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My father passed away 10 years ago

It’s December 7th, which marks 10 years since my father passed away. In the past decade I’ve had much to reflect on about his life.

When he passed away I was 23 and had bought a house in the suburbs of Philadelphia. I had just transitioned from doing web development contract work to working various temp jobs to pay the bills. It was one of those temp jobs that I went to the morning after I learned my father had passed, because I didn’t know what else to do, I learned quickly that people tend to take a few days off when they have such a loss and why. The distance from home made it challenging to work through the loss, as is seen in my blog post from the week it happened, I felt pretty rutterless.

My father had been an inspiration for me. He was always making things, had a wood workshop where he’d build dollhouses, model planes, and even a stable for my My Little Ponies. He was also a devout Tolkien fan, making The Hobbit a more familiar story for me growing up than Noah’s Ark. I first saw and fell in love with Star Wars because he was a big scifi fan. My passion for technology was sparked when his brother at IBM shipped us our first computer and he told me stories about talking to people from around the world on his HAM radios. He was also an artist, with his drawings of horses being among my favorites growing up. Quite the Renaissance man. Just this year, when my grandmother passed, I was honored received several of his favorite things that she had kept, including a painting that hung in our house growing up, a video of his time at college and photos that highlighted his love of travel.

He was also very hard on me. Every time I excelled, he pushed harder. Unfortunately it felt like “I could never do good enough” when in fact I now believe he pushed me for my own good, I could usually take it and I’m ultimately better for it. I know he was also supremely disappointed that I never went to college, something that was very important to him. This all took me some time to reconcile, but deep down I know my father loved my sisters and I very much, and regardless of what we accomplished I’m sure he’d be proud of all of us.

And he struggled with alcoholism. It’s something I’ve tended to gloss over in most public discussions about him because it’s so painful. It’s had a major impact on my life, I’m pretty much as text book example of “eldest child of an alcoholic” as you can get. It also tore apart my family and inevitably lead to my father’s death from cirrhosis of the liver. For a long time I was angry with him. Why couldn’t he give it up for his family? Not even to save his own life? I’ve since come to understand that alcoholism is a terrible, destructive thing and for many people it’s a lifelong battle that requires a tremendous amount of support from family and community. While I may have gotten genetic fun bag of dyslexia, migraines and seizures from my father, I’m routinely thankful I didn’t inherit the predisposition toward alcoholism.

And so, on this sad anniversary, I won’t be having an drink to his life. Instead I think I’ll honor his memory by spending the evening working on one of the many projects that his legacy inspired and brings me so much joy. I love you, Daddy.

December 2014 OpenStack Infrastructure User Manual Sprint

Back in April, the OpenStack Infrastructure project create the Infrastructure User Manual. This manual sought consolidate our existing documentation for Developers, Core Reviewers and Project Drivers, which was spread across wiki pages, project-specific documentation files and general institutional knowledge that was mostly just in our brains.

Books

In July, at our mid-cycle sprint, Anita Kuno drove a push to start getting this document populated. There was some success here, we had a couple of new contributors. Unfortunately, after the mid-cycle reviews only trickled in and vast segments of the manual remained empty.

At the summit, we had a session to plan out how to change this and announced an online sprint in the new #openstack-sprint channel (see here for scheduling: https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/VirtualSprints). We hosted the sprint on Monday and Tuesday of this week.

Over these 2 days we collaborated on an etherpad so no one was duplicating work and we all did a lot of reviewing. Contributors worked to flesh out missing pieces of the guide and added a Project Creator’s section to the manual.

We’re now happy to report, that with the exception of the Third Party section of the manual (to be worked on collaboratively with the broader Third Party community at a later date), our manual is looking great!

