilla Saebi from Comcast. I knew her through work on OpenStack in years past, so it was nice to see her again now that we’ve both transitioned from systems engineering into open source advocacy work.

In her keynote she touched upon key benefits of open sourcing software, like shared control of project direction from various contributors, and then drew from experience at Comcast about how to make it easier for employees within your organization to contribute. She also explained that raising awareness about the value of open source and open source work already being done in your organization is important, which can be done by regular activity reports, internal open source conferences and specific recognition when employees hit defined milestones in contributing to open source. I would have liked to hear more about what Comcast specifically was doing and how they got there as a large company whose focus is not delivery of technology solutions. Still, a nice chunk of their current work can be found by looking at the new Comcast GitHub Page.

The next talk was probably my favorite of the day, Walt Mankowski on “A punch card ate my program!” which was a reprise and extension of the talk he gave at !!Con several months back. In this talk he presented the audience with a bug in some COBOL code, explained what it was supposed to be doing, and then left us hanging as he gave some background about the origins of COBOL. I’d seen his !!Con talk, so I knew the punch line going in, but I loved how he added a whole bunch more history to the longer version of this talk. He had quotes from COBOL luminaries Grace Hopper and Jean Sammet, along with a trip back in time to the creation of the Jacquard Loom in 1804 and Herman Hollerith’s role in the 1890 census to give a proper full history of punch cards. Discussion around the use of COBOL today was also worth sticking around for, he drew from his work at QVC, but there are many older companies who still rely upon their COBOL codebases and they’ll soon need programmers to replace the ones who are currently aging right along with the code. He also wrote an article covering key points of this talk for opensource.com: Don’t hate COBOL until you’ve tried it

With his talk behind us, MJ and I joined Walt and several others for a quick lunch at a nearby Chinese restaurant. Upon my return I attended Andy Wojnarek’s talk on nmon. I was already familiar with the tool and its capabilities, but I was interested in how folks are using it today and any changes that had been made of late. It seems most of the changes of late have been related to architecture support instead of new features to support the increasing complexity of modern systems. Still, it was good to learn that as a tool it’s still a slim option for standard systems statistics reporting, and he also got into some of the dashboard tools that the data can be fed into.

My talk on “The Open Sourcing of Infrastructure” was directly after Andy’s. I had given this talk as a keynote at SLC DevOps Days back in May, and in my time since then I was able to flesh out some of my points, and talk a bit more about the software ecosystem in the 90s when I started tinkering with servers. My key message in this talk is to implore the audience to carefully think through the decisions made when looking to move to cloud-based systems, and that these aren’t new ideas, we can draw from lessons we learned as the industry shifted to using more open source tooling in infrastructures.


Thanks to David Morfin for taking a photo during my talk!

In discussions after my talk I learned how I can improve the talk further by going into security-focused examples of how the global community has come together, like for the creation of the Core Infrastructure Initiative. Slides from my talk can be found in PDF form here. I also wrote an opensource.com article last week that intentionally mirrors the key points in my presentation: Why open source should be the first choice for cloud-native environments

As happens post-talk, I ended up chatting with folks outside as the next talk got started and took the opportunity to walk around the venue and give away some of the DC/OS swag I brought along. It was particularly nice running into a DC/OS user who I got to geek out with over how much easier DC/OS makes it for a very small team to manage an Apache Mesos cluster. At the tail end of my wandering, I got to catch up with Jim Fisher who brought along the annual Oreo cake!

The conference concluded with R Geoffrey Avery organizing a series of lightning talks before organizer Jonathan Simpson formally concluded the conference with some giveaways and thanks given to sponsors and volunteers.

Some more photos from the event here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/albums/72157688170091285

As a bit of an unofficial after party a whole bunch of us ended up at the nearby City Tap House at a big outdoor table. We had some beers and good food, watched the sun set and tried to identify strange things flying in the sky. Good times. I always enjoy the connections I make at these smaller regional events, and since it takes place in a city where I used to live, Fosscon itself will always hold a special place for me.

Filed under: events, philadelphia, tech

A beach, a space ship and a road trip

Sunday, Aug 27th, 2017 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

MJ and I went down to Florida earlier this month for a family reunion, but the rest of our trip was pretty much a vacation, the first beach vacation we’d had in nearly two years.

Several evenings were spent poolside with frozen strawberry daquaris from the outside bar. Sunday was our beach day after breakfast with family. We got some chairs and an umbrella set up by the hotel and spent a long afternoon relaxing. I went in the ocean a couple times, where strong waves made for an exhilarating dip. On the beach I spent much of the time reading, finishing Madeleine L’Engle’s Dragons in the Water young adult novel that afternoon. Our time concluded when an evening thunderstorm rolled in and forced us to pack up and head inside.

