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Meetup, baseball and kitties

Thursday, Aug 6th, 2015 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

I had fully intended on writing this before sitting in a hotel in Peru, but pre-trip tasks crept up, I had last minute things to finish with work (oh, leaving on a Wednesday!) and sitting on a plane all day is always much more exhausting than I expect it to be. So here we are!

Since returning from OSCON a couple weeks ago I’ve kept busy with other things. In addition to the continued work on my book. On the Thursday OSCON was still going on, I attended my first Write/Speak/Code SF & Bay Area event. It was a work evening where several women met up at a little eatery in SOMA, chatted about their work and each brought a project to work on. I had my keynote slides to perfect, and managed to do that and get them set off to the friend I was having them translate them into Spanish. I managed to also talk about the work I’d been doing on my book and found a couple people who may be interested in doing some review. It was also great to learn that some of them were interested in supporting Grace Hopper Conference speakers, and there may be an event in September to gather some of us who live and work in the area to support each other and practice fine tune our talks.

The following Monday MJ and I met at AT&T Park downtown to attend a Giants baseball game on Jewish Heritage Night. It had been a couple years since I’d been to a Giants game (the season goes by so quickly!), it was great to get to see a game again. Plus, the Kiddush cup they gave away as the special event gift now has a treasured spot in my home.

As the game began, I found myself sitting in front of the Rabbi for our congregation, who is a big baseball fan and is always fun to talk to about it. Since we bought tickets with other members we also found ourselves in the bleachers, which I’d never sat in before. It was a whole different angle and seating arrangement than I’m used to, but still lots of fun.

As an added bonus, it was a solid game that the Giants won. More photos from the game here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157654129506103

In other “while I’m home” life news, I also started the sessions with a trainer at the gym. I have 5 paid for, and the first was a tour of pain, as advertised. I go running and have always been quite skilled at lifting things, but this trainer found muscles I’m not sure I’ve ever used. He also managed to put me in a state where it took me about 3 days to feel normal again, the first day of which I really struggled to walk down stairs! I’m sticking to it though and while I may ask him to tone it down slightly for my next session, I already have it on my schedule upon my return from Peru and the OpenStack Operators Meetup in Palo Alto.

I then spent a lot of time on work and getting some loose ends tied off for my book as I prepared for this trip to Peru. We’ve also had some vet visits interspersed as poor Simcoe has battled a bacterial problem that caused some eye trouble. Thankfully she was almost all healed up by the time I flew out on Wednesday and you can hardly tell there was an issue. Fortunately none of these troubles impacted her bouncy nature.

Or whatever is in their nature that makes them want to sleep on our suitcases.

Sitting on my suitcases aside, I already miss my fluffy critters, and am thankful that my husband is joining me on Sunday. Still, I’m super excited for UbuCon Latin America tomorrow!

Filed under: events, life, san francisco

OSCON 2015

Friday, Jul 24th, 2015 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Following the Community Leadership Summit (CLS), which I wrote about wrote about here, I spent a couple of days at OSCON.

Monday kicked off by attending Jono Bacon’s Community leadership workshop. I attended one of these a couple years ago, so it was really interesting to see how his advice has evolved with the change in tooling and progress that communities in tech and beyond has changed. I took a lot of notes, but everything I wanted to say here has been summarized by others in a series of great posts on opensource.com:

…hopefully no one else went to Powell’s to pick up the recommended books, I cleared them out of a couple of them.

That afternoon Jono joined David Planella of the Community Team at Canonical and Michael Hall, Laura Czajkowski and I of the Ubuntu Community Council to look through our CLS notes and come up with some talking points to discuss with the rest of the Ubuntu community regarding everything from in person events (stronger centralized support of regional Ubucons needed?) to learning what inspires people about the active Ubuntu phone community and how we can make them feel more included in the broader community (and helping them become leaders!). There was also some interesting discussion around the Open Source projects managed by Canonical and expectations for community members with regard to where they can get involved. There are some projects where part time, community contributors are wanted and welcome, and others where it’s simply not realistic due to a variety of factors, from the desire for in-person collaboration (a lot of design and UI stuff) to the new projects with an exceptionally fast pace of development that makes it harder for part time contributors (right now I’m thinking anything related to Snappy). There are improvements that Canonical can make so that even these projects are more welcoming, but adjusting expectations about where contributions are most needed and wanted would be valuable to me. I’m looking forward to discussing these topics and more with the broader Ubuntu community.


Laura, David, Michael, Lyz

Monday night we invited members of the Oregon LoCo out and had an Out of Towners Dinner at Altabira City Tavern, the restaurant on top of the Hotel Eastlund where several of us were staying. Unfortunately the local Kubuntu folks had already cleared out of town for Akademy in Spain, but we were able to meet up with long-time Ubuntu member Dan Trevino, who used to be part of the Florida LoCo with Michael, and who I last saw at Google I/O last year. I enjoyed great food and company.

I wasn’t speaking at OSCON this year, so I attended with an Expo pass and after an amazing breakfast at Mother’s Bistro in downtown Portland with Laura, David and Michael (…and another quick stop at Powell’s), I spent Tuesday afternoon hanging out with various friends who were also attending OSCON. When 5PM rolled around the actual expo hall itself opened, and surprised me with how massive and expensive some of the company booths had become. My last OSCON was in 2013 and I don’t remember the expo hall being quite so extravagant. We’ve sure come a long way.

Still, my favorite part of the expo hall is always the non-profit/open source project/organization area where the more grass-roots tables are. I was able to chat with several people who are really passionate about what they do. As a former Linux Users Group organizer and someone who still does a lot of open source work for free as a hobby, these are my people.

