2022 Open Source Summit – Day 4

I always feel a little sad on the last day of any conference, and Open Source Summit was no different. It seems like the week went by too fast.

With the Sponsor Showcase closing on Thursday, attendance at the Friday keynotes was light, but those of us that showed up got to hear some pretty cool presentations.

Picture of Rachel Rose on stage

The first one was from Rachel Rose, who supervises R&D at Industrial Light and Magic. As a fanboy of ILM I was very eager to hear what she had to say, and she didn’t disappoint. (sorry about the unflattering picture but I took three and they were all bad)

In the past a lot of special effects that combine computer generated imagery (CGI) and live action are created separately. The live action actors perform in front of a green screen and the CGI backgrounds are added later. Technology has advanced to the point that the cutting edge now involves live action sets that are surrounded by an enormous, curved LED screens, and the backgrounds are projected as the actors perform.

This presents a number of challenges as the backgrounds may need to change as the camera moves, but it provides a much better experience for the actors and the audience.

The tie-in to open source is that a lot of the libraries used the creation of these effects are now open. In fact, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the people responsible for the Oscars) along with the Linux Foundation have sponsored the Academy Software Foundation (ASWF) to act as a steward for the “content creation industry’s open source software base”. The projects under the ASWF fall into one of two tiers: Adopted and Incubation. Currently there are four projects that are mature enough to be adopted and several more in the incubation stage.

A lot of this was so specific to the industry that it went over my head, but I could understand the OpenEXR project, which provides a reference implementation of the EXR file format for storing high quality images.

A slide showing the ILM Stagecraft volume setup

She then went on to talk about Stagecraft, which is the name of the ILM platform for producing content. I would love to be able to visit one day. It would be so cool to see a feature being made with the CGI, sets and actors all integrated.

Picture of Vini Jaiswal on stage

The next speaker was Vini Jaiswal, Developer Advocate for Databricks. I had seen a cool Databricks presentation back on Day 2 and the first part was similar, but Jaiswal skipped the in-depth technical details and focused more on features and adoption. A rather large number of companies are using the Delta Lake technology as a way to apply business intelligence to data lakes, and as the need to analyze normally unstructured data becomes more important, I expect to see even more organizations adopt it.

The third presentation was a video by Dmitry Vinnik of Meta on measuring open source project health.

Begin rant.

To be honest I was a little unhappy to see a video as a keynote. It was the only one for the entire week and I have to admit I kind of tuned it out. It wasn’t even novel, as he has given it at least twice before. The video we were shown is available on Youtube from a conference earlier in the month and he posted another one dated June 24th from the Python Web Conference (while it has a different splash screen it looks to be the same presentation).

A still picture of a part of the video sent in by Demetri Vinnik

Look, I’ve given the same talk multiple times at different conferences, so I get it. But to me keynotes are special and should be unique. I was insulted that I bothered to show up in person, wear a mask, get my temperature checked each day, and I expected something better than a video I could have watched at home.

Note: Rachel Rose played a video as part of her presentation and that’s totally cool, as she didn’t “phone in” the rest of it.

Okay, end rant.

The next two presenters were very inspiring young people, and it was nice to have them included as part of the program.

Picture of Alena Analeigh on stage

The first speaker was Alena Analeigh, an amazing young woman who, among other achievements, has been accepted to medical school at age 13 (note that in trying to find a reference for that I came up blank, except for her twitter bio, so if you have one please let me know and I can update this post).

Med school is just one of her achievements. She also founded The Brown STEM Girls as an organization to get more women of color interested in science, technology, engineering and math. She stated that while men make up 52% of the workforce, they represent 76% of people employed in STEM fields.

My love of such things was fostered at an early age, and programs like hers are a great step to encourage young women of color to get interested in and eventually pursue careers in STEM.

While she seemed a little nervous and tentative while presenting, the final speaker of the morning was the exact opposite. At 11 years old, I could listen to Orion Jean speak for hours.

Picture of Orion Jean on stage

Orion also has a number of accolades, including Time Magazine’s “Kid of the Year“. He got his start as the winner of a speech contest sponsored by Think Kindness, and since then has started the Race to Kindness (“a race where everybody wins”) to spread kindness around the world.

To help inspire acts of kindness he uses the acronym K.I.N.D.:

  • Keep Your Eyes Open: Look for opportunities to be kind to others. One example he used is one I actually practice. If you are in line to check out at the store, and you see a person with a lot less items than you, while not offer to let them check out first?
  • Include Others: No one can effect change alone. Get others involved.
  • Nothing Is Too Small: One thing that keeps us from spreading kindness is that we can try to think too big. Even small acts of kindness can have a huge impact.
  • Do Something About It: Take action. Nothing can change if we do nothing.

After the keynotes I had to focus on some work stuff that I had let languish for the week, so I didn’t make it to any of the presentations, but overall I was happy with my first conference in three years.