The following are some stats about our sprint gleaned from Gerrit and Stackalytics:

Sprint start

  • Patches open for review: 10
  • Patches merged in total repo history: 13

Sprint end:

  • Patches open for review: 3, plus 2 WIP (source)
  • Patches merged during sprint: 30 (source)
  • Reviews: Over 200 (source)

We also have 16 patches for documentation in flight that were initiated or reviewed elsewhere in the openstack-infra project during this sprint, including the important reorganization of the git-review documentation (source)

Finally, thanks to sprint participants who joined me for this sprint, sorted chronologically by reviews: Andreas Jaeger, James E. Blair, Anita Kuno, Clark Boylan, Spencer Krum, Jeremy Stanley, Doug Hellmann, Khai Do, Antoine Musso, Stefano Maffulli, Thierry Carrez and Yolanda Robla

My Smart Watch

I wear a watch.

Like many people, I went through a period where I thought my phone was enough. However, when my travel schedule picked up and I often found myself in planes with my phone off in an effort to save my battery for whatever exotic land I found myself in next. I also found it was nice to be able to have a clock I could adjust so I knew what time it was in this foreign land before I got there. Enter the mechanical watch.

When I learned I’d be receiving an Android Wear device at Google I/O I was skeptical that I’d have a real use for it, but amused and happy to give it a chance. I didn’t have high hopes though, another device to charge? Will interaction with my phone through a tiny device actually be that useful?

I’m happy to report that my skepticism was unnecessary. I have the Samsung Gear Live and I couldn’t be happier.

The battery life will last me a couple days, which is plenty of time to get me to my next destination, and I turn it off at night if I’m really concerned about not getting to an outlet (or just being to lazy to do so).

And usefulness? It sends alerts to my watch, so at a glance can see Twitter mentions and replies, and quickly favorite or retweet them from my watch. Perhaps my favorite feature is the ability to control Google Play music via the watch, walking around town I no longer need to dig my phone out of my purse to change the song (or now, adjust volume!). As an added bonus, the watch also has an icon for when it’s disconnected from my phone, so if I walk out the door and don’t remember if I grabbed my phone? Check my watch.

In addition to all this, it’s also much less distracting, I can feel in touch with people trying to contact me without having my face rudely buried in my phone all the time. I only need to pull out my phone when I actually have something to act on, which is pretty rare.

It seems I’m not alone. I was delighted to read this piece in Smithsonian Magazine several months ago: The Pocket Watch Was the World’s First Wearable Tech Game Changer. Unless some other, more convenient and socially acceptable wearable tech comes out, I’m hoping smart watches will catch on.

Perhaps the only caveat is how it looks. When I’m attending a wedding or nice dinner, I’m not going to strap on my giant black Gear Live, I switch back to my pretty mechanical watch. So I’m looking forward to the market opening up and giving us more options device-wise. In addition to something more feminine, a hybrid of mechanical and digital like the upcoming Kairos watches would be a lot of fun.

My Vivid Vervet has crazy hair

Keeping with my Ubuntu toy tradition, I placed an order for a vervet stuffed toy, available in the US via: Miguel the Vervet Monkey.

He arrived today!

He’ll be coming along to his first Ubuntu event on December 10th, a San Francisco Ubuntu Hour.

Vacation in Jamaica

This year I’ve traveled more than ever, but almost all of my trips have been for work. This past week, MJ and I finally snuck off for a romantic vacation together in Jamaica, where neither of us had been before.

Unfortunately we showed up a day late after I forgot my passport at home. I had removed it from my bag earlier in the day to get a copy of it for a VISA application and left it on the scanner. I realized it an hour before our flight, and the check in was 45 minutes prior to, not enough time for me to get home and back to the airport before the cutoff (but I did try!). I felt horrible. Fortunately the day home together before the trip did give us a little bit of breathing room between mad dash from work to airport.

Friday evening we got a flight! We sprung for First Class on our flights and thankfully all travel was uneventful. We got to Couples Negril around 3PM the following day after 2 flights, a 6 hour layover and a 90 minute van ride from Montego Bay to Negril.

It was beautiful. The rooms had recently been renovated and looked great. It was also nice that the room air conditioning was very good, so on those days when the humidity got to be a bit much I had a wonderful refuge. The resort was all-inclusive and we had confirmed ahead of time that the food was good, so there were no disappointments there. They had some low-key activities and little events and entertainment at lunch and later into the evening (including some ice carving and a great show by Dance Xpressionz). As a self-proclaimed not cool person I found it all to be the perfect atmosphere to relax and feel comfortable going to some of the events.