Wednesday was my last morning at OSCON. I did another walk around the expo hall and chatted with several people. I also went by the HP booth and got a picture of myself… with myself. I remain very happy that HP continues to support my career in a way that allows me to work on really interesting open source infrastructure stuff and to travel the world to tell people about it.

My flight took me home Wednesday afternoon and with that my OSCON adventure for 2015 came to a close!

More OSCON and general Portland photos here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157656192137302

Filed under: events, tech, travel, ubuntu planet

Community Leadership Summit 2015

Monday, Jul 20th, 2015 by pleia2 | 2 Comments

My Saturday kicked off with the Community Leadership Summit (CLS) here in Portland, Oregon.

CLS sign

Jono Bacon opened the event by talking about the growth of communities in the past several years as internet-connected communities of all kinds are springing up worldwide. Though this near-OSCON CLS is open source project heavy, he talked about communities that range from the Maker movement to political revolutions. While we work to develop best practices for all kinds of communities, it was nice to hear one of his key thoughts as we move forward in community building: “Community is not an extension of the Marketing department.”

The day continued with a series of plenaries, which were 15 minutes long and touched upon topics like empathy, authenticity and vulnerability in community management roles. The talks wrapped up with a Facilitation 101 talk to give tips on how to run the unconference sessions. We then did the session proposals and scheduling that would pick up after lunch.

CLS schedule

As mentioned in my earlier post we had some discussion points from our experiences in the Ubuntu community that we wanted to get feedback on from the broader leadership community so we proposed 4 sessions that lasted the afternoon.

Lack of new generation of leaders

The root of this session came from our current struggle in the Ubuntu community to find leaders, from those who wish to sit on councils and boards to leaders for the LoCo teams. In addition to several people who expressed similar problems in their own communities, there was some fantastic feedback from folks who attended, including:

  • Some folks don’t see themselves as “Leaders” so using that word can be intimidating, if you find this is the case, shift to using different types of titles that do more to describe the role they are taking.
  • Document tasks that you do as a leader and slowly hand them off to people in your community to build a supportive group of people who know the ins and outs and can take a leadership role in the future.
  • Evaluate your community every few years to determine whether your leadership structure still makes sense, and make changes with every generation of community leaders if needed (and it often is!).
  • If you’re seeking to get more contributions from people who are employed to do open source, you may need to engage their managers to prioritize appropriately. Also, make sure credit is given to companies who are paying employees to contribute.
  • Set a clear set of responsibilities and expectations for leadership positions so people understand the role, commitment level and expectations of them.
  • Actively promote people who are doing good work, whether by expressing thanks on social media, in blog posts and whatever other communications methods you employ, as well as inviting them to speak at other events, fund them to attend events and directly engage them. This will all serve to build satisfaction and their social capital in the community.
  • Casual mentorship of aspiring leaders who you can hand over projects for them to take over once they’ve begun to grow and understand the steps required.

Making lasting friendships that are bigger than the project

This was an interesting session that was proposed as many of us found that we built strong relationships with people early on in Ubuntu, but have noticed fewer of those developing in the past few years. Many of us have these friendships which have lasted even as people leave the project, and even leave the tech industry entirely, for us Ubuntu wasn’t just an open source project, we were all building lasting relationships.

Recommendations included:

  • In person events are hugely valuable to this (what we used to get from Ubuntu Developer Summits). Empower local communities to host major events.
  • Find a way to have discussions that are not directly related to the project with your fellow project members, including creating a space where there’s a weekly topic, giving a space to share accomplishments, and perhaps not lumping it all together (some new off-topic threads on Discourse?)
  • Provide a space to have check-ins with members of and teams in your community, how is life going? Do you have the resources you need?
  • Remember that tangential interests are what bring people together on a personal level and seek to facilitate that

There was also some interesting discussion around handling contributors whose behavior has become disruptive (often due to personal things that have come up in their life), from making sure a Code of Conduct is in place to set expectations for behavior to approaching people directly to check in to make sure they’re doing all right and to discuss the change in their behavior.

Declining Community Participation

We proposed this session because we’ve seen a decline in community participation since before the Ubuntu Developer Summits ceased. We spent some time framing this problem in the space it’s in, with many Linux distributions and “core” components seeing similar decline and disinterest in involvement. It was also noted that when a project works well, people are less inclined to help because they don’t need to fix things, which may certainly be the case with a product like the Ubuntu server. In this vein, it was noted that 10 years ago the contributor to user ratio was much higher, since many people who used it got involved in order to file bugs and collaborate to fix things.

Some of the recommendations that came out of this session:

  • Host contests and special events to showcase new technologies to get people excited about involvement (made me think of Xubuntu testing with XMir, we had a lot of people testing it because it was an interesting new thing!)
  • In one company, the co-founder set a community expectation for companies who were making money from the product to give back 5% in development (or community management, or community support).
  • Put a new spin on having your code reviewed: it’s constructive criticism from programmers with a high level of expertise, you’re getting training while they chime in on reviews. Note that the community must have a solid code review community that knows how to help people and be kind to them in reviews.
  • Look at bright spots in your community and recreate them: Where has the community grown? (Ubuntu Phone) How can you bring excitement there to other parts of your project? Who are your existing contributors in the areas where you’ve seen a decline and how can you find more contributors like them?
  • Share stories about how your existing members got involved so that new contributors see a solid on-ramp for themselves, and know that everyone started somewhere.
  • Make sure you have clear, well-defined on-ramps for various parts of your project, it was noted that Mozilla does a very good job with this (Ubuntu does use Mozilla’s Asknot, but it’s hard to find!).

