Dev-Jam officially started on Monday at 10am, where I did my usual kick-off speech before turning it over to Seth and Jesse who handle the technical side of things.

Yesterday I stated that this was our tenth Dev-Jam at UMN. I forgot that the first one was held at my house, so this actually makes this the ninth (we’ve still had eleven since 2005).

Everyone went around the room and talked about the things they wanted to work on this week. A lot of them focused on Minion, a technology rather unique to OpenNMS. A Minion is a a Karaf container that implements features for remote monitoring. It is key for OpenNMS to be able to scale to the Internet of Things (IoT) level of millions of devices and billions of metrics. And speaking of IoT, Ken turned me on to openHAB which is something I need to check out.

It is often hard for me to describe Dev-Jam to other people, as it is truly a lightly structured “un-conference”. In a great example of the Open Source Way it is very self-organizing, and I look forward to Friday when everyone presents what they have done.

We did have Alex Finger, one of the creators of the OpenNMS Foundation, join use via robot. He was having some sound issues and I think he did get stymied by the robot’s lack of hands when he came across a door, but it was cool he was able to visit from Europe.

We use this week for planning and sharing, so Jesse took some time to go over the Business Service Monitor (BSM) which allows you to create a “business level” view of your services versus just the devices themselves. It is fully implemented via ReST and it pretty powerful, although as with a lot of things OpenNMS that very power can add complexity. I’m hoping our community will find great uses for it.

That evening about half of us walked to a theatre to see Star Trek Beyond. Most of us disliked it and I posted a negative review, but it was fun to go out with my friends.