Tag Archives: tech

Upcoming events (June and beyond)

I’m about to head out for a few events again, and I’m in the process of planning several other events.

First, I’ll be in Berlin for FOSS Backstage , Berlin Buzzwords , and the Apache EU RoadShow. This is a trifecta of open source events happening at the Kulturbrauerei in Berlin. I’ll be speaking at Backstage about mentoring in open source, which, you might know, is something I’m passionate about. I’ll also be doing interviews for Feathercast, so if you’re going to be there, find me and do an interview.

I’ll be home for a week, and then I’ll be attending the ISC-HPC Supercomputing event in Frankfurt. This is the second time I’ll attend this event, which was my introduction to Supercomputing last year. I’ve learned so much since then, but I’m still an HPC newbie. While there, I hope to spend most of my time speaking with the EDUs and research orgs that are present, and doing interviews with the student supercomputing teams that are participating in the Student Cluster Competition.

Beyond that, I’m planning several events, where I’ll be representing CentOS.

In August, I’ll be attending DevConf.us in Boston, and on the day before DevConf, we’ll be running a CentOS Dojo at Boston University. The call for papers for that event is now open, so if you’re doing anything interesting around CentOS, please submit a paper and come hang out with us.

Later in August, I will (maybe? probably?) be going to Vancouver for Open Source Summit North America (formerly Linuxcon) to represent CentOS.

In September, I’ll be at ApacheCon North America in Montreal. The schedule for this event is published, and registration is open. You should really come. ApacheCon is something I’ve been involved with for 20 years now, and I’d love to share it with you.

October is going to be very full.

CentOS is proudly sponsoring Ohio LinuxFest, which apparently I last attended in 2011! (That can’t be right, but that’s the last one I have photographic evidence for.) We (CentOS) will be sharing our booth/table space with Fedora, and possibly with some of the project that use the CentOS CI infrastructure for their development process. More details as we get closer to the event. That’s October 12th – 13th in Columbus.

Then, on October 19th, we’ll be at CERN, in Meyrin, Switzerland, for the second annual Cern CentOS Dojo. Details, and the call for papers, for that event, are on the event website at http://cern.ch/centos.

Immediately after that, I’ll be going (maybe? probably?) to Edinburgh for Open Source Summit Europe. This event was in Edinburgh a few years ago, and it was a great location.

Finally, in November, I plan to attend SuperComputing 18 in Dallas, which is the North American version of the HPC event in Frankfurt, although it tends to be MUCH bigger. Last year, at the event in Denver, I walked just over 4 miles one day on the show floor, visiting the various organizations presenting there.

So, that’s it for me, for the rest of the year, as far as I know. I would love to see you if you’ll be at, or near, any of these venues.

Event report: ApacheCon North America, 2017, Miami

Event Report, ApacheCon North America 2017

May 15-19, 2017

(This is an abridged version of the report I sent to my manager.)

Last week I attended ApacheCon North America in Miami. I am the conference chair of ApacheCon, and have been for on and off for  about 15 years. Red Hat has been a sponsor of ApacheCon almost every single time since we started doing it 17 years ago. In addition to being deeply involved in specific projects, such as Tomcat, ActiveMQ, and Mesos, we are tangentially involved in many of the other projects at the Apache Software Foundation.

Presentations from ApacheCon may be found at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbzoR-pLrL6pLDCyPxByWQwYTL-JrF5Rp (Yes, that’s the Linux Foundation’s YouTube channel – this ApacheCon was produced by the LF events team.)

I’d like to draw specific attention to Alan Gates, at Hortonworks, who has developed a course to train people at the company in how to work with upstream projects. He did this because, as the company expanded from a small group of founders who deeply understood open source, to thousands of employees who kinda sorta got it, but not always.


Also of great interest was the keynote by Sandra Matz about what your social media profile tells the world about you. It’s worth watching all the way to the end, as she doesn’t just talk about the reasons to be terrified of the interwebs, but also about how this kind of analysis can actually be used for good rather than evil.