Barriers related to single-vendor control and development of a project

This session came about because of the obvious control that Canonical has in the direction of the Ubuntu project. We sought to find advice from other communities where there was single-vendor control. Perhaps unfortunately the session trended heavily toward specifically Ubuntu, but we were able to get some feedback from other communities and how they handle decisions made in an ecosystem with both paid and volunteer contrbutors:

  • Decisions should happen in a public, organized space (not just an IRC log, Google Hangout or in person discussion, even if these things are made public). Some communities have used: Github repo, mailing list threads, Request For Comment system to gather feedback and discuss it.
  • Provide a space where community members can submit proposals that the development community can take seriously (we did used to have brainstorm.ubuntu.com for this, but it wound down over the years and became less valuable.
  • Make sure the company counts contributions as real, tangible things that should be considered for monetary value (non-profits already do this for their volunteers).
  • Make sure the company understands the motivation of community members so they don’t accidentally undermine this.
  • Evaluate expectations in the community, are there some things the company won’t budge on? Are they honest about this and do they make this clear before community members make an investment? Ambiguity hurts the community.

I’m really excited to have further discussions in the Ubuntu community about how these insights can help us. Once I’m home I’ll be able to collect my thoughts and take thoughts and perhaps even action items to the ubuntu-community-team mailing list (which everyone is welcome to participate in).

This first day concluded with a feedback session for the summit itself, which brought up some great points. On to day two!

As with day one, we began the day with a series of plenaries. The first was presented by Richard Millington who talked about 10 “Social Psychology Hacks” that you can use to increase participation in your community. These included “priming” or using existing associations to encourage certain feelings, making sure you craft your story about your community, designing community rituals to make people feel included and use existing contributors to gain more through referrals. It was then time for Laura Czajkowski’s talk about “Making your the Marketing team happy”. My biggest take-away from this one was that not only has she learned to use the tools the marketing team uses, but she now attends their meetings so she can stay informed of their projects and chime in when a suggestion has been made that may cause disruption (or worse!) in the community. Henrik Ingo then gave a talk where he did an analysis of the governance types of many open source projects. He found that all the “extra large” projects developer/commit-wise were all run by a foundation, and that there seemed to be a limit as to how big single-vendor controlled projects could get. I had suspected this was the case, but it was wonderful to have his data to back up my suspicions. Finally, Gina Likins of Red Hat spoke about her work to get universities and open source projects working together. She began her talk by explaining how few college Computer Science majors are familiar with open source, and suggested that a kind of “dating site” be created to match up open source projects with professors looking to get their students involved. Brilliant! I attended her session related to it later in the afternoon.

My afternoon was spent first by joining Gina and others to talk about relationships between university professors and open source communities. Her team runs teachingopensource.org and it turns out I subscribed to their mailing list some time ago. She outlined several goals, from getting students familiar with open source tooling (IRC, mailing lists, revision control, bug trackers) all the way up to more active roles directly in open source projects where the students are submitting patches. I’m really excited to see where this goes and hope I can some day participate in working with some students beyond the direct mentoring through internships that I’m doing now.

Aside from substantial “hallway track” time where I got to catch up with some old friends and meet some people, I went to a session on having open and close-knit communities where people talked about various things, from reaching out to people when they disappear, the importance of conduct standards (and swift enforcement), and going out of your way to participate in discussions kicked off by newcomers in order to make them feel included. The last session I went to shared tips for organizing local communities, and drew from the off-line community organizing that has happened in the past. Suggestions for increasing participation for your group included cross-promotion of groups (either through sharing announcements or doing some joint meetups), not letting volunteers burn out/feel taken for granted and making sure you’re not tolerating poisonous people in your community.

The Community Leadership Summit concluded with a Question and Answer session. Many people really liked the format, keeping the morning pretty much confined to the set presentations and setting up the schedule, allowing us to take a 90 minute lunch (off-site) and come back to spend the whole afternoon in sessions. In all, I was really pleased with the event, kudos to all the organizers!

Filed under: events, tech, travel, ubuntu planet

SF activities and arrival in Portland, OR

Saturday, Jul 18th, 2015 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Time at home in San Francisco came to an end this week with a flight to Portland, OR on Friday for some open source gatherings around OSCON. This ended my nearly 2 months without getting on a plane, the longest stretch I’ve gone in over 2 years. My initial intention with this time was to spend a lot of time on my book, which I have, but not nearly as much as I’d hoped because the work and creativity required isn’t something you can just turn on and off. It was nice getting to spend so much time with my husband though, and the kitties. The stretch at home also led me to join a gym again (I’d canceled my last month to month membership when a stretch of travel had me gone for over a month). Upon my return next week I have my first of four sessions with a trainer at the gym scheduled.

While I haven’t exactly had a full social calendar of late, I have been able to go to a few events. Last Wednesday I hosted an Ubuntu Hour and Bay Area Debian Dinner in San Francisco.

The day after, SwiftStack hosted probably the only OpenStack 5th birthday party I’ll be able to attend this year (leaving before the OSCON one, will be in Peru for the HP one!). I got to see some familiar faces, meet some Swift developers and eat some OpenStack cake.

MJ had a friend in town last week too, which meant I had a lot of time to myself. In the spirit of not having to worry about my own meals during this time, I cooked up a pot of beef stew to enjoy through the week and learned quickly that I should have frozen at least half of it. Even a modest pot of stew is much more than I can eat it all myself over the course of a week. I did enjoy it though, some day I’ll learn about spices so I can make one that’s not so bland.

I’ve also been running again, after a bit of a hiatus following the trip to Vancouver. Fortunately I didn’t lose much ground stamina-wise and was mostly able to pick up where I left off. It has been warmer than normal in San Francisco these past couple weeks though, so I’ve been playing around with the times of my runs, with early evenings as soon as the fog/coolness rolls in currently the winning time slot during the week. Sunday morning runs have been great too.