There were a few people that attended who tested positive for COVID, so I plan to take some precautions when I get home and hope that the steps the Linux Foundation took to mitigate infection worked. So far I’ve tested negative twice, and I’ll probably take another test on Monday.

My next conference will be SCaLE in Los Angeles at the end of July, and I plan to be in Dublin, Ireland for Open Source Summit – Europe. If you are comfortable getting out and about I hope to see you there.

2022 Open Source Summit – Day 3

Thursday at the Open Source Summit started as usual at the keynotes.

Picture of Robin Bender Ginn on stage

Robin Bender Ginn opened today’s session with a brief introduction and then we jumped into the first session by Matt Butcher of Fermyon.

Picture of Matt Butcher on stage

I’ve enjoyed these keynotes so far, but to be honest nothing has made me go “wow!” as much as this presentation by Fermyon. I felt like I was witnessing a paradigm shift in the way we provide services over the network.

To digress quite a bit, I’ve never been happy with the term “cloud”. An anecdotal story is that the cloud got its name from the fact that the Visio icon for the Internet was a cloud (it’s not true) but I’ve always preferred the term “utility computing”. To me cloud services should be similar to other utilities such as electricity and water where you are billed based on how much you use.

Up until this point, however, instead of buying just electricity it has been more like you are borrowing someone else’s generator. You still have to pay for infrastructure.

Enter “serverless“. While there are many definitions of serverless, the idea is that when you are not using a resource your cost should be zero. I like this definition because, of course, there have to be servers somewhere, but under the utility model you shouldn’t be paying for them if you aren’t using them. This is even better than normal utilities because, for example, my electricity bill includes fees for things such as the meter and even if I don’t use a single watt I still have to pay for something.

Getting back to the topic at hand, the main challenge with serverless is how do you spin up a resource fast enough to be responsive to a request without having to expend resources when it is quiescent? Containers can take seconds to initialize and VMs much longer.

Fermyon hopes to address this by applying Webassembly to microservices. Webassembly (Wasm) was created to allow high performance applications, written in languages other than Javascript, to be served via web pages, although as Fermyon went on to demonstrate this is not its only use.

The presentation used a game called Finicky Whiskers to demonstrate the potential. Slats the cat is a very finicky eater. Sometimes she wants beef, sometimes chicken, sometimes fish and sometimes vegetables. When the game starts Slats will show you an icon representing the food they want, and you have to tap or click on the right icon in order to feed it. After a short time, Slats will change her choice and you have to switch icons. You have 30 seconds to feed as many correct treats as possible.

Slide showing infrastructure for Frisky Kittens: 7 microservices, Redis in a container, Nomad cluster on AWS, Fermyon

Okay, so I doubt it will have the same impact on game culture as Doom, but they were able to implement it using only seven microservices, all in Wasm. There is a detailed description on their blog, but I liked that fact that it was language agnostic. For example, the microservice that controls the session was written in Ruby, but the one that keeps track of the tally was written in Rust. The cool part is that these services can be spun up on the order of a millisecond or less and the whole demo runs on three t2.small AWS instances.

This is the first implementation I’ve seen that really delivers on the promise of serverless, and I’m excited to see where it will go. But don’t let me put words into their mouth, as they have a blog post on Fermyon and serverless that explains it better than I could.

Picture of Carl Meadows on stage

The next presentation was on OpenSearch by Carl Meadows, a Director at AWS.

Note: Full disclosure, I am an AWS employee and this post is a personal account that has not been endorsed or reviewed by my employer.

OpenSearch is an open source (Apache 2.0 licensed) set of technologies for storing large amounts of text that can then be searched and visualized in near real time. Its main use case is for making sense of streaming data that you might get from, say, log files or other types of telemetry. It uses the Apache Lucene search engine and latest version is based on Lucene 9.1.

One of the best ways to encourage adoption of an open source solution is by having it integrate with other applications. With OpenSearch this has traditionally been done using plugins, but there is a initiative underway to create an “extension” framework.

Plugins have a number of shortcomings, especially in that they tend to be tightly coupled to a particular version of OpenSearch, so if a new version comes out your existing plugins may not be compatible until they, too, are upgraded. I run into this with a number of applications I use such as Grafana and it can be annoying.

The idea behind extensions is to provide an SDK and API that are much more resistant to changes in OpenSearch so that important integrations are decoupled from the main OpenSearch application. This also provides an extra layer of security as these extensions will be more isolated from the main code.

I found this encouraging. It takes time to build a community around an open source project but one of the best ways to do it is to provide easy methods to get involved and extensions are a step in the right direction. In addition, OpenSearch has decided not to require a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) for contributions. While I have strong opinions on CLAs this should make contributing more welcome for developers who don’t like them.

