The 4th day of OSCON was the last one for me this year, with a redeye flight on my horizon so I could be in Boston for a friend’s pre-wedding festivities on Friday night.

The day began with a series of keynotes. The first that really stood out for me was one about CODE2040 by Laura Weidman Powers. She boldly spoke about race in the technology sector head on as she gave a series of interesting statistics about race in the industry and the growth of technology jobs and how quickly it has outpaced the supply of qualified workers. As such, they (and I) believe that broadening the pool of people in technology by reaching out to underrepresented racial minorities is the way forward. They do summer fellowship programs for blacks and latino/as and more to support these communities.

There were also a couple of keynotes about government, Code for America spoke about some of their work with the city of Oakland to help improve engagement between government and citizens with an open source question-style web portal. And Leigh Heyman from the Executive Office of the President came on to talk about the open source offerings for developers that have come from the White House, including sites at whitehouse.gov/developers, petitions.whitehouse.gov/developers and their github repo. The morning also had a couple of talks about licensing, discussing the importance of having one and stressing that not bothering to have one actually makes it less free, and the rise of permissive licensing in open source, as opposed to strongly copyleft licenses.

The first session I attended of the day was “Good enough” is good enough! by Alex Martelli of Google. The audience was pretty much in agreement about the “release early, release often” mantra so he had an easy crowd as he explored the history of debate behind the argument over how “perfect” software should be before release and several examples of where “less perfect” technologies have found success because they were available while better solutions were locked up in being perfected by their creators. But I think the most valuable portion of this talk for me was his overview of what not to skimp on when you’re developing software but not seeking perfection, his list included: revision control, documentation, security and proper coding and release practices. Slides here.

Next up was my talk!

In Code Review for Systems Administrators I began by giving an overview of the fully open source code review and continuous integration (CI) system that our Infrastructure team manages for the OpenStack project. The point of my talk was that we not only manage this system, but put our own changes (in puppet, system scripts, other config files) through automated testing and peer review as well, making it a really great infrastructure for collaborative systems administration. It was great to field questions about this process and have colleagues in the room who were able to speak to some of the history behind this (“Was it planned to do the administration this way?” “No, it happened organically when random people wanted to help us fix things!”). At the end of the session I was really happy to get to talk to some other folks who were interested in implementing similar code review and CI systems for their projects. Slides from my talk are online here: Code Review for Systems Administrators slides

After lunch I went to Reducing Identity Pain by Tim Bray of Google who began by impressing upon the audience that when a user has dozens of password to keep track of, rules like this are “mean”:

And then went on to talk about the job of securing these passwords, which major organizations fail to accomplish on a daily basis, leading to weekly headlines about major breaches. His plea was for use of federated identity systems so that users can simply use an identity provider they want without having to have separate logins for each site. His talk discussed OAuth2 and OpenID technology and reviewed Google’s identity toolsets for developers to make implementing it easier. He also gave examples of some clever ways that sites have allowed users to use identity providers of their choice without having dozens of icons cluttering up the login page.

Next up on my schedule was Creating a User Journey for Your Open Source Community by Francesca Krihely. She gave examples of types of users that needed attention in communities: n00bs, sophomores and experts. From these examples she gave ideas for how to best each of these groups through clear, targeted documentation on the website that was specifically designed for each level. Beyond just software, she also suggested getting users in touch with each other (user and study groups locally) and perhaps having expert programs that more experienced users can qualify for once they reach a certain level, where they have an elevated path to report and discuss feature concerns. I’ve certainly seen a need for easier on-boarding in some of my communities, so it was an interesting talk to attend.

I then met up with colleagues to attend Monty Taylor’s talk on TripleO: OpenStack on OpenStack. Since I’m intimately familiar with the project through testing I’m working on putting together, I didn’t gain a whole lot from it technically, but hearing further project rationale and future plans is always super helpful. It was also interesting how meta this discussion gets when you’re talking about bootstrapping and launching things from each other, cool concepts but it sure takes some explaining!