This week I made it out to a San Francisco DevOps meetup where Tom Limoncelli was giving a talk inspired by some of the less intuitive points in his book The Practice of Cloud Systems Administration. In addition to seeing Tom, it was nice to meet up with some of my local DevOps friends who I haven’t managed to connect with lately and meet some new people.

I had a busy week at home before my trip to Portland this week, upon settling in to the hotel I’m staying at I met up with my friend and fellow Ubuntu Community Council Member Laura Czajkowski. We took the metro over the bridge to downtown Portland and on the way she showed off her Ubuntu phone, and the photo taking app for a selfie together!

Since it was Laura’s first time in Portland, our first stop downtown was to Voodoo Doughnuts! I got my jelly-filled voodoo guy doughnut.

From there we made our way to Powell’s Books where we spent the rest of the afternoon, as you do with Powell’s. I picked up 3 books and learned that Powell’s Technical Books/Powell’s 2 has been absorbed into the big store, which was a little sad for me, it was fun to go to the store that just had science, transportation and engineering books. Still, it was a fun visit and I always enjoy introducing someone new to the store.

Then we headed back across the river to meet up with people for the Community Leadership Summit informal gathering event at the Double Tree. We had a really enjoyable time, I got to see Michael Hall of the Ubuntu Community Council and David Planella of the Community Team at Canonical to catch up with each other and chat about Ubuntu things. Plus, I ran into people I know from the broader open source community. As an introvert, it was one of the more energizing social events I’ve been to in a long time.

Today the Community Leadership Summit that I’m in town for kicks off! Looking forward to some great discussions.

Filed under: events, food, health, life

Ubuntu at the upcoming Community Leadership Summit

Thursday, Jul 16th, 2015 by pleia2 | 2 Comments

This weekend I have the opportunity to attend the Community Leadership Summit. While there, I’ll be able to take advantage of an opportunity that’s rare now: meeting up with my fellow Ubuntu Community Council members Laura Czajkowski and Michael Hall, along with David Planella of the community team at Canonical. At the Community Council meeting today, I was able to work with David on narrowing down a few topics that impact us and we think would be of interest to other communities and we’ll propose for discussion at CLS:

  1. Declining participation
  2. Community cohesion
  3. Barriers related to [the perception of] company-driven control and development
  4. Lack of a new generation of leaders

As an unconference, we’ll be submitting these ideas for discussion and so we’ll see how many of them gain interest of enough people to have a discussion.

at

Community Leadership Summit 2015

Since we’ll all be together, we also managed to arrange some time together on Monday afternoon and Tuesday to talk about how these challenges impact Ubuntu specifically and get to any of the topics mentioned above that weren’t selected for discussion at CLS itself. By the end of this in person gathering we hope to have some action items, or at least some solidified talking points and ideas to bring to the ubuntu-community-team mailing list. I’ll also be doing a follow-up blog post where I share some of my takeaways.

What I need from you:

If you’re attending CLS join us for the discussions! If you just happen to be in the area for OSCON in general, feel free to reach out to me (email: lyz@ubuntu.com) to have a chat while I’m in town. I fly home Wednesday afternoon.

If you can’t attend CLS but are interested in these discussions, chime in on the ubuntu-community-team thread or send a message to the Community Council at community-council at lists.ubuntu.com with your feedback and we’ll work to incorporate it into the sessions. You’re also welcome to contact me directly and I’ll pass things along (anonymously if you’d like, just let me know).

Finally, a reminder that this time together is not a panacea. These are complicated concerns in our community that will not be solved over a weekend and a few members of the Ubuntu Community Council won’t be able to solve them alone. Like many of you, I’m a volunteer who cares about the Ubuntu community and am doing my best to find the best way forward. Please keep this in mind as you bring concerns to us. We’re all on the same team here.

Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet

California Tourist

Sunday, Jul 5th, 2015 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

I returned from my latest conference on May 23rd, closing down what had been over 2 years of traveling every month to some kind of conference, event or family gathering. This was the longest stretch of travel I’ve done and I’ve managed to visit a lot of amazing places and meeting some unforgettable people. However, with a book deadline creeping up and tasks at home piling up, I figured it was time to slow down for a bit. I didn’t travel in June and my next trip isn’t until the end of July when I’m going up to Portland for the Community Leadership Summit and a couple days of schmoozing with OSCON friends.

Complicated moods of late and continued struggles with migraines have made it so I’ve not been as productive as I’ve wanted, but I have made real progress on some things I’ve wanted to and my book is really finally coming together. In the spaces between work I’ve also managed a bit of much needed fun and relaxation.

A couple weekends ago MJ and I took a weekend trip up to an inn and spa in Sonoma to get some massages and soak in natural mineral water pools provided by on site springs. We had some amazing dinners at the inn, including one evening where we enjoyed s’mores at an outdoor fire pit. The time spent was amazingly relaxing and refreshing, and although it wasn’t a cure-all for the dip in my mood of late, it was some time well spent together.


Perfect weather, beautiful venue

On Sunday morning we checked out of the inn and enjoyed a fantastic brunch that included lobster eggs benedict on the grounds before venturing on. While in Sonoma, we decided to stop by a couple wineries that we were familiar with, starting with Imagery, which is the sister winery to the one we got engaged at, and our next stop, Benziger. At both we picked up several nice wines, of which I’m looking forward to cracking open for Shabbats in our near future!

We also stopped by B.R. Cohn for a couple olive oils, and I picked up some delicious blackberry jam and some Chardonnay caramel sauce which has graced some bowls of ice cream since our return. On the trip back to San Francisco we made one final stop, at Jacuzzi Winery where we picked up several more interesting bottles of olive oil, which will soon make it into some salads, scrambled eggs and other dishes that we got recipe cards for.