That evening MJ found us a Cuban restaurant to go to, which happened to be both highly rated and near our hotel. It was probably the best meal out I had during our whole trip, such delicious food! And a couple incredibly strong mojitos for me, though I probably should have stopped at one, hah!

Monday was more of an adventure day. At 9:30 we met up with my mother and Aunt Elaine to drive up to the Kennedy Space Center! I had never been before, and that day was a particularly special one since it was launch day for the SpaceX Falcon 9 CRS-12, which was sending a payload up to the International Space Station. The timing was somehat coincidental since I just learned about the launch over the weekend and then planned accordingly, but I have always wanted to see a launch for myself. Unfortunately we hit several snags in our journey to do so. The first was not leaving early enough. The launch was at 12:31, and we figured that getting there by 10:30 would be fine, but we didn’t expect the hour we’d spend in traffic once we were within a mile and a half of the center. That got us there just shy of 11:30, meaning the viewing platform closer to the rocket was full and we missed the last bus to it by about five minutes. Never fear though, they had bleachers setup within the center for all of us poor souls who had to view from there! It was a hot day, so we picked up a couple umbrellas to shield us from the sun as we sat in the bleachers and waited for the launch.

It’s a really great experience being there with so many other people. To my disappointment we’ve trended away from science and space interest and spending in my lifetime, but being there with hundreds of other people to feel the excitement, brave the hot Florida August weather and do the countdown was a lot of fun. Alas, the second snag of the day was where we were sitting in the bleachers, a huge building was in the way of us seeing the launch! Once it cleared the building we were able to see the rocket, but it was pretty high up at that point. I took a picture anyway.

It would be disingenuous to say I wasn’t disappointed by the experience given the inability to make it out closer and then missing the best views even from where we were, but I sought the silver linings. I’ve watched plenty of launches in the comfort of my own home via NASA TV an SpaceX coverage, I know what they look like. You go to these things to see it with your own eyes, but also to be with the crowd and feel the sonic boom. We did also get a pretty good view of the rocket itself coming down to land over at Cape Canaveral. So we got to experience some of that, and in the end I’d say it was worth it to experience those things with MJ, my mother and my Aunt Elaine. Still, I would like to go back some time for the full experience.

With the launch completed, the heat really started taking its toll. The temperature soared into the 90s with high humidity, placing the heat index at well over 100. We wandered through a Mars exhibit and swung by their shop, but we departed mid-afternoon to find some food in an air-conditioned space beyond the chaos of the center. We ended up at Crackers Island Grille in Cape Canaveral, where I had some delicious fish tacos and a local beer before returning to the hotel and parting ways with my mother and aunt.

With that, our trip together was winding down. A final visit to the pool that evening and a late dinner concluded our evening. Tuesday was bringing an early morning departure for me as I joined my mother and Aunt Elaine on a road trip up to Philadelphia, and MJ was off to fly back home to San Francisco.

Our road trip began at 8AM with a stop at Dunkin’ Donuts to get us going, and then we hopped on Interstate 95, which we were pretty much taking all the way up to Philadelphia. My aunt drove the entire way, the full 16 hours! Thankfully it was pretty uneventful, at least on our side of the highway, we did pass three major accidents that shut down I-95 south throughout the day.

As our journey progressed I had some lively discussions with my aunt, of which the most fun was a topic we disagreed on, but we were able to roll our eyes and laugh about it when we reached a firm impasse in our discussion. We hit Washington DC at the tail end of rush hour, which slowed us down a bit, but once we were through that we sailed on through up to Philadelphia, getting in a bit before midnight. A quick stop at Wawa provided us some dinner, which we brought back to the townhouse to eat before we went to bed.

This was the first time I had someone from my side of the family staying at our place and the first time using the sofa bed. It made me grateful we’d invested in setting up the guest room as soon as we moved in, and with our decision to go with the sofa bed. Having lots of beds for friends and family to stay makes this place that much more valuable for us.

My mother and aunt departed early Wednesday morning, leaving me a day off from work to catch up on house things and chill for the afternoon before returning to work on Thursday.

