All Things Open - Day 2

Final day of All Things Open.  Day 2 was excellent.  Great keynotes and great sessions.  I wish I could bottle the inspiration to take throughout the year.

Keynote

• James Pearce - Facebook - "Open Source at Facebook and Beyond"
  The overflow room had audio problems so I missed the first 10 minutes.  However I got to meet some developers by reminiscing over Smalltalk: Thank you Mary, Sherri and Marianne !!
  When we did finally get audio, James had me with his lovely accent.   Seems like a good presenter but maybe I am just pleasantly distracted by his voice.   His story was about how Facebook handles open source projects including five key metrics: Followers/repo, forks/repo, pull request age, issue age & external commits. The tipping point when there are more non-facebook contributors then facebook contributors.  Also talked about a new group TODO (Talk Openly Devlop Openly) http://todogroup.org/ 
• DeLisa Alexander - Red Hat - "Women in Open Source"
  Right off the bat, I like DeLisa.  She start with a history lesson of ENIAC.   Made me thnk of how when the space gets 'important', females get crowded out.   Her talk made me think about a recent article on how cronyism is sometimes disguised as "meritocracy".   There are tons of research that our human nature acts on unconscious prejudice.
  http://www.engadget.com/2014/09/25/unconscious-bias-is-why-we-dont-have-a-diverse-workplace-says/

Sessions

• Greg DeKoenigsberg- @gregdek -Case Study: Ansible and NASA
  Discussion on http://www.ansible.com/home from a business perspective.  Ansible is a configuration management tool (like Puppet and Chef), Orchestrations (like fabric, Capistrano): Doing it together is an application deployment story.  "Fancy SSH For-loop" .  Need to make servers immutable ("Treat servers like cattle, not pets")
   (Note to self: Look at Hootsuite (https://hootsuite.com/) and Vagrant - https://www.vagrantup.com/ ) 
• Dr. Megan Squire @meganSquire0 -Case Study: We're Watching You: How and Why Researchers Study Open Source And What We've Found So Far
  Tons of interesting items to follow up on: Conway's law, Brook's law came from case studies, which is a survey of one, Gmane (get email archive), pastebin tools, Social Network Graphs and especially I need to find Megan's paper on profanity and double entente on FLOSS. Oh and cool search tools:  http://scholar.google.com/ and http://flosshub.org/biblio
• Women in Technology - DeLisa Alexander, Dr. Megan Squire, Elizabeth Joseph, Erica Stanley, Estelle Weyl, Karen Sandler - Profound and powerful.  Great panel!

Keynote 

•  Ross Mason, Founder & VP of Product Strategy for Mulesoft - The Second Digital Revolution is Here. Are You Ready for Hyperconnectivity?

Session 

• Ben Balter -GitHub - Software Development as a Civic Service government@github.com
  Email is evil (at least for project management).  Proof from Ben.  Good fast talk.  Open sourcing the way government interacts with their constituents.  Open Source community must demand it from government.
• John Potocny  -So You Think You Know 'Go'? The Go Programming Language
  Use Go 1.3.3 (Stable) : Google created the language because they saw short comings to C++.
  Go is a simple language.   Keep it as small as possible.  Has great tools. (built in testing, code coverage, govet, gofix to upgrade, ... ).  Compiles quickly, compiles natively.   Garbage collected.  Statically typed language.  Concurrency: treading library is built in.    
  Design Flaw example: play.golang.org/p/kPFCYuNTTG
  Playground: http://play.golang.org/
• Pamela Vickers -Your Company Culture is Awesome (But is Company Culture a Lie?)
  perma : Positive emotions, Engagement, Relationship, Meaning and Achievement
  (Note to self read "How Perks can divide us" santos and colburn and follow Keith Sparkjoy of Thoughtworks culture.pluralsight.com

Thanks,
G
Oh and of course some music (Walk The Moon's Shut Up and Dance)

All Things Open - Day 1

Opening day of All Things Open.    Good to see lots of IBMers and make new connections.   Being part of the event has given me a unique view of who is attending.   My favorite question in line is if we have women's shirts.    While the answer is no, it is great to be asked and great to see how hard ATO works to bring in high quality women presenters.  Next year they need to consider me!!!

Keynotes

• Jeffrey Hammond of Forrester gave a State of the Union for Open source.   Name dropped a lot including IBM Softlayer. 
• Dwight Merriman of MangoDB and Double Click -  "Things have changed a lot.  You can see it especially when you are old like me."   Likes the term Modern Application
  (Note to self: Get ready for post-modern programming just like art and fashion!).  