Monty Taylor presents on OpenStack on Openstack (TripleO)

Last talk of the day (and the conference!) for me was PiDoorbell: Home Automation with Arduino/RaspberryPi by Rupa Dachere. The room was packed and it took several minutes to get the live demo set up, but the wait was worth it. Her talk centered around the use of a motion sensor, Arduino, Raspberry Pi and webcam to detect when someone is at her door and take a 10 second video of them, which is then uploaded and she is sent a text message to be notified of the event. Her live demo worked (hooray!) and was quite fun to watch. Over the weekend MJ ended up making a comment about how we should put a camera on Simcoe’s bowl to see if Caligula eats from it when we’re not around and I immediately thought of Rupa’s talk. Perhaps with an infrared camera…

I didn’t mention the expo hall at all, but it was a good one. The Ubuntu booth was pretty busy the whole time as far as I could tell, every time I tried to drop by to say hello they were crowded.

In all, great OSCON, I hope to go back next year!

Day three of OSCON kicked off with several keynotes. Highlights for me included Jay Parikh of Facebook presenting on the growth of the Open Compute Project. I learned about this project when it was much younger and fully populated by Facebook engineers, so it’s was great to learn that they’ve since grown considerably and now have several companies involved and have become close to having a completely open stack for the datacenter. Carin Meier had perhaps the most entertaining keynote of all with a live demonstration of a flying robot and a hacked roomba, I uploaded a video of the flying robot doing a flip here: Flying robot #oscon. Finally, I enjoyed Mark Shuttleworth’s keynote Redefining What’s Possible. Ubuntu has been heavily focused on convergence with the recent focus on tablets and phones, and with the announcement of the Ubuntu Edge campaign Mark was able to articulate the goal of Canonical to disrupt the mobile market with this crowd-funded phone option.

After keynotes, it was off to sessions! First one I went to was More Instantly Better Vim where Damian Conway presented an array of awesome hacks for getting vim to work the way you want it to. Tips ranged from managing vim swap files more effectively to tips for handling column width. I highly recommend downloading his slides and scripts here: Instantly_Better_Vim_2013.tar.gz – even if it’s just for SWTC.vim, demonstrated here:

I then attended Jon Roberts’ Using Open Source in the Classroom Every Single Day session. My involvement with Partimus made this one particularly interesting to me. Roberts works for an alternative high school and has pretty much worked autonomously to get Linux and Open Source into his classrooms, going as far as keeping his Linux machines off the school network so not to raise the hackles of the school’s IT staff. I think what was most interesting about his talk was the realization that he (and other teachers I’ve encountered who do this), are doing precisely the same thing that people in companies were doing 10 years ago to bring Open Source into their environment. Businesses have largely caught up and now appreciate the value of Open Source, I hope schools get there soon too. During his talk he also demonstrated the use of several KDE Edu tools that he says have been improving quickly these past couple years, great to hear! Finally, it was cool to learn that he came up with a non-boring way to talk teenagers about computer history: by giving the history of video games instead.

After lunch I went to Rikki Endsley’s talk on How to Recruit, Hire, and Retain a Diverse Team where she focused on how outreach is done (are you going where the candidates hang out?), language used in job advertisements (“rock star” and “ninja” were among the non-collaborative, off-putting terms for many folks) and perks offered (beer and foosball do not appeal to everyone). I was already pretty familiar with these strategies for improving outreach, but unfortunately these key points from Rikki’s talk haven’t made it very far in the industry, we got to walk out of her talk to a job board looking for ninjas and rock stars. She also gave a bunch of great tips for improving retention, including appropriate onboarding procedures, working to reduce burnout and motivation check-ins with employees.

From there I joined my colleagues in Tom Fifield’s Planning your OpenStack Cloud where he gave an overview of considerations when you’re looking to deploy an OpenStack-based cloud, including storage, networking and more. I then went to Google’s session on Automated Testing For Accessibility. Unfortunately they assumed the audience was familiar with accessibility tools going in, so I was jotting down notes of “things to look up later” while trying to keep up with the presentation itself, including ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) and WCAG 2.0 (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines). It was cool to learn about the Chrome Accessibility Developer Tools (and extension) and they had folks from the Capybara-accessible project join them to talk about how they’ve been using those developer tools inside their automated integration testing, cool! I have to admit all my sites are pretty inaccessible so I may have to give these tools a spin in the near future to have my sites at least become marginally better.

