The preface to The Martian Chronicles says I should also read Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson. Books that recommend other books is perhaps my largest source of recommendations over the years.
The Illustrated Man
I just finished The Illustrated Man, which I haven’t read in decades. I was worried it wouldn’t stand up, but it was every bit as amazing as I remembered, but with the extra depth of reading it as an adult.
Particularly wonderful was “The Rocket” in which a broke junk dealer arranges for his kids to travel to Mars in a scrap metal rocket.
Bonus, about half of these stories ended up as Twilight Zone episodes!
Next, The Martian Chronicles, which I have read many times over the past 40 years but is always wonderful.
Bradbury summer
I started reading Ray Bradbury today. It’s like revisiting an old friend.
His first story collection, which I don’t have, is The dark carnival. Seems that’s not available on kindle. So I ordered that and started on The Illustrated Man, which I have read so many times I can quote parts of it.
But there’s also bits I didn’t remember.
We’re also reading Dandelion Wine, which I used to read every summer.
There are so many books in the world that sometimes it seems a waste to spend time reading what I’ve already read before, but Bradbury is just so magical. So that’s my plan for the summer.
mod_rewrite And Friends
I wrote a new book.
In 2006, I published The Definitive Guide to Apache mod_rewrite with Apress. That book is now nearly 20 years old, and the world of Apache HTTP Server configuration has changed enormously since then — new flags, expression engines, security considerations, and two decades of community questions revealing what actually confuses people.
So I wrote a new one from scratch: mod_rewrite And Friends.
It covers everything from regular expressions through RewriteRule, RewriteCond, RewriteMap, every flag, logging and debugging, proxying, virtual hosts, and access control — plus 40+ real-world recipes distilled from 20 years of users@httpd.apache.org questions. The “And Friends” part covers all the other Apache HTTP Server modules that often do the job better than mod_rewrite: mod_alias, mod_dir, mod_proxy, FallbackResource, expressions, and more.
Available now on Amazon:
📘 Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BSV4LO6
📕 Paperback: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GYKT6ZJ6
📖 Read free online: https://mod-rewrite.org/
If you order a copy *right now* you could bring it to Open Source Summit and I’ll sign it!
#ApacheHTTPServer #mod_rewrite #WebDev #SysAdmin #OpenSource
Winds of Change
Whenever I hear Winds of Change, by the Scorpions, I get a little misty-eyed. Not because it’s great music – although it’s definitely catchy and I do like it – but because, for a brief moment in 1989 and 1990, we actually believed that the world was getting smaller, and that there might be a day when “we could be so close, like brothers.”
Of course, when the moment wore off, it turns out that people are still people, and now in 2026 the US is actively working to undo what little progress has been made in the years since 1989.
The Fog Horn, by Ray Bradbury
20 minutes.
From “Golden Apples Of The Sun”. Also appears in “R is for Rocket”.
OpenDocsBugs, lunch time musings
I have a browser bookmark to OpenDocsBugs, which has been there for many years. It links to a filter on the Apache httpd bugzilla tracker that lists all open httpd bugs that are open in the Documentation component.
I mentioned a few weeks ago that I am now Without Hat at the ASF, having not run for the board this year. This leaves my ASF time allotment to other things.
Long ago, I was one of the main participants in the httpd documentation effort. I had almost entirely stepped away from that during my years on the board. That OpenDocsBugs lists crept up from double digits 10 years ago to 173 by the beginning of this year. This was daunting, to say the least.
Over the last 2 or 3 months, I have gradually whittled this down to zero. Or, as it helpfully says, Zarro Boogs.
Much of the grunt work – verifying that the bug still exists in the current versions of the project, synchronizing the patch across the trunk and 2.4 branches, verifying that the xml still validated, crafting a friendly commit message that accurately reflected the change(s) that I had made to the docs – was done by a helpful AI agent. I’m using Amazon Quick, which is a lovely tool that I’m becoming entirely too dependent on.
But the actual work of writing the patch, that was mostly me. I take particular pride in my writing, and have cultivated a particular voice in my writing that I don’t want to become a mass-produced robot voice.
This is the approach that I am taking with pretty much all of my AI interactions – I use the tooling for research, and then I use my own voice. I recognize that this probably makes me move a little slower, and it definitely identifies me as Someone Of A Certain Age. And I’m ok with that. I have the career that I have almost entirely due to my communication and writing skills – if not directly, at least that’s the path that got me here. And I an very, very reluctant to cede that to an algorithm. (No offense intended, all you algorithms that are reading this!)
So now, for the moment, we’re down to Zerro Boogs, and I’m going to endeavor to keep it there.
Next project is rewriting the mod_rewrite documentation to reflect the fact that it’s 2026 now, and not 2008.
2:13
2:13
The coffee maker says
it is 2:13
which doesn’t seem
true
but, perhaps
I will go back to bed anyway
Impressions from FOSSBackstage 2026
This week I’ve been in Berlin for FOSS Backstage 2026. This is perhaps the 6th time I’ve attended, I think?
It’s a completely unique event which explores what goes on behind open source projects. That includes governance, policy, design, community management, working with companies, and so on, that doesn’t often have a focus at major open source events. And it’s a gathering of the people that make this stuff happen.
That means it’s a somewhat smaller event than many I attend, but that the content is very deep. This is one of my top 5 favorite open source events, up there with FOSSAsia, and Community Over Code.
I gave a talk about disaster planning as a consumer of an open source project (“Plan to fork (so you won’t have to fork)”) which is always a fun talk to give.
Africa
I attended several talks by African open source contributors, talking about the challenges that are unique to Africa, but also the huge opportunity to invest in a growing African open source scene.