Picture of Taylor Dolezal on stage

The next speaker was Taylor Dolezal from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). I liked him from the start, mainly because he posted a picture of his dog:

Slide of a white background with the head and sad eyes of a cute black dog

and it looks a lot like one of my dogs:

Picture of the head of my black Doberman named Kali

Outside of having a cool dog, Dolezal has a cool job and talked about building community within the CNCF. Just saying “hey, here’s some open source code” doesn’t mean that qualified people will give up nights and weekends to work on your project, and his experiences can be applied to other projects as well.

The final keynote was from Chris Wright of Red Hat and talked about open source in automobiles.

Picture of Chris Wright on stage

Awhile ago I actually applied for a job with Red Hat to build a community around their automotive vertical (I didn’t get it). I really like cars and I thought that combining that with open source would just be a dream job (plus I wanted the access). We are on the cusp of a sea change with automobiles as the internal combustion engine gives way to electric motors. Almost all manufacturers have announced the end of production for ICEs and electric cars are much more focused on software. Wright showed a quote predicting that automobile companies will need four times the amount of software-focused talent that the need now.

A slide with a quote stating that automobile companies will need more than four times of the software talent they have now

I think this is going to be a challenge, as the automobile industry is locked into 100+ years of “this is the way we’ve always done it”. For example, in many states it is still illegal to sell cars outside of a dealership. When it comes to technology, these companies have recently been focused on locking their customers into high-margin proprietary features (think navigation) and only recently have they realized that they need to be more open, such as supporting Android Auto or CarPlay. As open source has disrupted most other areas of technology, I expect it to do the same for the automobile industry. It is just going to take some time.

I actually found some time to explore a bit of Austin outside the conference venue. Well, to be honest, I went looking for a place to grab lunch and all the restaurants near the hotel were packed, so I decided to walk further out.

Picture of the wide Brazos river from under the Congress Avenue bridge

The Brazos River flows through Austin, and so I decided to take a walk on the paths beside it. The river plays a role in the latest Neal Stephenson novel called Termination Shock. I really enjoyed reading it and, spoiler alert, it does actually have an ending (fans of Stephenson’s work will know what I’m talking about).

I walked under the Congress Avenue bridge, which I learned was home to the largest urban bat colony in the world. I heard mention at the conference of “going to watch the bats” and now I had context.

A sign stating that drones were not permitted to fly near the bat colony under the Congress Avenue bridge

Back at the Sponsor Showcase I made my way over to the Fermyon booth where I spent a lot of time talking with Mikkel Mørk Hegnhøj. When I asked if they had any referenceable customers he laughed, as they have only been around for a very short amount of time. He did tell me that in addition to the cat game they had a project called Bartholomew that is a CMS built on Fermyon and Wasm, and that was what they were using for their own website.

Picture the Fermyon booth with people clustered around

If you think about it, it makes sense, as a web server is, at its heart, a fileserver, and those already run well as a microservice.

They had a couple of devices up so that people could play Finicky Whiskers, and if you got a score of 100 or more you could get a T-shirt. I am trying to simplify my life which includes minimizing the amount of stuff I have, but their T-shirts were so cool I just had to take one when Mikkel offered.

Note that when I got back to my room and actually played the game, I came up short.

A screenshot of my Finicky Whiskers score of 99

The Showcase closed around 4pm and a lot of the sponsors were eager to head out, but air travel disruptions affected a lot of them. I’m staying around until Saturday and so far so good on my flights. I’m happy to be traveling again but I can’t say I’m enjoying this travel anxiety.

[Note: I overcame by habit of sitting toward the back and off to the side so the quality of the speaker pictures has improved greatly.]

2022 Open Source Summit – Day 2

The word for Day 2 of the Open Source Summit is SBOM.

When I first heard the term my thought was that someone had spoken a particular profanity at an inappropriate time, but SBOM in this context means “Software Bill of Materials”. Open source is so prevalent these days that it is probably included in a lot of the software you use and you may not be aware of it, so when an issue is discovered such as Log4shell it can be hard to determine what software is affected. The idea of asking all vendors (both software-only and software running on devices) to provide an SBOM is a first step to being able to audit this software.

It isn’t as easy as you might think. The OpenNMS project I was involved with used over a hundred different open source libraries. I know because I once did a license audit to make sure everything being used had compatible licenses. I also have used Black Duck Software (now Synopsys) to generate a list of included software, and it looks like they now offer SBOM support as well, but I get ahead of myself.

Note that Synopsys is here in the Sponsor Showcase but when I stopped by the booth no one was there.

Getting back to the conference, the second morning keynotes were more sparsely attended than yesterday, but the room was far from empty. The opening remarks were given by Mike Dolan, SVP and GM of Projects at the Linux Foundation, and he was a last minute replacement for Jim Zemlin, who was not feeling well.

Picture of Mike Dolan on stage

Included in the usual housekeeping announcements was a short “in memoriam” for Shubhra Kar, the Linux Foundation CTO who passed away unexpectedly this year.