Last talk of the day was the one where I probably learned most to help me in my day to day work: Demystifying SELinux: WTF is it saying? by Dave Quigley. Up until about 4 weeks ago I had never worked with SELinux at all, and boy was I in for a world of surprise and pain when I found myself on a CentOS box faced with SELinux issues. I was able to hack my way through the problems in several hours and get my results pushed into puppet so things worked, but it was a trial and I was never fully certain I was using the right commands properly. This talk was an excellent overview of the basics that I sorely needed and I walked out feeling about ten times more comfortable with SELinux than when I walked in. This slide was particularly demystifying:

This and other slides linked here. It was also super useful to learn of the “-Z” flag in ls, ps and netstat commands to actually learn what was going on, and the great ausearch tool for logs. I was happy to learn that I had been using restorecon, semanage and setsebool properly. Finally, there are a lot of applications these days that come with an selinux specific man page reachable by: man servicename_selinux (ie `man httpd_selinux`), sweet!

By this point in the day my notes were getting messy and I was pretty tired. The plan had been to go out to one of the OSCON parties but with my own talk coming up Thursday and the realization that I had just wrapped up my 5th day of conferencing I made the wise decision to stay in to finish prepping for my talk and get some rest instead.

This is my second time attending OSCON, last year I was here for the last 2 days and this time I’m attending for the first 4. As such, this is the first time I’ve had the opportunity to attend the tutorial days.

The first day I ended up in Jono Bacon’s Community Management Training. I have a considerable amount of experience working with an existing community when it comes to structure, dispute resolution and governance (which means I probably could have skipped the afternoon session!) but I really was seeking some fleshing out of my skills when it comes to getting new contributors working on things.

I’ve worked with a lot of new contributors over the years, but the process has always been very hands on and exhausting for me, a lot of figuring it out as I go and individually catering tasks for specific people as I mentor them directly. Obviously this doesn’t scale, and this year as I’ve been so busy with my new job and wedding I noticed that my communities suffered from my lack of attention to newcomers. What I gained from Jono’s session was the structure for crafting missions and visions, and then a concrete implementation plan, complete with work items, deadlines and success criteria. I’ve loosely done all these things casually over the years but it was always “here’s an idea, who wants to work on it and when do you want to finish it?” that rarely works, and when it does it’s almost always an existing community member who chimes in, if I want a newcomer to do it I need to be more strict about crafting the task and end up doing it individually for individuals (or don’t do it at all when I get busy, apparently!). I think actually having a targeted plan with more concrete things that I organized with my peers in the project will make this whole process take less time and hopefully be more effective and scalable. Now to decide what project to start with, beware! ;)

Monday wrapped up with dinner with OpenStack colleagues.

Tuesday! I went to Service Orchestration In The Cloud With Juju by Jorge Castro and Mark Mims. They did their demos on HP Cloud and Jorge kicked things off by showing the juju web UI running on a server provisioned there. From there they demonstrated the command line tools to do the same things the web interface did in the demo. From there Mark took over to do more in depth examples of configuration, service associations and more – in fact, it dovetails nicely with Dustin Kirkland’s blog post on juju yesterday. I’ll also mention that I was really impressed with the quality checklist that they subject charms in the charm store too, as an example, the one for WordPress. I want this kind of audit for everything.

Juju Web UI – on HP Cloud!

I spent the afternoon catching up with work and email. At 5PM I did a quick loop around the expo hall when it opened, and amusingly got my picture taken with a Princess Leia cardboard cutout at the cPanel booth. I may go back for a more thorough browse later this week. Tomorrow the keynotes and individual sessions kick off!

On Thursday I’m presenting on Code Review for Systems Administrators at OSCON, but was delighted to be able to to come up to Portland a couple days early to join my peers and colleagues at the Community Leadership Summit. Back in 2011 I attended a Community Leadership Summit West, but this was my first time attending the original event.

I arrived Friday night and was able to meet up with my Portland friend B.J. Brown for some burgers and an obligatory doughnut run to Voodoo Doughnut (I got one with Tang on it).

Saturday morning CLS kicked off! I was able to meet up with a number of people I’d met before, like Emma Marshall from System76:

Photo by Benjamin Kerensa, CC BY-SA

As well as meeting a whole bunch of great people I hadn’t met before, including colleagues from HP and OpenStack.