The view from our room (2nd floor Beachfront suite) was great too:

I had planned on going into deep Ian Fleming mode and getting a lot of writing done on my book, but I only ended up spending about 4 hours on it throughout the week. Upon arrival I realized how much I really needed the time off and took full advantage of it, which was totally the right decision. By Tuesday I was clear-headed and finally excited again about some of my work plans for the upcoming weeks, rather than feeling tired and overwhelmed by them.

Also, there were bottomless Strawberry Daiquiris.

Alas, it had to come to an end. We packed our things and were on our way on Thursday. Prior to the trip, MJ had looked into AirLink in order to take a 12 minute flight from Negril to Montego Bay rather than the 90 minute van ride. At $250 for the pair of us, I was happy to give it a go for the opportunity to ride in a Cessna and take some nice aerial shots. After getting our photo with the pilot, at 11AM the pair of us got into the Cessna with the pilot and co-pilot.

The views were everything I expected, and I was happy to get some nice pictures.

Jamaica is definitely now on my list for going back to. I really enjoyed our time there and it seemed to be a good season for it.

More photos from the week here (admittedly, mostly of the Cessna flight): https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157649408324165/

Holiday cards 2014!

Every year I send out a big batch of wintertime holiday cards to friends and acquaintances online.

Reading this? That means you! Even if you’re outside the United States!

Just drop me an email at lyz@princessleia.com with your postal address, please put “Holiday Card” in the subject so I can filter it appropriately. Please do this even if I’ve sent you a card in the past, I won’t be reusing the list from last year.

Typical disclaimer: My husband is Jewish and I’m not religious, the cards will say “Happy Holidays”

Wedding in Philadelphia

This past weekend MJ and I met in Philadelphia to attend his step-sister’s wedding on Sunday. My flight came in from Paris on Saturday, and unfortunately MJ was battling a cold so we had a pretty low key evening.

Sunday morning we were up ready to dress and pick up a truck to drive his sister to the church. The wedding itself didn’t begin until 2PM, but since we were coordinating transportation for the wedding party, we had to meet everyone pretty early to make sure everyone got into their respective bus/car to make it to St. Stephen’s Orthodox Cathedral on time.

I’d never been to an eastern Orthodox wedding, so it was an interesting ceremony to watch. It took about an hour, and we were all standing for the entire ceremony. There was a ring exchange in the back of the chapel, and then the bride and groom come up the center aisle together for the rest of their ceremony. I chose to keep my camera stashed away during the ceremony, but as soon as the priest had finished and was making some closing comments about the newlyweds I got one in real quick.

The weather in November can go either way in Philadelphia, but they got lucky with bright, clear skies and the quite comfortable temperature in the 60s.

The reception began at 4PM with a cocktail hour.

And we did manage to get a few minutes in with the beautiful bride, Irina :)

Big congratulations to Irina and Sam!

More photos here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157648832387979/

The trip was a short one, with us packing up on Monday to fly home that evening. I did manage to get in a quick lunch with my friend Crissi who made it down to the city for the occasion, so it was great to catch up with her. Our flights home were uneventful and I finally got to sleep in my own bed after 3 weeks on the road!

Tomorrow night we fly off to Jamaica for a proper vacation together, I’m very much looking forward to it.

Party in France

On Saturday November 1st I landed in Paris on a redeye flight from Miami. I didn’t manage to sleep much at all on the flight, but thankfully I was able to check into my hotel room around 8:30AM to drop off my bags and freshen up before going on a day of jetlag-battling tourism.

It was the right decision. Of all the days I spent in Paris, that Saturday was the most beautiful weather-wise. The sky was clear and blue, the temperature quite comfortable to be wandering around the city in a t-shirt. Since Saturday was one of my only 2 days to play the tourist in Paris, mixed in with some meetings with colleagues, I took the advice of my cousin Melissa and bought a ticket on one of the red hop-on, hop-off circuit buses that stopped at the various landmarks throughout the city.