Dolan also mentioned that the Software Package Data eXchange (SPDX) open standard used for creating SBOMs had turned 10 years old (and it looks like it will hit 11 in August). This was relevant because with applications of any complexity including hundreds if not thousands of open source software projects, there had to be some formal way of listing them for analysis in an SBOM, and most default to SPDX.

The next speaker was Hilary Carter who is in charge of research for the Linux Foundation.

Picture of Mike Dolan and Hilary Carter on stage

She spoke on the work the Linux Foundation is doing to measure the worldwide impact of open source. As part of that she mentioned that there is a huge demand for open source talent in the market place, but there are also policy barriers for employees of many companies to contribute to open source. She also brought up SBOMs as a way to determine how widespread open source use is in modern applications.

Stylized Mercator Map Projection

Since diversity has been a theme at this conference I wanted to address a pet peeve of mine. This is a slide from Carter’s presentation and it uses a stylized Mercator projection to show the world. I just think it is about time we stop using this projection, as the continent highlighted, Africa, is actually much, much larger in proportion to the other continents than is shown on this map. As an alternative I would suggest the Gall-Peters projection.

Gall-Peters projection of the world yoinked from Wikipedia

To further digress, I asked my friend Ben to run “stylized Gall-Peters projection” through Midjourney but I didn’t feel comfortable posting any of the results (grin).

Anyway, enough of that. The next presenter was Kevin Jakel, who founded Unified Patents.

Picture of Kevin Jakel on stage

The goal of Unified Patents is to protect open source from patent trolls. Patent trolls are usually “non-practicing entities” who own a lot of patents but exist to extract revenue from companies they believe are infringing upon them versus building products. Quite frequently it is cheaper to settle than pursue legal action against these entities and this just encourages more actions on the part of the trolls.

The strategy to combat this is described as “Detect, Disrupt and Deter”. For a troll, the most desired patents are ones that are broad, as this means more companies can be pursued. However, overly broad patents are also subject to review, and if the Patent and Trademark Office is convinced a patent isn’t specific enough it can invalidate it, destroying the revenue stream for the patent troll.

I’m on the fence over software patents in general. I mean, let’s say a company could create a piece of software that exactly modeled the human body and how a particular drug would interact with it, I think that deserves some protection. But I don’t think that anyone owns the idea of, say, “swipe left to unlock”. Also it seems like software rights could be protected by copyright, but then again IANAL (one source for more information on this is Patent Absurdity)

Picture of Amir Montezary on stage

The next person on stage was Amir Montazery, of the Open Source Technology Improvement Fund. The mission of the OSTIF is to help secure open source software. They do this through both audits and fundraising to provide the resources to open source projects to make sure their software is secure as possible.

Jennings Aske, of New York-Presbyterian Hospital spoke next. I have worked a bit with technology in healthcare and as he pointed out there are a lot of network connected devices used in medicine today, from the devices that dispense drugs to the hospital beds themselves. Many of those do not have robust security (and note that these are proprietary devices). Since a hack or other breach could literally be a life and death situation, steps are being taken to mitigate this.

Picture of Jennings Aske on stage

I enjoyed this talk mainly because it was from the point of view of a consumer of software. As customers are what drive software revenues, they stand the best chance in getting vendors to provide SBOMs, along with government entities such as the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). The NTIA has launched an effort called Software Component Transparency to help with this, and Jennings introduced a project his organization sponsors called DaggerBoard that is designed to scan SBOMs to look for vulnerabilities.

Picture of Arun Gupta on stage

The next keynote was from Arun Gupta of Intel. His talk focused on building stronger communities and how Intel was working to build healthy, open ecosystems. He pointed out that open source is based largely on trust, which is an idea I’ve promoted since I got involved in FOSS. Trust is something that can’t be bought and must be earned, and it is cool to see large companies like Intel working toward it.

Picture of Melissa Smolensky on stage

The final presenter was Melissa Smolensky from Gitlab who based her presentation around a “love letter to open source”. It was cute. I too have a strong emotional connection to my involvement in free and open source software that I don’t get anywhere else in my professional life, at least to the same degree.

I did get to spend some time near the AWS booth today, and after chatting at length with the FreeRTOS folks I happened to be nearby when Chris Short did a presentation on GitOps.

Chris Short presenting GitOps

In much the same way that Apple inspired a whole generation of Internet-focused products to put an “i” in front of their name, DevOps has spawned all kinds of “Ops” such as AIOps and MLOps and now GitOps. The idea of DevOps was built around creating processes to more closely tie software development to software operation and deployment, and key to this was configuration management software such as Puppet and Ansible. Instead of having to manage configuration files per instance, one could store them centrally and use agents to deploy them into the environment. This central repository allows for a high degree of control and versioning.

It is hard to think of a better tool for versioning than git, and thus GitOps was born. Software developed using GitOps is controlled by configuration files (usually in YAML) and using git to make changes.