60% of Africa’s population is under 25. 1/4 of people, worldwide, will be African by 2050. By 2030, 42% of the world’s youth will be African.
These metrics together should be a hint to any organization or company that investing today in Africa is going to pay off in big ways in the next 10 years. Gaining developer affinity for tools and services in the African audience is going to be hugely important in remaining relevant as the world continues to change. If you’re not paying attention to Africa, you’re going to miss out on a major source of talent.
I think a lot of companies view engagement in Africa as altruism, and helping the less fortunate. That’s absolutely the wrong mindset. As Seyi Kuforiji said, inclusion is not charity, it’s sustainability. And if we don’t include Africa today, maybe they won’t include us tomorrow.
Airport Strike
Unfortunately, on Wednesday, when I was to fly home, there was an airport strike, and my flight was canceled. So I got to spend an extra 2 days in Berlin. Which isn’t all bad. I do love Berlin. But I’ve been away from home for a very long time.
Design
I took that opportunity to attend Foss Backstage Design, the sister conference to Foss Backstage. It’s been going for several years, but I’ve never attended, because, well, I’m not a designer.
It was worth attending. Listening to designers talk about their experience in open source was strangely familiar. Non-code contributors have a lot in common with one another, since code is what *real* open source is about, and so if you’re not writing code, you tend to not get the same recognition that the real programmers do.
But open source cannot happen without the non-code stuff. Documentation and design and so many other things have to be there or nobody will use what you write.
Also, the stuff that these people were doing with UI design was just mind blowing. From the flashy stuff that Blender is producing, to the science of user experience research, this was eye opening, and another “aha” moment around how we can reduce the barrier to entry for new contributors.
Conclusion
FOSS Backstage isn’t for everyone. It’s not a technical conference – it’s about everything else that keeps the lights on in open source. If you’re involved in any of that “back stage” stuff, this is an amazing event. And it’s an important place to meet the folks that are doing all of this often-hidden work.
A+, will attend again, and will continue to strongly advocate for my employer to sponsor, since this is important stuff.
Impressions from FOSSAsia 2026
Last week I attended FOSSAsia Summit 2026 in Bankok. This already seems a long time ago, as I’ve been in Berlin this week for FOSSBackstage (see other blog post, later today).
[Photos]
I’ve been attending FOSSAsia for several years – several times in Singapore, and 2 years ago in Hanoi. It’s pretty high on my list of favorite conferences, for a number of reasons.
The audience is young and passionate. In many ways it reminds me of open source conferences in the 90s and early 2000s in terms of the excitement and eagerness to learn. And this far along in the open source journey, it’s great to see young people still doing cool stuff and pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.
Also, the Asian perspective is so important. It makes us reconsider some of the things that we assume with the US/EU lens. The focus on sovereignty has been pretty strong in European conferences the last few years. This is even more the case for the Asia audience, who are torn between the cultural/technological imperialism of US companies and Chinese companies, and looking for ways to remain sovereign while also benefiting from open source innovation.
FOSSAsia prioritizes first-time speakers. While this can lead to some unpolished presentations, it also means that you don’t get the same talks you’ve seen elsewhere, and the same faces. This has a number of other positive side effects, too, including seeing the Shoshin – Beginner’s Mind – in action, which consistently leads to insights about assumptions that one makes when one has been doing this stuff for decades. I attended a number of talks that made me think anew about how we can do a better job of new contributor onboarding, for example.
I have roughly 10 pages of notes from the event. Much of it is in the form of ToDo lists that came from insights from talks, and as such is a little hard to summarize.
Airflow onboarding
One talk stands out. I attended an Airflow Contributor Onboarding workshop, led by Kan Ouivirach. Not because I intend to contribute to Airflow (although, who knows?!) but because I had heard that they way the run these was fantastic, and I wanted to see what recommendations we need to document for other projects at the ASF.
This did lead to several specific actionable notes.
Airflow has [CONTRIBUTION OPPORTUNITY] emails that go to the dev mailing list (example), which is a way to document something that needs to be done (preferably linking to a ticket) in a way that encourages someone to step up and do it, or help doing it, and doesn’t “lick the cookie.” I will be adopting this convention elsewhere.
I liked that “connect with people” was an explicit part of the contribution workflow. You cannot make a meaningful contribution to an open source project if you don’t talk to the other participants, advocate for your change, and build trust and relationships. The Github contributor workflow has created a world where so many people toss a PR into the stack, and that’s the end of their engagement.
I noticed, in the onboarding docs, that a number of steps assumed that people just know how to do them, and this may be a place that I make some contributions. Specifically, a lot of things around git, github, and docker, assume you Just Know. And this is always a challenge with these things – what’s the minimum that you’re able to assume that your audience knows? You have to start somewhere. But, for myself, I *always* struggle with the “just run this thing in docker” kinds of instructions, and pretty much am never able to get that working.
AI, AI, and more AI
Every talk was about AI. And the talks that weren’t about AI spent a lot of time talking about AI.
Since this time last year, I’ve set aside a bit of my skepticism about AI. but I still get weary of it being everywhere, all the time. This was different. There were a lot of practical, immediately applicable talks that showed how to use AI to accomplish meaningful things, but not making it the small god that we worship. I appreciated that.
There was a tutorial on using ollama. This has been on my ToDo list for a while, and in an hour I got over some of the initial hurdles, as well as the “just getting around to it” part of things. I’m looking forward to seeing what I can accomplish with a local ollama instance and private data, and without burning cloud credits every time I want to do something.
Conclusion
FOSSAsia is always worth the trip, even though it’s a slogging journey half way around the world. And if you want to reach a young, passionate open source audience, this is the event to sponsor and show up at.
A+, will attend again.