The hotel I was staying not far from the Arc de Triomphe so I was able to have a look at that and pick up a bus at that stop. I rode the bus until it reached the Eiffel Tower.

The line to take a lift up to the top of the tower was quite long and I wasn’t keen on waiting while battling jet lag, so I took a nice long walk around the tower and the grounds, snapping pictures along the way. I also found myself hungry so I picked up a surprisingly delicious chicken sandwich at a booth under the tower and enjoyed it there.

I hopped on the bus again and drove through the grounds of the Louvre museum, which was an astonishingly large complex. Due to the crowds and other things on my list for the day, I skipped actually going to the Louvre and contented myself with simply seeing the glass pyramid and making a mental note to return the next time I’m in Paris.

Soon after my phone lit up with a notification from my friend and OpenStack colleague Chris Hoge saying that he was at Notre Dame and folks were welcome to join him. It was the next stop I was planning on making, so I made plans to meet up.

I adore old cathedrals, and Notre Dame is a special one for me. As funny as it sounds, Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame is one of my favorite movies. Being released in 1996, I must have just been finishing up my freshman year in high school where one of my history classes had started diving into world religions. I was also growing my skeptic brain. I had also developed a habit at that time of seeing all Disney full-length animated features in theaters the day they were released because I was such a hopeless fan. The confluence of all these things made the movie hit me at the right time. It was a surprising tale of serious issues around compassion, religion and ethics for an animated film, I was totally into it. Plus, they didn’t disappoint with the venue for the film, I fell in love with Notre Dame that summer and started developing a passion for cathedrals and stained glass, particularly rose windows.

I met up with Chris and we took the bell tower tour, which all told took us up 387 steps to the roof of the 226 foot cathedral. We stopped halfway up to walk between the towers and hear the bells ring, which is where I took this video (YouTube). If you’re still with me with the Disney film, it’s where the final battle between Frollo and Quasimodo takes place ;)

387 steps is a lot, and I have to admit getting a bit winded as we climbed the narrow spiral staircases, but it was totally worth it. I really enjoyed being so close to all the gargoyles and the view from the top of the cathedral was beautiful, not to mention a fantastic way to see the architecture of the cathedral from above.

After the tour, I was was able to go inside the cathedral to take a good luck at all those stunning stained glass windows!

After Notre Dame, I did a little shopping and made my way back to the bus and eventually the hotel for a meeting and dinner with my colleagues.

Sunday morning I managed to sleep in a bit and made my way out of the hotel shortly before 10AM so I could make it over to the Catacombs of Paris. The line for the catacombs is very long, the website warning that you could wait 3-4 hours. I had hoped that getting there early would mitigate some of that wait, but it did end up taking 3 hours! I brought along my Nook so at least I got some reading done, but it probably was the longest I’ve ever waited in line.

I’d say that it was worth it though. I’d never been inside catacombs before, so it was a pretty exceptional experience. After walking through a fair number of tunnels going down and then you finally get to where they keep all the bones. So. Many. Bones. As you walk through the catacombs the walls are made of stacked bones, seeing skulls and leg bones piled up to make the walls, with all kinds of other bones stacked on the tops of the piles.

I also decided to bring along a bit of modernity into the catacombs with a selfie. I’ll leave it to the reader to judge whether or not I have respect for the dead.

By the time I left the catacombs it was after 2PM and I made my way over to the Avenue des Champs-Élysées to do some shopping. Most worthy of note was my stop at Louis Vuitton flagship store where I bought a lovely wallet.

And with that, my tourism wound down. Sunday night I began getting into the swing of things with the OpenStack Summit as we had a team dinner (for certain values of “team” – we’re so many now that any meal now is just a subset of us). I am looking forward to going again some day on a proper vacation with MJ, there are so many more things to see!