Filed under: family, travel

2017 Family Reunion in Melbourne, FL

Sunday, Aug 27th, 2017 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

On Thursday the 10th of August MJ and I boarded a red-eye flight across the country to visit my mother’s side of the family in Melbourne, Florida for a small family reunion coinciding with my grandfather’s 81st birthday. The first leg of the trip took us to Miami, where I grabbed an espresso from Cafe Versailles. This stop is a must whenever I’m in that airport, especially since I’m usually stepping off a sleepless overnight flight when I get there. We then had a quick hop up to Orlando. A regional aircraft, right? No, they run a 767 up there, complete with big first class seats which we had complimentary status-based upgrades for! It was a short, but very comfortable flight. We arrived into Orlando and picked up the rental car to drive out to mid day Melbourne and get a nap before meeting family for dinner at a local steakhouse.

Dinner was a sort of was a pre-reunion gathering where MJ and I got to visit with my mother, grandfather and his wife Jo, Aunt Elaine, Aunt Pam, and Uncle Dan and his fiancee Jovie. It was my first time meeting Jovie and MJ was able to get acquainted with my Uncle Dan, the last of my uncles on that side of the family he hadn’t met. It was a fun evening, but even with the afternoon nap I was flagging pretty early and eager to get back to the hotel to get a proper night sleep in a bed.

Saturday was the reunion!

Early in the event we decided to get a cousins photo with grandpa. Now, I have a huge family on that side, since my mother was one of six children. I wouldn’t succeed in naming all of my cousins, let alone getting us all in once place at the same time. So we had a nice, representative sample of some of my generation of cousins, with the kids of four of the six siblings, along with the next generation in little Frankie. Also, our photo is hilarious, and also representative of all of us. We’re all over the place in geography, life and general chaos.

And in spite of my grandfather’s insistence that “this is a reunion not my birthday party!” we did have a carrot cake (his favorite, and mine!) and sang happy birthday late in the afternoon. It was nice reconnecting with family I’m close with, meeting new partners and children who have joined the family since I last visited, connecting with a cousin whose only contact we’ve had since childhood was over Facebook and meeting one cousin I hadn’t seen since we were both kids. It was hot out though, especially with so many people squeezed into a small space, and the required venturing outside for a BBQ lunch, during which I was able to spend some time with my grandfather and an uncle. The festivities wrapped up around 7PM and we went our separate ways for the evening, which for us meant retiring to the hotel pool.

I’d ignored my phone much of the day, and it was upon leaving that we caught up with the heartbreaking news out of Charlottesville, Virginia. My family is all over the board politics-wise. As a technology professional living in San Francisco my liberal leanings are well-known in my family, and I was certainly teased to that effect. But when applicable I’d interject a comment or two about equality and fairness to get people from going off the rails. Alas, while they respect me, as a liberal Californian my words seem mean very little to my conservative relatives. Then again, my incredibly white Irish and German ancestry family is getting more colorful by the year. We’re that newly melting pot family that the white nationalists are so offended by, and as far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing more American than us. By quietly living our lives and sharing them with whomever we want, we’re nudging our country into the progressive future that I still believe in, in spite of the dreadful setbacks we’re currently seeing.

The next morning was spent at my grandfather’s place with my mother, aunts and uncles, and some mimosas. We also got some more family photos! First posing with my mother and her three sisters.

And with grandpa and Jo (and Molly!).

It was really nice getting to visit everyone. My family does these kinds of gatherings every few years, but it often conflicts with other travel plans I’ve already made for work or otherwise. This was planned months ago so I was able to adjust my schedule around it. This was also the first small chunk of time I’ve taken off since starting my new job in January, so we spent a couple days playing tourist while we were there in in central Florida.

Filed under: family, travel

Baseball, MST3K, OSEN and streetcars

Thursday, Aug 10th, 2017 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

I’ve kept busy these past few weeks. On Monday the 24th I joined my Mesosphere colleagues for pizza and wings before two of us led a group of 25+ down to AT&T Park to watch the San Francisco Giants play against the Pittsburgh Pirates. Unfortunately, our beloved home team lost 10-3 and as the losing game went on the crowds were fleeing the stadium. In the 8th inning, when the Pirates scored four more runs, the seagulls which descend upon the stadium at the end of the game for leftover snacks were starting to outnumber the remaining fans. I toughed it out though, with two German colleagues who were attending their first baseball game. In spite of the loss, it was a beautiful night to be outside and it was my first opportunity this season to get out to AT&T Park.

Later that week I met up with a friend of mine for a walk around Lake Merritt over in Oakland. We met at BART and walked over to the lake to do the three mile loop. We hadn’t seen each other in a few months so it was nice to spend the time together, and I’d never been to the lake before. Pelicans, geese and all kinds of other sea fowl hang out at the brackish lake, and in spite of my dislike for birds they did liven up the evening too, as did the beautiful lake itself.