Due to my backlog, I’ve been spending a lot of time at home and not much at local events, with the exception of a great gathering at the East Bay Linux Users Group a few weeks ago. In contrast with my professional colleagues who work on Linux full time as systems administrators, engineers and DevOps, it’s so refreshing to go to a LUG where I’m meeting with long term tech hobbiests who still distro-hop and come up with interesting questions around the distros I’m most familiar with and the Linux ecosystem in general. This group has also had interest in Partimus lately, so it was nice to get some feedback about our on-going efforts and volunteer recruitment activities.

In an effort to get out of the house more, I picked up the book Historic Walks in San Francisco: 18 Trails Through the City’s Past and finally took it out for a spin this weekend. I went on the Financial District walk which took me around what is essentially my own neighborhood but had me look at it with whole new eyes. I learned that the Hallidie Building tricked me into believing it was a new building with it’s glass exterior, but is actually from 1917 and one of the first American buildings to feature glass curtain walls.


Hallidie Building

One of my favorite buildings on the tour turned out to be the Kohl Building, which was built in 1901 and withstood the 1906 earthquake that leveled most of downtown San Francisco and so was used as a command post during the recovery. Erected for Alvinza Hayward, the “H” shape of the building is allegedly in honor of his last name.


Kohl Building

The tour had lots more fun landmarks and stories of recovery (or not) following the 1906 earthquake. Amusingly for my European friends, the young age of San Francisco itself, and our shaky history means that there was not much at all here 160 years ago, so “historical” for us means 50+ years. Over 110 years and you’re going back before the city was essentially leveled by the earthquake and fire to some truly impressive sturdy buildings. The oldest on the tour was the oldest standing building downtown and it dates from 1877 and now houses the Pacific Heritage Museum, which I hope to visit one of these days when they’re open.

More photos from my walk here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157655051173508

While on the topic of walking tours, doing this tour alone left something to be desired, even with Tony Bennett and company crooning in my ears. I think I might look up some of the free San Francisco Walking Tours for my next adventure.

My 4th of July weekend here has been pretty low-key. MJ has a friend in town, so they’ve been spending the days out and I’ll sometimes tag along for dinner. With an empty house, I got some reading done, plowed through several tasks on my to do list and started catching up on book related tasks. I still don’t feel like I got “enough” done, but there’s always tomorrow.

Filed under: life, san francisco

Contributing to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter

Monday, Jun 29th, 2015 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Super star Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter contributor Paul White recently was reflecting upon his work with the newsletter and noted that he was approaching 100 issues that he’s contributed to. Wow!

That caused me to look at how long I’ve been involved. Back in 2011 the newsletter when on a 6 month hiatus when the former editor had to step down due to obligations elsewhere. After much pleading for the return of the newsletter, I spent a few weeks working with Nathan Handler to improve the scripts used in the release process and doing an analysis of the value of each section of the newsletter in relation to how much work it took to produce each week. The result was a slightly leaner, but hopefully just as valuable newsletter, which now took about 30 minutes for an experienced editor to release rather than 2+ hours. This change was transformational for the team, allowing me to be involved for a whopping 205 consecutive issues.

If you’re not familiar with the newsletter, every week we work to collect news from around our community and the Internet to bring together a snapshot of that week in Ubuntu. It helps people stay up to date with the latest in the world of Ubuntu and the Newsletter archive offers a fascinating glimpse back through history.

But we always need help putting the newsletter together. We especially need people who can take some time out of their weekend to help us write article summaries.

Summary writers. Summary writers receive an email every Friday evening (or early Saturday) US time with a link to the collaborative news links document for the past week which lists all the articles that need 2-3 sentence summaries. These people are vitally important to the newsletter. The time commitment is limited and it is easy to get started with from the first weekend you volunteer. No need to be shy about your writing skills, we have style guidelines to help you on your way and all summaries are reviewed before publishing so it’s easy to improve as you go on.

Interested? Email editor.ubuntu.news@ubuntu.com and we’ll get you added to the list of folks who are emailed each week.

I love working on the newsletter. As I’ve had to reduce my commitment to some volunteer projects I’m working on, I’ve held on to the newsletter because of how valuable and enjoyable I find it. We’re a friendly team and I hope you can join us!

Still just interested in reading? You have several options:

And everyone is welcome to drop by #ubuntu-news on Freenode to chat with us or share links to news we may found valuable for the newsletter.

Filed under: tech, ubuntu planet

Weekends, street cars and red pandas

Saturday, Jun 13th, 2015 by pleia2 | 1 Comments

I’m home for the entire month of June! Looking back through my travel schedule, the last month I didn’t get on a plane was March of 2013. The travel-loving part of me is a little sad about breaking my streak, but given that it’s June and I’ve already given 8 presentations in 5 countries across 3 continents, I’m due for this break from travel. It’s not a break from work though, I’ve had to really hunker down on some projects I’m working on at work now that I have solid chunks of time to concentrate, and some serious due dates for my book are looming. I’ve also been tired, which prompted an extensive pile of blood work that had some troubling results that I’m now working with a specialist to get to the bottom of. I’m continuing to run and improve my diet by eating more fresh, green things which have traditionally helped bump my energy level because I’m treating my body better, but lately they both just make me more tired. And ultimately, tired means some evenings I spend more time watching True Blood and The Good Wife than I should with all these book deadlines creeping up. Don’t tell my editor ;)

I’m also getting lots of kitty snuggles as I remain at home, and lots of opportunities to take cute kitty pictures.