A couple hundred more photos from my travels around Paris here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pleia2/sets/72157648830423229/

Final day of the OpenStack Kilo Summit

Today was the last day of the OpenStack Design Summit. It wrapped up with a change of pace this time around, each project had their own contributor meetup which was used to continue hashing out ideas and getting some work done. I think this was a really brilliant move. I was pretty tired by the time Friday rolled around (one of the reasons the later Ubuntu Developer Summits were shrunk to 4 days), so I’m not sure how useful I would have been in more discussion-driven sessions. The contributor meetup allowed us to chat about things we didn’t have time to run sessions on, or do in-person follow-ups to sessions we did have. We also had nice in-person time to collaborate on some things so that some of our projects got to a semi-working state before we all go home and take a vacation (my vacation starts next Thursday).

I spent my day meeting up with with people to talk about our new translations tools and did the first couple drafts of the infrastructure specification to get that project started. Given the timeline, I anticipate that my real work on that won’t really begin until after I return from Jamaica on November 21st, but that seemed to sync up with the timeline of others on the team who are either taking some time off post-summit or have some dependencies blocking their action items.

There was also time spent on talking about the Infrastructure User Manual as a follow up to the session earlier in the week. We decided to host a 48 hour virtual sprint on the first couple days of December in order to collaborate on fleshing out the rest of the document (announcement here). As we all know, I love documentation, so I’m glad to see this coming together. I was also able to have a chat with a contributor later in the day who is also looking forward to seeing it finished so he can build upon it as the foundation for more project-specific developer documentation.

Also, the topic of third party testing came up during one of my chats and was overheard by someone nearby – which is how we learned there were at least three teams talking about creating a more automatic mechanism for determining the health of the third party testing systems. That’s approximately two teams too many. Kurt Taylor was able to get us all on an email thread together so I’m happy to say that a specification for that project should be coming together too.

Late in the afternoon James E. Blair did a demo for developers of gertty. I wrote about the tool back in September (here) and I’m a big fan of CLI-based code review, so it was fun to see others excited and asking questions about it.

As things wound down, I realized that this was probably the best OpenStack summit I’ve attended. The occasional snafu aside (like the over-crowded lunch on Thursday – I ate elsewhere), for a conference with over 4,600 attendees it felt well-managed. The Design Summit itself had a format I was really pleased with, as in addition to having the Friday work day, Tuesday was devoted to much-needed cross-project summit sessions. As OpenStack grows and matures, I’m really happy to see everyone working to fine tune the summits like this to keep pace.

Tonight I joined several of my OpenStack colleagues for an early dinner, retiring early to my room so I could re-pack my suitcase (and hope it’s not over 50lbs) and get some work done before my flight tomorrow morning. As exhausting as this trip was, it sure flew by fast and I am quite sad to be leaving Paris! Alas, my sister in law’s wedding in Philadelphia on Sunday awaits and I’m looking forward to it (and finally seeing my husband again after almost 2 weeks).

Kilo OpenStack Summit Days 3-4

As the OpenStack Summit continued for those of us on the development side, Wednesday and Thursday were full of design sessions.

First up for me on Wednesday was a great session about the Infrastructure User Manual led by Anita Kuno. A pile of work went into this while we were at our mid-cycle Infrastructure sprint in July, but many of the patches have since been sitting around. This session worked to make sure we had a shared vision for the manual and to get more core contributors both reviewing patches and submitting content for some of the more complicated, institutional knowledge type sections of the manual. The etherpad for the session is available here.

The session on AFS (Andrew File System) for the Infrastructure team was also on Wednesday. In spite of having a lot of storage space at our disposal and tools like Swift (which we’re slowly moving logs to), there are still some problems we’re seeing to solve that a distributed filesystem would be useful for, enter the AFS cell set up for the OpenStack project. The session went through some of the benefits of using AFS in our environment (such as read-only replicas of volumes, heavy client-side caching support and more comprehensive ACLs than standard Unix filesystem permissions). From there the discussion moved on to how it may be used, some of the popular proposals were our pypi mirror, the git repos and documentation. Detailed Etherpad here.

There were also a couple QA/Infra sessions, including one on Gating Relationships. At the QA/Infra mid-cycle meetup back in July we touched upon some of the possible “over-testing” that may be done when a change in one project really has no potential to impact another project, but we run the tests anyway, using up testing resources. However, there isn’t really any criteria to follow for determining what changes and project combinations should trigger tests, and it was noted that many of what seem like unnecessary testing was actually put in place at one point to address a particular pain point. The main result of this session was to try to develop some of this criteria, even if it’s manual and human-based for now. Detailed Etherpad here.