Event report: Red Hat Summit, OpenStack Summit

Event report: Red Hat Summit, OpenStack Summit

May 1-5, 2017 and May 8-11, 2017

During the first two weeks of May, I attended Red Hat Summit, followed by OpenStack Summit. Since both events were in Boston (although not at the same venue), many aspects of them have run together.

Mini-cluster

On the first day of Red Hat Summit, I received the mini-cluster, which had been built in Brno for the April Brno open house. There were one or two steps missing from the setup instructions, so with a great deal of help from Hugh Brock, it too most of the first day to get the cluster running. We’ll be publishing more details about the mini-cluster on the RDO blog in the next week or two. However, most of the problems were 1) it was physically connected incorrectly (ie, my fault) and 2) there were some routing table changes that were apparently not saved after initial setup.

Once the cluster was up, we connected to the ManageIQ cluster on the other side of our booth, and they were able to manage our OpenStack deployment. Thus, we were able to demonstrate the two projects working together.

In future events, we’d like to bring more projects into this arrangement – say, use Ceph for storage, or have ManageIQ managing OpenStack and oVirt, for example.

After we got the cluster working, in subsequent days, we just had to power it on, follow the startup instructions, and be patient. Again, more details of this will be in the RDO blog post in the coming  weeks.

Upcoming CentOS Dojos

I had conversations with two groups about planning upcoming CentOS Dojos.

The first of these will be at Oak Ridge National Labs (ORNL), and is
now tentatively scheduled for the first Tuesday in September.  (If you saw my internal event report, I mentioned July/August. This has since changed.) They’re interested in doing a gathering that would be about both CentOS and OpenStack, and draw together some of the local developer community. This will be held in conjunction with the local LOPSA group.

The second Dojo that we’re planning will be at CERN, where we have a great relationship with the cloud computing group, who run what we believe to be the largest RDO installation in the world. We have a tentative date of October 20th, immediately before Open Source Summit in Prague to make it easier to combine two trips for those traveling internationally. This event, too, would cover CentOS topics as well as OpenStack/RDO topics.

If you’re interested in participating in either one of these events, you need to be on the centos-promo mailing list. Send mail to centos-promo-subscribe@centos.org to subscribe, or visit https://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos-promo for the
clicky-clicky version.

General Impressions

The Community Central area at Red Hat Summit was awesome. Sharing center stage with the product booths was a big win for our upstream first message, and we had a ton of great conversations with people who grasped the “X is the upstream for Red Hat X” concept, seemingly, for the first time. The “The Roots Are In The Community” posters resonated with a lot of people, so huge thanks to Tigert for pulling those together at the last minute.

The collaboration between RDO and ManageIQ was very rewarding, and helped promote the CloudForms message even more, because people could see it in action, and see how the communities work together for the greater good of humanity. I look forward to expanding this collaboration to all of the projects in the Community Central area by next year.

The space for Red Hat Summit was huge, making the crowd seem a lot smaller than it actually was. The opposite was true for  OpenStack Summit, where it was always crowded and seemed very busy, even though the crowd was smaller than last year.

 

Where next?

In three weeks I’ll be heading to the High Performance Computing event in Frankfurt. My mission there is to talk with people that are using CentOS and RDO in HPC, and collect user stories.

What does a community manager do

Last week I took some long-postponed vacation time and missed Stormy’s blogging prompt. But this particular question needs answering.

What does a community manager do?

Whenever people ask me what I do, I find myself struggling for words, because being a community manager is a daunting mishmash of interrelated tasks that range from marketing to HR to event management to journalism to … everything else.

During the Obama years, the term “community organizer” was bandied about, and that comes close to what a community manager does. And then there’s the confusion around the term “manager”, because I’m not a manager, and I don’t manage the community.

So what do I do?