Admin Track 

• Elizabeth Joseph - HP - Open Source Systems Administration
  Great talk from a person in the middle of administration on OpenStack.   Great list of tools and advice from real life experience.    (Note to self: Augument Elizabeth's charts with details on what each product does: http://princessleia.com/presentations/ATO-opensource_sysadmin.pdf )
  
• Wes Morgan - IBM - The Gurobox Project: Open Source Troubleshooting Tools
  Great speaker.  Kept the crowd entertained even before the session started.   Likeable from the start.  Talked about Network Analysis, Directory search, web analysis, vms, mobile services, cloud services, load testers.
  MFR provides standard deviation for the network connectivity.   Wireshark is very popular in the room.   Apache Directory Studio is one of his favorite tools.   (Note to self: Look up Android-x86. )

Keynote:

• [Note here Bob Geolas], CEO, Research Triangle Park - Forget Live, Work and Play. The Future is Dream, Believe and Create
• Gail Roper, CIO @ City of Raleigh NC & Jason Hibbets, Director @ OpenSource.com - How Raleigh Became an Open Source City

Admin Tracks

• Jim Salter - Cloud in a bottle: Enterprise Virtualization Features and Reliability on a Microbusiness budget http://openoid.net/presentations
  Take the best of "Enterprise" : Predictability, Minimal Downtime, Rapid recovery.
  Test your backups, Automated Monitoring to assure it works (including snapshots\backups)
  Nagios, Linux Kernal Machine, KVM Management suite (very good for generic hardware), OpenZFS Filesystems (snapshots), NAgios and OpenVPN -- Watch the watcher
• Tony UcedaVelez - Application Security on a Dime: A Practical Guide to Using Functional Open Source Tools to Test, Validate, Harden, Code, Systems and Even People 

Trending and Hardware Track 

• Saving the World with Open Source and Science -Dr. Marcus Hanwell "Publishing Research without data is simply advertising, Not Science." (missed reference)  Very enjoyable talk on how science should be more transparent in their data and tools.   

Closing Keynote 

• Doug Cutting, Cloudera  - Impact of Technology on Society 

And now for something completely different:
(Gabrielle Cilmi, Sweet About Me)

All Things Open - Day 0 - Volunteering

I am excited about the second All Things Open this week in Raleigh North Carolina.    It is a quick drive down I40 with the potential to "open up" a world of possibilities.     Last year was well worth the investment of time.    This conference is not directly related to my current job, so it provides freedom to explore.   And when you explore you find things you did not even know you didn't know.  

This year I am going into this with the same wide eyed enthusiasm.   No agenda except to listen with new ears.    

The conference starts tomorrow but volunteer training brought me down to Raleigh.   Todd Lewis and his crew are passionate about their work including this conference.   They have a genuine desire to improve the IT community and be pleasant hosts.   #ATO2014

While in Raleigh, I decided to stay for the Open Source Lightening Talks from OpenSource.com.   While I met charming folks such as Alex and John from NC State, Amy from Atlanta, Kevin Sonny from Pittsboro and many others, I need a much better way to get contact information.  I hate meeting someone for only one day.    It was good seeing Robin, Dirk, Pat and Steve from IBM.

Here are some take aways from the various lightning talks:

• Jen Wike +Jen Wike Huger - Building a premier storytelling platform on open source -
  Stories matter, not just in marketing a product, but in promoting open source projects. 
• Scott Nesbitt @ScottWNesbitt - Easing into open source -
  Clever use of pictures to tell a story on making open source approachable.  Really just about being approachable.   
• Brian Proffitt - Why Is everyone hating on Operating Systems?
  Now that we have Docker, we don't need the OS --- WOAH says Brian.  Containers are awesome but new.   It is growing, sprawling, and leaking.
  (Note to self: put your twitter id on every slide)
• Vincent Batts - +vbatts Docker in 5 minutes
  What I now think Docker is: namespacing, conflicting runtimes ("Docker Run" in Fedora), Port Mapping (have all your HTTP service running on a port),   Ops-to-Dev dependencies, Dev-to-Ops dependencies. reproducible from various deployments.  
  (Note to self: what is Lxc?) 
• Michael DeHaan - Why Ansible wants to make your IT infrastructure boring
  Great talk that made me want to earn more about Ansible to make Admin boring.   Pushing code to production (EC Load balancing, ...) Teach your IT Processes to Self Destruct , Smart Rolling Updates.  https://galaxy.ansible.com/
  (Note: I thought Vincent was my favorite but Michael spoke to my daily pain!)   
• Rikki Endsley - Social media for slackers
  Curate content (tough), make sure it is re-tweetable, don't overdue hash tags, don't use PR talk, don't invest in facebook, give credit, avoid scandal, Naughty links in well meaning tweets, measure success(Note: Ironic that the talk on social media does not have their hashtag or twitter account) 
• Luis Ibanez - Unmanagement and Unleadership
  Channeling great leaders of all times. 
• Remy DeCausemaker aka "RemyD" @Remy_D - The first FOSS Minor at RIT
  Ok, that is too cool!   A minor in Free Open Source Software!   Now I know IT will change the world for the better.   WOW!   5 minutes later!
  (Note: Remy has the coolest vitae so far.  Lots of great titles and experience.) 
• Charlie Reisinger - @charlie3 - Open Source Schools: More Soup, Less Nuts
  Jason recommends Charlie's TED Talk.   Can't go wrong with Jason's recommendation.
  Tablets can't run a LAMP stack and thus handcuffing them from really learning computing.  

Fun night!   Looking forward to day 1 of All Things Open 

-G