While I am not an expert on GitOps by any means, suppose your application used a configuration file to determine the various clusters to create. To generate a new cluster you would just edit the file in your local copy of the repo, git commit and git push.

You application would then use something like Flux (not to be confused with the Flux query language from InfluxData) to note that a change has occurred and then do a git pull which would then cause the change to be applied.

Pretty cool, huh? A lot of people are familiar with git so it makes the DevOps learning curve a lot less steep. It also allows for the configuration of multiple repositories so you can control, say, access to secrets differently than the main application configuration.

Spot Callaway and Brian Proffitt

Also while I was in the booth I got this picture of two Titans of Open Source, Spot Callaway and Brian Proffitt. Oh yeah.

My final session of the day was given by Kelly O’Malley of Databricks on Delta Lake.

Kelly O'Malley presenting on Delta Lake

Now as someone who has given a lot of talks, I try to be respectful of the presenter and with the exception of the occasional picture and taking notes I try to stay off my phone. I apologized to her afterward as I was spending a lot of time looking up terms with which I was unfamiliar, such as “ACID” and “parquet“.

Delta Lake is an open source project to create a “Lakehouse”. The term is derived from a combination of “Data Warehouse” and “Data Lake“.

Data warehouses have been around for a very long time (in one of my first jobs I worked for a VAR that built hardware solutions for storing large data warehouses) and the idea was to bring together large amounts of operational data into one place so that “business intelligence” (BI) could be applied to help make decisions concerning the particular organization. Typically this data has been very structured, such as numeric or text data.

But people started figuring out that a lot of data, such as images, needed to be stored in more of a raw format. This form of raw data didn’t lend itself well to the usual BI analysis techniques.

Enter Delta Lake. Based on Apache Spark, it attempts to make data lakes more manageable and to make them as useful as data warehouses. I’m eager to find the time to learn more about this. When I was at OpenNMS we did a proof of concept about using Apache Spark to perform anomaly detection and it worked really well, so I think it is perfectly matched to make data lakes more useful.

My day ended at an internal event sponsored by Nithya Ruff, who in addition to being the chairperson of the Linux Foundation is also the head of the AWS OSPO. I made a number of new friends (and also got to meet Amir Montazery from the morning keynotes in person) but ended up calling it an early night because I was just beat. Eager to be fresh for the next day of the conference.

2022 Open Source Summit – Day 1

The main activities for the Open Source Summit kicked off on Tuesday with several keynote sessions. The common theme was community and security, including the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF).

The focus on security doesn’t surprise me. I was reminded of this xkcd comic when the Log4shell exploit hit.

An xkcd comic showing how complex digital architecture depends on little known, small projects

At the time I was consulting for a bank and I called the SVP and said “hey, we really need to get ahead of this” and he was like “oh, yeah, I was invited to a security video call a short while ago” and I was like “take the call”.

I managed to squeeze into the ballroom just before the talks started, and I was happy to see the room was packed, and would end up with a number of people standing in the back and around the edges.

People in the hotel ballroom watching the keynote presentations

The conference was opened by Robin Bender Ginn, Executive Director of the OpenJS Foundation.

Picture of Robin Bender Ginn on stage

After going over the schedule and other housekeeping topics, she mentioned that in recognition of Pride Month the conference was matching donations to the Transgender Education Network of Texas (TENT) as well as Equality Texas, up to $10,000.

In that vein the first person to speak was Aeva Black, and they talked about how diversity can increase productivity in communities, specifically open source communities, by bringing in different viewpoints and experiences. It was very well received, with many people giving a standing ovation at its conclusion.

Picture of Aeva Black on stage

The next speaker was Eric Brewer from Google (a platinum sponsor) and his talk focused on how to improve the robustness and security of open source (and he joked about having to follow Black with such a change of topic). Free software is exactly that, free and “as is”. So when something like Log4shell happens that impacts a huge amount of infrastructure, there is really no one who has an implicit obligation to rectify the issue. That doesn’t prevent people from trying to force someone to fix things, as this infamous letter to Daniel Stenberg demonstrates.

Picture of Eric Brewer on stage

Brewer suggests that we work on creating open source “curators” who can provide commercial support for open source projects. In some cases they could be the maintainer, but it is not necessary. When I was at OpenNMS our support offerings provided some of this indemnification along with service levels for fixing issues, but of course that came at a cost. I think it is going to take some time for people to realize that free software does not mean a free solution, but this idea of curators is a good start.

I got the feeling that the next presentation was one reason the hall was so packed as Linus Torvalds and Dirk Hohndel took the stage. Linus will be the first to admit that he doesn’t like public speaking, but I found that this format, where Dirk asked him questions and he responded, worked well. Linus, who is, well, not known for suffering fools gladly, admitted and apologized for his penchant for being rather sharp in his criticism, and when Dirk asked if he was going to be nicer in the future Linus said, no, he probably wouldn’t so he wanted to proactively apologize. That made me chuckle.