Well, it’s a bit of this and a bit of that.

Cheerleading

A major task of community management is to be the lead cheerleader for the community. I’m the community manager for RDO, and so it’s my job to promote RDO to the various audiences that might care.

In the case of RDO, that includes the larger OpenStack community, cloud operators in the general IT work force, and also internally to people at Red Hat who need to be informed about what’s happening in the “upstream” community, and how it affects our “downstream” product, Red Hat OpenStack Platform.

To this end, I manage our Social Media presence, post updates to our mailing lists and blog,  make announcements on IRC, and so on. I also show up at conferences and answer questions from attendees, put together presentations to tell people about what we do, and speak at events.

Event planning

At Red Hat, we have an actual event planning team, and they are awesome at what they do – booking facilities, shipping stuff around, planning and setting up and tearing down the physical booths at events, coordinating and communicating with all of the people that will attend.

I don’t do that.

But I plan and coordinate events that my part of the community will show up to. I plan small social events around the main events. I make sure that those events work with the schedules of the people that I’m responsible for, and encourage them to come and bring their friends.

And I help out with small regional meetups, providing swag, as well as helping with (i.e., funding) travel and lodging for speakers that might not have budget to do that on their own.

Make personal connections

A major job of the community manager is to become an expert on the community members. Who knows what. Who is willing to speak on a particular topic. Who has the connections to make things happen.

Then, when a question is asked, or when someone has a need, it’s my job to connect them with the right person that can help them.

So … kind of like first-tier support, triaging problems, solving the ones that I’m able to, and referring to second-tier support those problems that are beyond my expertise.

There’s also some mentoring that goes in here – helping people new to the project know where to fit in, and where to find the information they need.

Look for stories

I look for stories of people using our project, and tell those stories to the world. In this part of the role, I’m the journalist, looking for ways to tell the story about how our project makes life easier. Much of this is amplifying stories that other people are telling. And then some of it is going out and gathering the stories, and then finding ways to tell those stories.

Everything else

While I don’t write code for the RDO project, I do a little bit of everything else – whatever people need done, I try to fill in, or find the right people to do those tasks.

So, that’s why it’s difficult to know how to answer when people ask me what I do at work.

Open source stats – but what do the numbers *mean*?

I recently sent a report to project management containing some numbers that purport to describe the status of the RDO project.

I got a long and thoughtful response from one of the managers – we’ll call him Mark – and it seems worthwhile sharing some of his insights. To summarize, what he said was, don’t bother collecting stats if they don’t tell a story.

1. Focus on the goals

Listing a bunch of numbers without context – even with pretty graphs – doesn’t tell us anything unless you relate them to goals that we’re trying to achieve.

Several weeks ago I presented a “stakeholder review” to this same audience. Any statistics that I present in the future should be directly related to a goal in that review, or they are just meaningless numbers, and possibly a distraction, and, worse still, might cause people to work towards growing the wrong metric. (Google for “be careful what you measure” and read any of those articles for more commentary on this point.)

2. Focus on the people

One of the stats that I provided was about how certain words and phrases feature in the questions on ask.openstack.org. Mark looked beyond the numbers and saw three people who are very active on that website, two of whom are not obviously engaged in the RDO community itself. Why not? How can we help them? How can they help us? What’s their story? Why are we ignoring them?

3. Focus on the blips

In February, our Twitter mentions, retweets, visits, and so on, went through the roof. Why? And why didn’t we do that same thing again in March?

As it turns out, in February there were two conferences that contributed to this. But, specifically, we captured a lot of video at those events, and the Twitter traffic was all around those videos. So clearly we should be doing more of that kind of content, right?

4. Ignore the stuff that doesn’t seem to mean anything

We track “downloads” of RDO, which roughly speaking means every time someone runs the quickstart and it grabs the RPM. Except RDO is on a mirror network, so that number is false – or, at best, it reflects what the trends might be across the rest of the mirror network. So we have no idea what this metric means. So why are we bothering to track it? Just stop.