Last Thursday MJ and I met at The Warfield after work for the second night of San Francisco’s stop of the MST3K Live! – Watch Out for Snakes! Tour. We went for the “Secret Surprise Film!” (rather than Eegah, the night before) night and it didn’t disappoint. The live cast and audience were fun and being around so many fellow MSTies is always an interesting experience, I always forget how many of us there are!

This was also my first time at The Warfield. It’s an easy walk from home, so that was nice. The theater was a bit warm, but in the tradition of these older theater it was ornately decorated and a pleasure to spend time in.

The weekend was spent with MJ as one of the few that we’ve had together recently. We enjoyed some nice meals and then got down to the business of booking travel. My travel schedule from August through October is a bit chaotic. I’m leaving San Francisco on August 10th, not to return until after a partial vacation in Dublin over Labor Day. Then I have trips to Los Angeles, Orlando, Raleigh, Prague and Germany taking me through the end of October. Of that, only one trip had been booked. We spent Sunday afternoon sifting through airline fare classes and routes to find the best deals and over the next couple days we managed to firm up a host of plans.

My first trip takes me to Orlando for a family reunion that’s happening this Saturday. From there I’m going up with my mother and aunt to our townhouse in Philadelphia for a week and a half where I’ll speak at a PLUG meeting and then meet MJ as he re-joins me to attend Fosscon, where I’m also speaking. We’ll be off to Dublin from there, I’ll work for a couple days and speak at a Kafka meetup before spending a long weekend together being tourists.

On Wednesday I met up with a friend I hadn’t seen in a while to grab dinner, and then Thursday was spent at the inaugural gathering of the Open Source Entrepreneur Network Bay Area at the Docker offices in SOMA. There I had the pleasure of finally meeting John Mark Walker (we’ve known of each other for years), and quickly connect with long time open source colleagues Stephen Walli and Jono Bacon, who were all speaking that evening. In the first talk of the evening, John Mark guided us through what he believed made open source entrepreneurs and defined where open source advocates and evangelists for a company sit (it’s near the funnel). He also made clear that there are pieces (bits of software that make up something), projects (think, OpenStack) and products (any of the various vendor-sponsored all-inclusive proprietary-bits-on-top “distributions” of OpenStack). I also gleaned some thoughtful observations from his talk, like how he considers the groundwork laid by the open source way itself to be what drove such high rate of collaborative innovation today, not necessarily the other way around.

Stephen brought us back in time with a history lesson about the rise of open source, particularly centered around some of Red Hat’s customer-focused business model that has brought them such success. In this, he wove in customers and community. A non-paying user community is essential to any open source project, because that’s where you get your outside contributors. It doesn’t just happen automatically though, you must have a quick on-ramp to make sure people can use and develop against your software quickly and you should still expect it to be a pretty small fraction of your total user base. I also liked how he talked about setting customer and partner expectations, along with those in the community, and noted that they were different. The evening concluded with a talk from Jono Bacon who talked about “Building a World Class Community” during which he talked about culture, contribution workflows, the importance of trust and gave a series of recommendations.

The weekend came quickly and on Saturday MJ and I had tickets for a baseball game. Back to AT&T Park for me! This time we went with a winery that we’re members of, so there was pre-game wine and snacks to be enjoyed. Merlot with a hot dog? Don’t mind if I do! We had a really nice time together and it was an exciting game to watch. Even better, this time the Giants won.

Sunday was pretty mellow, but I was eager to spend much of it outside. In the morning I took a walk down Market, picked up a coffee, walked around the Embarcadero. I also took a lot of pictures of streetcars and stopped by the little SF Railway Museum where I picked up a new hat. That afternoon we went out for lunch at a little restaurant on the Embarcadero and watched cars on the E-Line pass by. More pictures! Then I road my first and second ones of the day, taking the E-Line to Ferry Building where we transferred to one of the F-Line cars to go down Market and get home.

This week I met with our new pet sitter. Caligula is on some medication to try and regulate his high calcium levels. Most of his life he’s also been on the heavy side, but he’s been losing weight recently too. I’m really hoping the medication works and the change in his food to one more appropriate for older cats helps.

Tuesday night I had dinner with my friend and open source colleague Remy. We met at Thirsty Bear Brewing to chat about work, open source and life in general. Good times.

And now I’m getting ready to head out on that trip to Florida!

Filed under: events, life, rails, san francisco
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