Picture of Linus Torvalds and Dirk Hohndel on stage

This was followed by a security-focused presentation by Todd Moore from IBM, another platinum sponsor. He also addressed trying to improve open source security but took an angle more aimed at government involvement. Digital infrastructure is infrastructure, much like bridges, roads, clean water, etc., and there should be some way for governments to fund and sponsor open source development.

Picture of Todd Moore on stage

The final keynote for today was a discussion with Amy Gilliland who is the President of General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT). In a past life I worked quite a bit with GDIT (and you have to admit, that can be a pretty appropriate acronym at times) and it is nice to see a company that is so associated with more secretive aspects of government contracting focusing on open source solutions.

Picture of Amy Gilliland on stage

After the keynotes I visited the Sponsor Hall to see the AWS booth. It was pretty cool. As a diamond sponsor it is right in front as you enter.

AWS Booth in the Sponsor Hall

There were people from a number of the open source teams at AWS available to do presentations, including FreeRTOS and OpenSearch.

People in the Sponsor Hall

I don’t have booth duty this conference so I decided to wander around. I thought it was laid out well and it was interesting to see the variety of companies with booths. I did take some time to chat with the folks at Mattermost.

Mattermost Booth in the Sponsor Hall

While I’m a user of both Discord and Slack, I really, really like Mattermost. It is open source and provides a lot of the same functionality as Slack, and you can also host it yourself which is what the OpenNMS Project does. If you don’t want to go to the trouble of installing and maintaining your own instance, you can get the cloud version from Mattermost, and I learned that as of version 7 there is a free tier available so there is nothing preventing you from checking it out.

A selfie featuring me and whurley

I did take a short break from the conference to grab lunch with my friend William Hurley (whurley). It had been at least three years since we’d seen each other face to face and, thinking back, I was surprised at the number of topics we managed to cover in our short time together. He is an amazing technologist currently working to disrupt, and in many ways found, commercial quantum computing through his company StrangeWorks. He also made me aware of Amazon Braket, which lets those of us who aren’t whurley to access quantum computing services. I’m eager to check it out as it is an area that really interests me.

After lunch I was eager to see a presentation on InfluxDB by Zoe Steinkamp.

A picture of Zoe Steinkamp presenting on InfluxDB

Time series data collection and storage was a focus of mine when I was involved in monitoring, and Influx is working to make flexible solutions using open source. Steinkamp’s presentation was on combining data collection at the edge with backend storage and processing in the cloud. Influx had a working example of a device that would monitor the conditions of a plant (she’s an avid gardener) such as temperature and moisture, and this data was collected locally and then forwarded to the cloud. They have a new technology called Edge Data Replication designed to make the whole process much more robust.

I was excited to learn about their query language. Many time series solutions focus so much on obtaining and storing the data and not enough on making that data useful, which to me seems to be the whole point. I’m eager to play with it as soon as I can.

One thing that bothered me was that the hotel decided to have the windows washed in the middle of the presentation.

A picture a window washer

Steinkamp did a great job of soldiering through the noise and not letting it phase her.

The evening event was held at Stubbs restaurant, which is also a music venue.

The Stubbs Restaurant sign feature a billboard welcoming the Open Source Summit

I’ve been a fan of Stubbs barbecue sauce for years so it was cool to go to the restaurant that bears his name, even though the Austin location was opened in 1996, a year after Christopher B. Stubblefield died.

It was a nice end to a busy day, and I look forward to Day 2.

2022 Open Source Summit – Day 0

Monday was a travel day, but it was notable as it was the first time I have been in an airport since August. I fly out of RDU, and the biggest change was that they now have the “Star Trek” x-ray machines to scan carry-on luggage. While I was panicked for a second when I downloaded my boarding pass and didn’t see the TSA Precheck logo, I was able to get that sorted out so going through security was pretty easy.

The restrictions on masks for air travel have been lifted, but I wore mine along with about 10% of the other travelers. Even though I’ve had four shots and a breakthrough case of COVID I do interact with a lot of older people and since I’ll be around the most people in years at the Open Source Summit I figured I’d wear mine throughout the trip.

And while it isn’t N95, being a car nut I tried out these masks from K&N Engineering, who are known for high end air filtration for performance vehicles, and you almost don’t realize you are wearing a mask.

Anyway, I made my way to the Admiral’s Club and was pleasantly surprised to see it wasn’t very crowded. It was nice to have the membership (it comes with my credit card) as my flight to Charlotte was delayed over 90 minutes. I wasn’t too worried since I had a long layover before heading to Austin, so I was a lot less stressed than many of my fellow travelers.

The flight to Austin left on time and landed early, but we got hit with the curse in that our gate wasn’t available, so we ended up on the tarmac for 45 minutes, getting in 30 minutes late.