5. Ask not-the-usual-suspects

This last one wasn’t one of Mark’s observations, but is what I’m taking from this interaction. We tend to ask the same people the same questions year after year, and then are surprised that we get the same answers.

By taking this data to a new audience, I got new answers. Seems obvious, right? But it’s the kind of obvious thing we overlook all the time. Mark provided insight that I’ve been overlooking because I’m staring so hard at the same things every day.

By the way, I’ve presented Mark’s insight very bluntly here, because it’s important to be clear and honest about the places where we’re not doing our job as well as we can be. Mark’s actual response was much kinder and less judgmental, because Mark is always kind and supportive.

Too many beginners

Last weekend at FOSDEM I gave my “Write A Better Manual” talk. I got a question afterwards that I’ve never actually received before:

We’ve done such a great job of attracting new members to our community that it’s causing a problem. Our lead developers are spending all of their time mentoring beginners, and no code is getting written. What do we do?

Once I got over my “I wish I had your problem” moment, we had a great conversation about concrete ways that you can address this problem. And, of course, it is actually a problem, because it can lead to the demise of your project every bit as much as not enough new community members.

Here’s some things that you can do, even if you don’t have exactly this problem:

Turn the beginners into mentors

Someone has just come to your community, and asks a question. It’s one of the questions that you get every day, like “how do I find my IP address?” or “how do I connect to a wireless network?” or “where is the toilet?”

Rather than answering the question yourself, ask the not-quite-beginner to answer it. This does many things at the same time. It saves you the time and trouble of answering. It indicates your confidence that this person is part of the team. It lets this person know that it’s ok for them to start mentoring other people. And the next time the question is asked, you won’t even have to say anything – they’ll just answer it. You’ve taken the first step to making a mentor out of the mentee.

Take shifts

Mentoring beginners is amazingly rewarding, but it’s also exhausting. You shouldn’t have everyone doing it, and you shouldn’t have the same people doing it all the time. Take turns. Even go so far as making a rotation schedule – one week on, 3 weeks off. Your mentors will come back rejuvenated and ready to start up, and will get “off shift” just about the time that it’s starting to be frustrating.

Know when to quit

Even if you don’t take specific shifts, mentors should be told that they can, and should, take breaks. Mentoring is incredibly important, but it’s only part of your “job”. Work on code for 3 hours for every hour you spend answering questions on IRC. Or something like that. You’ll find that if you set yourself a specific quota of mentoring time, you’ll look forward to it more, and you’ll be more effective at it.

If you’re not good at it, don’t do it

Finally, some folks just aren’t that great at mentoring. Either they’re not very patient, or they’re not great at communicating, or maybe they’re just too valuable at writing the code or the docs, and should stick to that.

These people should be encouraged to stick to what they’re good at, because, frankly, some people do more harm than good when it comes to talking to beginners.

Celebrate your problem

But, at the end of it, recognize that most projects would love to have the problem you’ve got. Celebrate your beginners. Bring them along. Eventually, they will “graduate” and become the core of your community.

 

 

Project Leader

I was recently asked to write something about the project that I work on – RDO – and one of the questions that was asked was:

A healthy project has a visible lead(s). Who is the project lead(s) for this project?

This struck me as a strange question because, for the most part, the open source projects that I choose to work on don’t have a project lead, but are, rather, led by community consensus, as well as a healthy dose of “Just Do It”. This is also the case with RDO, where decisions are discussed in public on the mailing list, and on IRC meetings, and those that step up to do the work have more practical influence than those that just talk about it.

Now, this isn’t to say that nobody takes leadership or ownership of the projects. In many senses, everyone does. But, of course, certain people do rise to prominence from time to time, just based on the volume of work that they do, and these people are the de facto leaders for that moment.