The first session I attended was one on “Dealing with negative feedback” which had a lot of interesting ideas about soliciting and processing general feedback. The interesting parts of the discussion came up during the difficult problems to solve, like when the community wants things that the governing community or company can’t accommodate. Transparency tended to be the governing takeaway from most problems, when the community understands the reasons and goals behind decisions they are more likely to be sympathetic to decisions being made. It was also amusing to have the definition of Internet Troll be brought up during the discussion so we could discuss how to deal with actual trolls and differentiate these from just unhappy community members who probably mean well. Attendees put notes here.

After lunch I went to a session on Mindful Leadership. It was centered around the core focus of taking care of yourself so you can be more refreshed, energized and empathetic toward your community. Thanks to Van Riper for this reminder, and a session that started with a mindful breathing exercise!

Another interesting session on Saturday was “Gamification, it doesn’t work for me, does it work for you?” where I learned I have really mixed feelings about gamification. It seems I like it when it’s for “fun” stuff (fitbit for steps, untappd for beers) but when it gets into my serious hobbies/work I am really bothered by it. I think my issue is actually poorly implemented gamification that creates arbitrary goals that don’t otherwise create much value for the individual or the project/organization. At best a poorly implemented system just wastes time, at worst it ends up being demotivating as people with a lot of time collect badges and leave others feeling like they can never keep up. I think what I most enjoyed about this session was learning that there were other people out there who felt a bit squeamish about the trend to gamify everything.

At 4PM we gathered outside for a group photo:

Photo by Benjamin Kerensa, CC BY-SA

I also really enjoyed the session about managing communities of ambassadors and the discussion also covered user groups related to the technology. It was interesting to hear how some groups had planned communities built around individuals (Mozilla ambassador program) while others just have self-appointed local organizers who have to meet certain criteria to be part of the directory (Google Developer Groups) and others that seem to just have organically grown communities that don’t yet have much centralized control by the core project (OpenStack and WordPress groups). Topics included recognition for contributors, benefits of having folks to contact in different geographical areas, dealing with concerns over misrepresentation and some tips for handling shipping of swag (weight and customs concerns may alter what to ship where). Attendees put session notes here.

On Sunday, after a few requests by attendees to explain it, my colleague Mark Atwood and I proposed a session on “OpenStack Gated Trunk Continuous Integration and How it Shapes a Community.”

Mark stood and led the session as I chimed in as support. Not only was it a well-attended session, but it was exciting to talk about the work that’s being done in OpenStack with CI and the technical and social processes that have built up around it. I’m really proud to be a part of a community that puts code review so front and center in the development process and all the automated testing is something that I’m really happy to see more open source projects starting to embrace. This talk led to several more conversations throughout the day and invitations to have folks come to my OSCON talk where I’ll talk about some of the components in more detail ;) Thanks to @zahedab who took a photo of the session, available here:

And thanks to Deirdré Straughan who took the session notes, available here.

In the afternoon I went to a session about Certification and Training programs. It was interesting to hear that there has been discussion in the OpenStack community about some kind of certification program and very early stage ideas floating around for development and deploying training. I also got to share some of my own experiences with the now defunct Ubuntu Certified Professionals course and the largely unsuccessful community efforts around developing classes. Deirdré of Joyent shared some of her experience about the in-house work they’ve done developing and doing training on products on and around their technologies.

The other session of the day that stood out for me was about handling open source communities that operate alongside paid developer teams. I was excited to learn that Citrix is still paying pure open source developers on Xen now that it’s transitioned to a Linux Foundation Collaboration Project (though I mostly use kvm these days, I do still have a soft spot for Xen, and not just because of their awesome mascot). It was also an interesting exercise for me to contrast my experiences with Ubuntu and OpenStack, being on such different spectrums of centralized control (Ubuntu having a major controlling company, OpenStack actively making sure that doesn’t happen). The consensus from many of the attendees tended to be that when managing a mixed community transparency and communication matter the most. Do companies contributing need to worry that a single company will run off with the product? Do individuals contributing feel animosity toward paid developers? Finally, it is always exciting to be in a discussion with other deeply open source people who are all now paid to do the work they love, “open source is no longer that thing you do nights and weekends because you had to – now it’s your job.”

I wasn’t great at at taking photos (I only took a handful), but Benjamin posted over 350 here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bkerensa/sets/72157634723613485/

Now, on to OSCON!