Not that I’m complaining. Seriously, according to my handy the trip from my home to Austin by car is 19 hours. From the moment I left my home until we landed was more like 8 hours, and most of that was enjoyable. I always have to remind myself of this wonderful clip by Louis CK which kind of sums up the amazing world in which we live where every time we fly we should be saying to ourselves “I’m in a chair in the sky!”

I checked in at the hotel and then we headed back out in our rented minivan to get the last member of our team, and then we drove about 45 minutes outside of Austin to this barbecue joint called Salt Lick in Driftwood Texas. It was wonderful and I was told we owed this experience to a recommendation years ago from Mark Hinkle, so thanks Mark!

A white van in the parking lot of the Salt Lick barbecue restaurant

You can’t really tell a good barbecue restaurant by its looks, although shabbier tends to be better, but more by the smell. When you get out of your vehicle your nose is so assaulted with the most wonderful smell you might be drawn to the entrance so quickly that you miss the TARDIS.

A British Police box that looks like the TARDIS from Doctor Who in the parking lot of the Salt Lick barbecue restaurant

We sat at a big picnic table and ordered family style, which was all you could eat meat, slaw, baked beans, bread, pickles and potato salad. I was in such a food coma by the end that I forgot to take a picture of the cobbler.

A table full of food at the Salt Lick barbecue restaurant

I tried not to fall asleep on the ride back to Austin (I wasn’t driving) but it was a great start to what I hope is a wonderful week.

2022 Open Source Summit North America

Next week I’ll be attending my first conference in nearly three years. My last one turned out to be the very last OSCON back in 2019. Soon after that I was in a bad car accident that laid me up for many months and then COVID happened.

Open Source Summit Logo Showing Member Conferences

I am both eager and anxious. Even having four vaccine shots and one breakthrough case I still feel a little exposed around large groups of people, but the precautions outlined in the “Health and Safety” section of the conference website are pretty robust and I am eager to see folks face-to-face (or mask-to-mask) once again.

The Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit used to be known as Linuxcon and now it is an umbrella title for a number of conferences around open source, all of which look cool. My new employer, AWS, is a platinum sponsor and will also have a booth (I am not on booth duty this trip but I’ll be around). I am looking forward to getting to meet in person many of my teammates who I’ve only seen via video, old friends I haven’t seen in years, and to making a bunch of new ones.

Of course, we would have to have a conference in Austin during a heat wave. I was thinking about never leaving the conference venue but then I remembered … barbecue.

If you are going and would like to say “hi” drop me a note on Twitter or LinkedIn or send an e-mail to tarus at tarus dot io.

In Pursuit of Quality Interactions

Recently my friend Jonathan had a birthday, and I sent him a short note with best wishes for the day and to let him know I was thinking about him.

In his reply he included the following paragraph:

[I] was reminded of your comment about a sparsely attended OUCE conference at Southampton one year. You said something along the lines of that it didn’t matter, that you would try to make it the best experience you could for everyone there. That stuck with me. It’s been one of my mantras ever since then.

I can remember talking about that, although I also remember I was very ill during most of that conference and spent a lot of time curled up in my room.

Putting on conferences can be a challenge. You don’t know how many people will show up, but you have to plan months in advance in order to secure a venue. Frequently we could use information about the previous conference to approximate the next one, but quite often there were a number of new variables that were hard to measure. In this case moving the conference from Germany, near Frankfurt, to Southampton in the UK resulted in a lot less people coming than we expected.

It is easy to get discouraged when this happens. I have given presentations in full rooms where people were standing in the back and around the edges, and I have given presentations to three people in a large, otherwise empty room. In both cases I do my best to be engaging and to meet the expectations of those people who were kind enough to give me their attention.

I think this is important to remember, especially in our open source communities. I don’t think it is easy to predict which particular people will become future leaders on first impressions, so investing a little of your attention in as many people as possible can reap large results. I can remember when I started in open source I’d sometimes get long e-mails from people touting how great they were, which was inevitably followed up with a long list of things I needed to do to make my project successful. Other times I’d get a rather timid e-mail from someone wanting to contribute, along with some well written documentation or a nice little patch or feature, and I valued those much more.

I can remember at another OUCE we ended up staying at a hotel outside of Fulda because another convention (I think involving public service vehicles like fire trucks and ambulances) was in town at the same time. There was a van that would pick us up and take us into town each morning, and on one day a man named Ian joined me for the ride. He was complaining about how his boss made him come to the conference and he was very unhappy about being there. I took that as a challenge and spent some extra time with him, and by the end of the event he had become one of the project’s biggest cheerleaders.

Or maybe it was just the Jägermeister.

In the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance the author Robert Persig demonstrates a correlation between “attention” and “quality”. In today’s world I often find it hard to focus my attention on any one thing at a time, and it is something I should improve. But I do manage to put a lot of attention into person-to-person interactions, and that has been very valuable over the years.