I continue to take Saturdays off, which continues to be my primary burnout protection mechanism. I’ve continued to evolve what this day off means. While originally inspired by the Jewish tradition of Shabbat, and we practice Shabbat rituals in our home (candles, challah, etc), and I continue to avoid work, the definition of work is in flux for me. Early on, I’d still check “personal” email and social media, until I discovered that there’s no such thing, with my open source volunteer work, open source day job and personal life so intertwined. There recently have also been some considerable stresses related to my volunteer open source work, which I want to have a break from on my day off. So currently I work hard to avoid checking email and social media, even though it’s still a struggle. It’s caused me to learn how much of a slave I’ve become to my phone. It beeps, I leap for it. Having a day off has caused me to create discipline around my relationship with my phone, so even on days when I’m working, I’m less inclined to prioritize phone beeps over the work I’m currently engaged in, leading to a greater ability to focus. Sorry to people who randomly text or direct message me on Twitter/Facebook expecting an immediate response, it will rarely happen.

So currently, my Saturdays often include either:

  • Attending Synagogue services with MJ and having a lunch out together
  • Going to some museum, movie or cultural event with MJ
  • Staying home and reading, writing, catching up with some online classes or working on hobby projects

I had played around with avoiding computers entirely on Saturdays, but on home days I realized I’d get bored too easily if I’m reading all day and some times I’m really not in the mood for my offline activities. When I get bored, I end up napping or watching TV instead, neither of which are rejuvenating or satisfying, and I end up just feeling sad about wasting the day. So my criteria has shifted to “not work” to including fun, enriching projects that I likely don’t have time or energy for on my other six “working” days. I have struggled with whether these hobbies should be on my to do list or not, since putting them on my list adds a level of structure that can lead to stress, but my coping habit for task organization makes leaving them off a challenging mental exercise. Writing here in my blog also requires a computer, and these days off give me ample time for ideas to settle and finally have some quite time to get my thoughts in order and write without distraction. Though I do have to admit that buying a vintage mechanical typewriter has crossed my mind more than a few times. Which reminds me, have any recommendations? Aside from divorce lawyers and a bigger home in the event that I drive MJ crazy. I also watch videos associated with various electronics projects and online classes I’m learning for fun (Arduinos! History and anthropology!), so a computer or tablet is regularly involved there.

It’s still not perfect. My stress levels have been high this year and we’ve booked a weekend at a beautiful inn and spa in Sonoma next weekend to unplug away from the random tasks that come from spending our weekends at home. I’m counting down the hours.

Last weekend was a lot of fun though, even if I was still stressed. On Saturday we went on a Blackpool Boat Tram Tour along the F-line. I’ve been looking for an opportunity to ride on this “topless” street car for years, but the charters always conflicted with my travel schedule, until last weekend! MJ and I booked tickets and at 1:30PM on Saturday we were on our way down Market Street.

As the title of the tour suggests, these unusually styled street cars come from Blackpool, England, a region known for their seaside activities, including Blackpool Pleasure Beach where they now have the first Wallace and Gromit theme park ride, Wallace & Gromit’s Thrill-O-Matic ride! Well, they also have a tramway where these cars came from, and California now has three of them – two functioning ones operated here in the city by MUNI and maintained by the Market Street Railway non-profit, which I’m a member of and conducted this charter.

We met at 1:15 to pick up our tickets, browse through the little SF Railyway Museum and capture some pre-travel photos of the boat tram.

Upon boarding, we took seats at the back of the street car. The tour was in two parts, half of it guided by a representative from Market Street Railway who gave some history of the transportation lines themselves as we glided up Market Street along the standard F-line until getting to Castro where a slightly different route was taken to turn back on to Market.

At the turn around near Castro, the guides swapped places and we got a representative from San Francisco City Guides who typically does walking tours of the city. As a local enthusiast he was able to give us details about the major landmarks along Market and up the Embarcadero as we made our way up to Pier 39. I knew most of what both guides told us, but there were a few bits of knowledge I was excited to learn. I was also reminded of the ~12 minute A Trip Down Market Street, 1906 that was taken just days before the earthquake in 1906 that destroyed many of the buildings seen in the video. Fascinating stuff.

At Pier 39 we had the opportunity to get out of the car and take some pictures around it, including the obligatory pictures of ourselves!

The trip lasted a couple hours, and with the open top of the car I managed to get a bit of sunburn on my face, oops!

More photos from the tram tour can be found here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157654163687542

Sunday morning I took advantage of the de-stressing qualities of a visit to the zoo.

I finally got to see all three of the red pandas. It had been some time since I’d seen their exhibit, and last time only one of them was there. It was fun to see all three of them together, two of them climbing the trees (pictured below) and the third walking around the ground of the enclosure. I’m kind of jealous of their epic tree houses.

Also got to swing by the sea lions Henry and Silent Knight, with Henry playing king of the rock in the middle of their pool.

More photos here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157654194707041

In other miscellaneous life things, MJ and I made it out to see Mad Max: Fury Road recently. It’s been several months since I’d been to a theater, and probably over a year since MJ and I had gone to a movie together, so it was a nice change of pace. Plus, it was a fun, mind-numbing movie that took my mind off my ever-growing task list. MJ and I have also been able to spend several nice dinners together, including indulging in a Brazilian Steakhouse one evening and fondue another night. In spite of these things, with running, improved breakfast and lunch and mostly skipping desserts I’ve dropped 5lbs in the past month, which is not rapid weight loss but is being done in a way that’s sustainable without completely eliminating the things I love (including my craft beer hobby). Hooray!

I’ve cut back on events, sadly turning down invitations to local panels and presentations in favor of staying home and working on my book during my off-work hours. I did host an Ubuntu Hour this week though.

Next week I’m planning on popping over to a nearby Ubuntu/Juju Mine and Mingle. I’ll also be heading down to the south end of the east bay for an EBLUG meeting where they’ve graciously offered to host space, time and expertise for an evening of discussing work on some servers that Partimus is planning on deploying in some of the schools we work with. It will be great to meet up and chat with some of the volunteers who I’ve largely only worked on thus far online, and to block off some of my own time for the raw technical tasks that Partimus needs to be focusing on but I’ve been suffering from time constraints around.

