The final day of SCaLE 20x was bittersweet, as I was eager to see more presentations but not ready for it to be over.

The opening keynote was given by Dr. Kitty Yeung. Dr. Yeung is one of those amazing people who makes me feel completely inadequate. A graduate of Cambridge and Harvard, she has worked in fields as varied as fashion and quantum computing. She is also an artist, and most of her slides were ones she created herself.

She did also use a really cool graphic of world population that would make Tufte proud.

A lot of her current work centers on the intersection of technology and fashion. Now I am the least fashionable person alive. Seriously, when I’m not in front of customers I wear the same clothes every day: a black, heavy-weight pocket T-shirt and Levis blue jeans.

I have often thought if I ever did start another company one option would be to create modern tech for older people. Now some people may say that products from companies like Apple are easy to use, but as someone who is often around people in their 80s I know this isn’t true for them. There should be a market for very simple, but powerful, tools aimed at people in this age group. I keep thinking of the Yayagram machine I saw a few years ago as an example.

Dr. Yeung’s work on integrating tech and fashion could be a great interface for these products.

Shifting gears a bit, the next presentation I attended was by Don Marti on privacy.

While it is hard for an individual to balance privacy and convenience in today’s surveillance economy, there are some steps you can take to minimize what personal information you share. I take a number of steps to increase my privacy while on the Internet and this talk gave me a few more tools to use.

One of the things I love about SCaLE is that they usually have an amazing closing keynote. It is cool because you get to end the conference on a high note, and as a speaker it is always nice to have something to keep people from leaving early on the last day.

This year’s keynote was no exception and featured Ken Thompson, one of the founders of Unix and the creator of the Go programming language.

Before he spoke, Ilan Rabinovich gave some closing remarks reflecting on 20 years of SCaLE (which I learned started out as an umbrella conference for Southern California area Linux User Groups).

You can see a much younger Ilan as well as the still very tall Gareth Greenaway in that picture from SCaLE 1x. As someone who as been working in open source for over two decades it just doesn’t feel that long to me, so it was cool to reflect on all that has happened.

Two decades pales in comparison to the experience of Ken Thompson. He was hired by Bell Labs the year I was born.

He gave us some of the history of his time there and walked us through the creation of what was probably the ur-archive of digital music. In the before times, back when mp3 encoding came out and people worked in offices, some of us would bring in our compact disc collections, rip them and place them in a common archive. Ken’s project pre-dated mp3s and started out as a quest to collect all the Billboard hit songs from 1957. As someone with mild OCD issues, I felt seen when he talked about how that expanded to collecting all the songs (grin).

Of course, digital content isn’t useful unless you can access it, so he modified a Wurlitzer jukebox with a couple of iPads to provide a cool interface, and then, because he is awesome, he bought a refurbished player piano with a MIDI interface so you could trigger that from the same device.

So the best way to sum up Sunday at SCaLE is that you are a lazy bum compared to folks like Dr. Leung, Ilan and his team, and Ken Thompson, who apparently thinks about making a space shuttle out of discarded household appliances while you are watching re-runs of The Big Bang Theory.

(grin)

Hats off to the whole SCaLE team for another great conference, and I’m so happy that it was back in Pasadena. I am already looking forward to next year.

I got up fairly early on Saturday and went through my presentation one final time. When working on a new talk there is a point where the feeling I get when thinking about having to present it goes from anxiety to eagerness and that happened this morning, so I felt ready to go.

The conference started off with a keynote by Arun Gupta, who is a VP at Intel focused on open ecosystems.

His talk was about using open source cultural best practices within an organization, and he used specific examples of how that was being done at Intel. It was the first time I had seen the abbreviation “CW*2” which stands for that Zen quote about “Chop wood, carry water“. While that phrase has a lot of different meanings, when applied to open source it references the idea that as a member of an open source community one should not only just focus on the high profile aspects of the project but also the more mundane ones that actually keep the project alive.