There’s a lot of different leadership styles in open source, and a lot of projects do in fact choose to have one technical leader who has the final say on all contributions. That model can work well, and does in many cases. But I think it’s important for a project to ask itself a few questions:

  • What do we do when a significant number of the community disagrees with the direction that this leader is taking things?
  • What happens when the leader leaves? This can happen for many different reasons, from vacation time, to losing interest in the project, to death.
  • What do we do when the project grows in scope to the point that a single leader can no longer be an expert on everything?

A strong leader who cares about their project and community will be able to delegate, and designate replacements, to address these concerns. A leader who is more concerned with power or ego than with the needs of their community is likely to fail on one or more of these tests.

But, I find that I greatly prefer projects where project governance is of the people, by the people, and for the people.

Cacti and the Asus RT‑N66U

I discovered a few days ago, quite by accident, that the Cacti project is still quite alive and well. I don’t know why I thought it wasn’t. I thought it would be kind of cool to set it up to graph my network traffic here at home.

I have an Asus RT-N66U wireless router, which I’ve been very pleased with since I acquired it.

Step one was getting Cacti running, which has always been something of a challenge. The installation instructions, while extensive, miss a lot of prerequisites that you encounter along the way. (Install packages are not, apparently, available for CentOS7.) Notably, you have to install Spine (the stats collection daemon) from source, and it required the -devel version of several of the items that the docs mention. So, things like php-devel, mysql-devel, snmp-utils, which are not mentioned in the installation instructions. No big deal, but it did make the process a little longer, finding and installing these prerequisites.

Step two was getting file permissions set up correctly in my Apache httpd document directory. This turned out to be a combination of missing directories (log/ and rra/ in Cacti’s home directory) and the fact that my vanilla installation of php had logging turned off, so everything just silently failed. Those directories, once created, and ownership changed to the newly created cactiuser user, Cacti itself started running. Awesome.

Step three is enabling SNMP on the router, which isn’t hard, but is a little time consuming. Instructions for doing this may be found on the My gap in the void blog, and I will not copy them here.

Finally, there’s the step of getting Cacti to talk to the N66U. This turned out to be absurdly easy. Under ‘devices’, I clicked Add. I gave it the name and IP address of the router, and selected “Generic SNMP-enabled Host” from the Host Template dropdown, and pressed ‘Create’.

On the server, in the cactiuser’s crontab, add:

*/5 * * * * php /var/www/html/poller.php > /dev/null 2>&1

Then, click ‘New Graphs’, select the “select all” checkbox, and press ‘Create’.

Finally, under ‘Graph Management’, select the ‘select all’ checkbox, select ‘Place on a tree (default tree)’, and press go.

And, you’re done. Wait a few hours for data to accumulate:

graph_image

RetroPie

This weekend I set up my new Raspberry Pi with the RetroPie distribution, using the instructions and parts list from LifeHacker. I’ve been eyeing it for a while, and just hadn’t gotten around to it yet.

IMG_20160804_190526

It was very simple to get installed, but configuring the controller – I used an XBox360 USB controller – proved challenging. I ended up following the instructions in this Github issue to get it working.

Most of the games that I wanted are from the various Atari systems, and from the ZX Spectrum – systems that are long since obsolete, but the games are still a lot of fun.

 

Sensordrone

I’ve been reading some things about Sensordrone – the first commercially available functional Tricorder … sort of.

photo-full

It’s a multi-sensor device that communicates with your phone via bluetooth, providing a variety of environmental sensor information – temperature, humidity, lighting. presence of various gases, and so on.

It looks like the kind of thing that would be ideal for home automation or other “internet of things” automation.

Unfortunately, it’s at a price point – $200 – where I have to seriously consider what I’d actually do with it, which is, probably, not a whole lot.

What will be cool is when these kinds of sensors are so cheap to make that they’re in everything. Remember 10 years or so ago, GPS technology was still crazy expensive and now there’s a GPS chip in everything from your camera to your phone to your watch.