I really am looking forward to that spa weekend, but for now I’m rounding out my relaxing Saturday and preparing for get-things-done Sunday!

Filed under: animals, events, life, san francisco

Tourist in Vancouver

Saturday, May 30th, 2015 by pleia2 | 2 Comments

While in Vancouver for the OpenStack Summit, I made some time to visit some of the sights as well. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to do as much as I’d like, when I arrived early on Sunday I was sick and had to take it easy, so missed the Women of OpenStack boat tour and happy hour. Then after a stunning week of sunny weather, the Saturday afternoon following the summit brought rain. But I did get out on Saturday to explore some anyway.

First thing on Saturday morning I laced up my running shoes and took advantage of the beautiful path around the waterfront to go for a run. Of all the places away from home I’ve run, there’s been a common theme: water. From Perth to Miami, and even here at home in San Francisco, there’s something about running along the water that defies exhaustion otherwise brought on by travel to inspire me to get out there. It was a great run, one of my longer ones in recent memory.

While on my run I got to see the sea planes one last time. The next time I visit Vancouver, taking one of them to Victoria will definitely be on my list, I knew I’d regret not taking time on Saturday to do it and I totally do! Vancouver isn’t that far away, I’ll have my chance some other time.

I then packed up and checked out of my hotel in time to meet a couple colleagues for lunch, and then I was off to Stanley Park to visit the Vancouver Aquarium. I’ve been to a lot of aquariums, and this one is definitely in my top 5. They had a Sea Monsters Revealed exhibit that I visited first, very similar to the Bodies exhibits that show the insides of people, these ones showed the inside of sea animals. Gross and cool.

Fish, frogs, jellyfish, but the big draw for me is always the marine mammals. I continue to have mixed feelings about keeping large animals like belugas in captivity, but they were amazing to see. While I got a glimpse of one of the dolphin from an underwater tank, the above ground section was closed due the other recovering from surgery, which I later learned was sadly unsuccessful and she passed away the next day. Then of course there were the sea otters, oh the adorable sea otters! I also got to see the penguins get some food from one of their caretakers, after which they were quite lively, waddling around their habitat and going for swims.

Great visit, highly recommended. The rest of Stanley Park was beautiful too, I should have taken more pictures!

More photos from the aquarium here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157651049343264

I then headed back down to Gastown, the historic district of Vancouver, for some shopping and browsing. I picked up some lovely first nation-made goodies as well as some maple coffee, which may be a tourist gimmick, but it is one of the few types of coffees I’ve grow accustom to drinking black and it’s tricky to find south of the border. Gastown is also where the really cool steam-powered clock lives. While not historic, it is very steam punk.

And with that, the skies opened up and it began raining. I had planned for this and wore my new raincoat supplied as the gift to OpenStack attendees (nice thinking in Vancouver!). It was good to break it in with some nice Vancouver rain, but I did get a bit soggy where I wasn’t covered by the raincoat while walking back to the hotel. I then enjoyed a drink with a colleague who was also escaping the rain and we enjoyed chatting and I wrote some post cards before heading to the airport.

Filed under: travel

Liberty OpenStack Summit days 3-5

Saturday, May 23rd, 2015 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Summiting continued! The final three days of the conference offered two days of OpenStack Design Summit discussions and working sessions on specific topics, and Friday was spent doing a contributors meetup so we could have face time with people we’re working with on projects.

Wednesday began with a team breakfast, where over 30 of us descended upon a breakfast restaurant and had a lively morning. Unfortunately it ran a bit long and made us a bit late for the beginning of summit stuff, but the next Infrastructure work session was fully attended! The session sought to take some next steps with our activity tracking mechanisms, none of which are currently part of the OpenStack Infrastructure. Currently there are several different types of stats being collected, from reviewstats which are hosted by a community member and focus specifically on reviews to those produced from Bitergia (here) that are somewhat generic but help compare OpenStack to other open source projects to Stackalytics which is crafted specifically for the OpenStack community. There seems to be value in hosting various metric types, mostly so comparisons can be made across platforms if they differ in any way. The consensus of the session was to first move forward with moving Stackalytics into our infrastructure, since so many projects find such value in it. Etherpad here: YVR-infra-activity-tracking


With this view from the work session room, it’s amazing we got anything done

Next up was QA: Testing Beyond the Gate. In OpenStack there is a test gate that all changes must pass in order for a change to be merged. In the past cycle periodic and post-merge tests have also been added, but it’s been found that if a code merging isn’t dependent upon these passing, not many people pay attention to these additional tests. The result of the session is a proposed dashboard for tracking these tests so that there’s an easier view into what they’re doing, whether they’re failing and so empower developers to fix them up. Tracking of third party testing in this, or a similar, tracker was also discussed as a proposal once the infra-run tests are being accounted for. Etherpad here: YVR-QA-testing-beyond-the-gate

The QA: DevStack Roadmap session covered some of the general cleanup that typically needs to be done in DevStack, but then also went into some of the broader action items, including improving the reliability of Centos tests run against it that are currently non-voting, pulling some things out of DevStack to support them as plugins as we move into a Big Tent world and work out how to move forward with Grenade. Etherpad here: YVR-QA-Devstack-Roadmap

I then attended QA: QA in the Big Tent. In the past cycle, OpenStack dropped the long process of being accepted into OpenStack as an official project and streamlined it so that competing technologies are now all in the mix, we’re calling it the Big Tent – as we’re now including everyone. This session focused on how to support the QA needs now that OpenStack is not just a slim core of a few projects. The general idea from a QA perspective is that they can continue to support the things-everyone-uses (nova, neutron, glance… an organically evolving list) and improve pluggable support for projects beyond that so they can help themselves to the QA tools at their disposal. Etherpad here: YVR-QA-in-the-big-tent