After the keynote it was time for my presentation. I was originally scheduled to speak on Sunday morning but due to a conflict I got a spot on Saturday. I was grateful as I like to get my responsibilities out of the way so I can enjoy the rest of the weekend without worrying about them.

I did a talk on open source business models and how things have changed in the past decade or so. My “hook” was to do the presentation in the format of an old school text adventure.

It was fun (and yes, there was a grue reference). It seemed to go over well with the audience and there were a number of great questions afterward.

With that over I decided to walk down the road to grab lunch when I ran into Gareth Greenaway. Gareth was one of the original organizers of SCaLE and it was cool to be able to catch up. He is currently doing some amazing things over at Salt.

SCaLE always has a wonderful hallway track and I also got to see John Willis. I had not seen him in years although we used to cross paths much more frequently and it was nice to be able to catch up. He is a co-author on a new book called “Investments Unlimited” which chronicles the DevOps journey of a financial institution.

I also had some time to wander around the Expo floor. I try to minimize the amount of swag I bring home but I’ve started to collect those little enamel pins that some people give out.

Tha AlmaLinux pin was given to me by the amazing benny Vasquez who was spreading the word about their project which helps fill in the gap left by the CentOS project migrating to CentOS Stream.

This year I spent a lot more time in sessions than I normally do as they were just so good. Many times I found myself having to decide between three or more talks that occurred at the same time.

One that I didn’t want to miss was given by Zoe Steinkamp on using InfluxDB to monitor the health of plants.

I spent much of my professional career in observability and monitoring so I have a soft spot for unique applications of the technology. Zoe uses sensors to feed information about humidity, sunlight, etc. from her houseplants into InfluxDB so that she can use that information to maintain them in the best of health. My spouse keeps koi and I do something similar to monitor water temperature.

The next presentation I attended was on the Fediverse. Now I have never been much of a social media person, and last year I deleted my Twitter account which left LinkedIn as my only mainstream service. I do have a Mastodon account and with the recent migration of a lot of people to the platform I do find it useful, although I don’t spend nearly as much time on it as I did Twitter. I think it has a lot of potential, however, and what it really needs is that killer app to make it easier to use.

Bob Murphy did a great talk on how the Fediverse is not Mastodon, and he introduced me to a number of other services that use ActivityPub, which is the underlying protocol. For example, there are sites that focus on image as well as video sharing, not just microblogging. Speaking of blogging, Automattic (the company behind WordPress) announced that they acquired the makers of an ActivityPub plugin to bring the technology in-house and it seems like they plan to make it a core part of their app.

The final talk I attended was given by Michael Coté. I’ve known Coté for over two decades back when he lived in Texas and it was nice to see him again (he’s living over in Yurrip these days).

As usual, he provided some great insights on what he is calling “platform engineering” (think DevOps mashed up with SRE).

After the talks were over I met up with some friends for dinner. Now I am a fan of the television series The Big Bang Theory. It is set at Caltech which is located in Pasadena, and there is even a street named “The Big Bang Theory Way” (my picture of the street sign didn’t come out, unfortunately). During the weekend I kept hearing people talk about a place called “Lucky Baldwins”. I thought it was a joke since the character of Sheldon in the TV show makes a reference to the place in an episode called “The Irish Pub Formulation” but it turns out it exists.

We stopped there for a drink and ended up staying for dinner. It was a nice ending to a busy day.

Today I left for Pasadena and the 20th iteration of the Southern California Linux Expo.

SCaLE is on of my favorite events of the year, and I’ve been coming (for the most part) since SCaLE 5x.

This year I’m giving a presentation on open source business models, and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

I didn’t get to attend any of the sessions or activities on the first day, but I did manage to have dinner with some friends including Ilan Rabinovich, who is one of the main organizers of the event, and Stephen Walli, who works on the open source team at Microsoft. I also got to meet for the first time Amye Scavarda Perrin who is a program manager at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

Ilan, Stephen, myself and Amye

While I think virtual conferences have a lot to offer in the way of education, I really do miss these opportunities to meet face to face and to interact with interesting people. I’m hoping that in-person events become more common in 2023.