In any case I was touched that Jonathan remembered that from our conversation, and it helps to be reminded. It also motivated me to write this blog post (grin).

AWS: Impressions So Far

When I announced that I had joined AWS, at least two of my three readers reached out with questions so I thought I’d post an update on my onboarding process and impressions so far.

One change you can expect is that when I talk about my job on this blog, I’m going to add the following disclaimer:

Note: Everything expressed here represents my own thoughts and opinions and I am not speaking for my employer Amazon Web Services.

Back when I owned the company I worked for I had more control about what I could share publicly. While I am very excited to be working for AWS and may, at some time in the future, speak on their behalf, this is not one of those times.

A number of people joked about me joining the “dark side”. My friend Talal even commented on my LinkedIn post with the complete “pitch speech” Darth Vader made to Luke Skywalker in Empire. While I got the joke I’d always had a pretty positive opinion of Amazon, gained mainly through being a retail customer.

I recently went and traced what I think to be my first interaction with Amazon back to a book purchase made in December of 1997. In the nearly 25 years I’ve been shopping there I can think of only two times that I was disappointed with their customer service (both involving returns) and numerous times when my expectations were exceeded by Amazon. For example, I once spent around $70 on two kits used to clean high performance automotive air filters. In shipment one of them leaked, and I asked if I could return it. They told me to keep both and refunded the whole $70, even after I protested that I’d be happy with half that.

It was this focus on customer service that attracted me to the possibility of working with Amazon. When I was at OpenNMS I crafted a mission statement that read “Help Customers. Have Fun. Make Money”. I thought I came up with it on my own but I may have gotten inspiration from a Dilbert cartoon, although I changed the order to put the focus on customers. I always put a high value on customer satisfaction.

I have also been a staunch, and I’ll admit, opinionated, proponent of free and open source software and nearly 20 years of those opinions are available on this blog. Despite that, AWS still wanted to talk to me, and as I went through the interview process I really warmed to the idea of working on open source at AWS.

Just before I started I received a note from the onboarding specialist with links to content related to Amazon’s “peculiar” culture. When I read the e-mail I was pretty certain they meant “particular”, as “particular” implies “specific” and “peculiar” implies “strange”. Nope, peculiar is the word they meant to use and I’m starting to understand why. They are so laser-focused on customer satisfaction that their methods can seem strange to people used to working in other companies.

As you can imagine with a company that has around 1.6 million employees, they have the onboarding process down to a science. My laptop and supporting equipment showed up before my start date, and with few problems I was able to get on the network and access Amazon resources. These last two weeks have been packed with meeting people, attending virtual classes with other new hires, and going through a lot of online training. One concept they introduce early on is the idea of “working backwards”. At Amazon, everything starts from the customer and you work backwards from there. After having this drilled into my head in one of the online courses it was funny to watch a video of Jeff Bezos during an All Hands meeting where someone asks if the “working backwards” process is optional.

Based on my previous experience with large companies I was certain of the answer: no, working backwards is not optional. Period.

But that wasn’t what he said. He said it wasn’t optional unless you can come up with something better. I know it is kind of a subtle distinction but it really resonated with me, as it drove home the fact that at Amazon no process is really written in stone. Everything is open to change if it can be improved. As I learn more about Amazon I’ve found that there are many “tenets”, or core principles, and every one of them is presented in the context that these exist until something better is discovered, and there seem to be a lot of processes in place to suggest those improvements at all levels of the company.

If there is anything that isn’t open to change, it is the goal of becoming the world’s most customer-centric company. While a lot of companies can claim to be focused on their customers without many specifics, at Amazon this is defined has having low prices, large selection and a great customer experience. Everything else is secondary.

I bring this up because it is key to understanding Amazon as a company. To get back to my area of expertise, open source, quite frequently open source involvement is measured by things such as number of commits, lines of code committed, number of projects sponsored and number of contributors. That is all well and good but seen through the lens of customer satisfaction they mean nothing, so they don’t work at Amazon. Amazon approaches open source as “how can our involvement improve the experience of our customers?”

(Again, please remember that is my personal opinion based on my short tenure at AWS and doesn’t constitute any formal policy or position)

Note that with respect to open source at AWS, “customer” can refer to both end users of software who want an easy and affordable way to leverage open source solutions as well as open source projects and companies themselves. My focus will be on the latter and I’m very eager to begin working with all of these cool organizations creating wonderful open source solutions.

This focus may not greatly increase those metrics mentioned above, but it is hoped that it will greatly increase customer satisfaction.

So, overall, I’m very happy with my decision to come to AWS. I grew up in North Carolina where the State motto is Esse Quam Videri, which is Latin for “to be rather than to seem”. My personal goal is to see AWS considered both a leader and an invaluable partner for open source companies and projects. I realize that won’t happen overnight and I welcome suggestions on how to reach that goal. In any case it looks like it is going to be a lot of fun.

Posted in AWS