With sessions behind me, I boarded a bus for the Core Reviewer Party, hosted at the Museum of Anthropology at UBC. As party venues go, this was a great one. The museum was open for us to explore, and they also offered tours. The main event took place outside, where they served design-your-own curry seafood dishes, bison, cheeses and salmon. Of course no OpenStack event would be complete with a few bars around serving various wines and beer. There was an adjacent small building where live music was playing and there was a lot of space to walk around, catch the sunset and enjoy some gardens. I spent much of my early evening with friends from Time Warner Cable, and rounded things off with several of my buddies from HP. This ended up being a get-back-after-midnight event for me, but it was totally worth it to spend such a great time with everyone.

Thursday morning kicked off with a series of fishbowl sessions where the Infrastructure team was discussing projects we have in the works. First up was Infrastructure: Zuul v3. Zuul is our pipeline-oriented project gating system, which currently works by facilitating the of running tests and automated tasks in response to Gerrit events. Right now it sends jobs off to Gearman for launching via Jenkins to our fleet of waiting nodes, but we’re really using Jenkins as a shim here, not really taking advantage of the built in features that Jenkins offers. We’re also in need of a system that better supports multi-tenancy and multi-node jobs and which can scale as OpenStack continues to grow, particularly with Big Tent. This session discussed the end game of phasing out Jenkins in favor of a more Zuul-driven workflow and more immediate changes that may be made to Nodepool and smaller projects like Zuul-merger to drive our vision. Etherpad here: YVR-infra-zuulv3

Everyone loves bug reporting and task tracking, right? In the next session, Infrastructure: Task tracking, that was our topic. We did an experiment with the creation of Storyboard as our homebrewed solution to bug and task tracking, but in spite of valiant efforts by the small team working on it, they were unable to gain more contributors and the job was simply too big for the size of the team doing the work. As a result, we’re now back to looking at solutions other than Canonical’s hosted Launchpad (which is currently used). The session went through some basic evaluation of a few tools, and at the end there was some consensus to work toward bringing up a more battle-hardened and Puppetized instance of Maniphest (from Phabricator) so that teams can see if it fits their needs. Etherpad here:YVR-infra-task-tracking

The morning continued with an Infrastructure: Infra-cloud session. The Infrastructure team has about 150 machines in a datacenter that have been donated to us by HP. The session focused on how we can put these to use as Nodepool instances by running OpenStack on our own and adding that “infra-cloud” to the providers in Nodepool. I’m particularly interested in this, given some of my history with getting TripleO into testing (so have deployed OpenStack many, many times!) and in general eager to learn even more about production OpenStack deployments. So it looks like I’ll be providing Infra-brains to Clint Byrum who is otherwise taking a lead here. To keep in sync with other things we host, we’ll be using Puppet to deploy OpenStack, so I’m thankful for the expertise of people like Colleen Murphy who just joined our team to help with that. Etherpad here: YVR-infra-cloud

Next up was the Infrastructure: Puppet testing session. It was great to have some of the OpenStack Puppet folks in the room so they could talk some about how they’re using beaker-rspec in our infra for testing the OpenStack modules themselves. Much of the discussion centered around whether we want to follow their lead, or do something else, leveraging our current system of node allocation to do our own module testing. We also have a much commented on spec up for proposal here. The result of the discussion was that it’s likely that we’ll just follow the lead of the OpenStack Puppet team. Etherpad here: kilo-infra-puppet-testing

That afternoon we had another Infrastructure: Work session where we focused on the refactor of portions of system-config OpenStack module puppet scripts, and some folks worked on getting the testing infrastructure that was talked about earlier. I took the opportunity to do some reviews of the related patches and help a new contributor do some review – she even submitted a patch that was merged the next morning! Etherpad for the work session here: YVR-infra-puppet-openstackci

The last session I attended that day was QA: Liberty Priorities. It wasn’t one I strictly needed to be in, but I hadn’t attended a session in room 306 yet, and it was the famous gosling room! The room had a glass wall that looked out onto a roof were a couple of geese had their babies and would routinely walk by and interrupt the session because everyone would stop, coo and take pictures of them. So I finally got to see the babies! The actual session collected the pile of to do list items generated at the summit, which I got roped into helping with, and prioritized them. Oh, and they gave me a task to help with. I just wanted to see the geese! Etherpad with the priorities is here: YVR-QA-Liberty-Priorities


Photo by Thierry Carrez (source)

Thursday night I ended up having dinner with the moderator of our women of OpenStack panel, Beth Cohen. We went down to Gastown to enjoy a dinner of oysters and seafood and had a wonderful time. It was great to swap tech (and women in tech) stories and chat about our work.

Friday! The OpenStack conference itself ended on Thursday, so it was just ATCs (Active Technical Contributors) attending for the final day of the Design Summit. So things were much quieter and the agenda was full of contributors meetups. I spent the day in the Infrastructure, QA and Release management contributors meetup. We had a long list of things to work on, but I focused on the election tooling, which I ended up following up with on list and then later had a chat with the author of the proposed tooling. My afternoon was spent working on the translations infrastructure with Steve Kowalik who works with me on OpenStack infra and Carlos Munoz of the Zanata team. We were able to work through the outstanding Zanata bugs and make some progress with how we’re going to tackle everything, it was a productive afternoon and always a pleasure to get together with the folks I work with online every day.

That evening, as we left the closing conference center, I met up with several colleagues for an amazing sushi dinner in downtown Vancouver. A perfect, low-key ending to an amazing event!

Filed under: events, openstack, tech, travel
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