We also had a QA and CI After Merge session. Currently all of our tests are pre-merge, which makes sure all code that lands in the development repository has undergone all official tests that the OpenStack CI system has to offer. This session discussed whether heavier, less “central” tests to the projects be tested post merge or with periodic tests, with what I believe was some consensus: We do want to split out some of the current gated jobs. Several todo items to move this forward were defined at the bottom of the etherpad.

I also attended the “Stable branches” session (lively etherpad here). Icehouse’s support is 15 months and the goal seems to be to support Juno for a similar time frame. Several representatives from distributions were attending and giving feedback about their own support needs and there seems to be hope that there will be work from folks from distros committing to do some of the maintenance work.

There were also a couple sessions about Tempest, the integration test suite. First there was “Tempest scope in the brave new world” which focused on the questions around what should be in Tempest moving forward and what the project should consider removing as the project moves forward. Etherpad for the session here. There was also a “Tempest-lib moving forward” session, which discussed this library that was created last cycle and various ways to improve it in the coming cycle, details in the Etherpad here.

Wednesday evening I made my way over to the Core Reviewer party put on by HP at the near rooftop event space of Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine. We were driven there by what was described as “iconic, old French cars” which turned out to be the terrifying Citroën 2CV. And our drivers were all INSANE in Paris traffic. Fortunately no one died and it was actually pretty fun (though I was happy to see buses would be taking us back to the conference venue!).

The night itself kicked off with a lecture on the architecture of the Sagrada Família Basílica in Barcelona by one of the people currently working on it, and which drew some loose parallels between our own development work (including the observation that Sagrada Família is not complete – a 140+ year release cycle!). They also brought in entertainment in the form of several opera singers who came in throughout the night. Some food was served, but I spent much of the night outside chatting with various of my OpenStack colleagues and drinking so much Champagne that the outdoor bartender learned to pull out the bottle as soon as he saw me coming. Hah!

My favorite part of the night was the stunning view of the Eiffel Tower. It’s a beautiful thing on its own at night, but at the top of the hour it also sparkles for 5 minutes in a pretty impressive show. I was so caught up in discussions that I didn’t manage to go on the museum tour that was offered, but I heard good things about it today.

Then it was on to today, Thursday! I had a great chat with Steve Weston about the third party dashboard we’re working on before Anita came to find me so I wouldn’t be late for my own session (oops).

My (along with Andreas Jaeger’s who I saved a seat for up front) session was an infrastructure session on Translations Tools. We’re currently using Transifex but we need to move off of it now that they’ve transitioned to a closed source product. As I mentioned in my last post, we decided to go with Zanata so the session was primarily to firm up this decision with the rest of the infrastructure team and answer any questions from everyone involved. I have a lot of work to do during the Kilo cycle to finally get this going, but I’m really excited that all the work I did last cycle in getting demos set up and corralling the right talent for each component has finally culminated in a solid decision and action items for making the move. Next week I’ll start working on the spec for the transition. Etherpad here.

I attended a few other sessions, but the other big infrastructure one today was about Storyboard, the new task and bug tracker being written for the project to replace Launchpad. Michael Krotscheck has been doing an exceptional job on this project and the first decision of the session was whether it was ready for the OpenStack Infrastructure team to move to – yes! The rest of the session was spent outlining the key features that were needed to have really good support for infrastructure and to start supporting StackForge and OpenStack projects. The beautiful Etherpad that Michael created is here.

Tonight I went out with several of my OpenStack colleagues to dinner at La maison de Charly for delicious and stunningly arranged Moroccan food. I managed to get back to my room by 9PM so I could get an early night before the last day of the summit… but of course I got caught up in writing this, checking email and goofing off in IRC.

Tomorrow the summit wraps up with a working day with an open agenda for all the teams, so I’ll be spending my day in the Infra/QA/Release Management room.