All posts by rbowen

Poetry month, day 2

Day 2 prompt: Write about a poem about a superhero coming to your house and confronting you about something. Somewhere in the poem, you have to state what your superpower is.

The Documentor!

His shoulders fill the doorway
and his cape flutters slightly in the wind
only he feels.

You must use words like
Super, Ultra, Mega
when you refer to me.

I must be best, perfect, finest, outstanding, leading,
Optimum

But I hold him entirely in thrall
Sure, he can fly,
lift trains from their tracks,
trace a segfault to its root cause and patch it

But I write about it
and without me
he doesn’t exist.

 

Poetry month: Day 1 prompt – Unbroken

Working from http://www.agodon.com/uploads/2/9/4/3/2943768/writing_prompts_by_kelli_russell_agodon.pdf  for daily writing prompts, here’s day 1.

The prompt: 1. Grab the closest book. Go to page 29. Write down 10 words that catch your eye. Use 7 of words in a poem. For extra credit, have 4 of them appear at the end of a line.

Unbroken

High Bridge Road, Some time in September, 1991

I sit quietly
in the middle of the deserted field
the tick of the metal cooling
the moment frozen,
silent

Silence amplified
to the point of being
almost deafening.

The engine block steams
as the toxic fluids
spill on the grass,
the anger drains away

The telephone pole, upright,
shorn off
inches from the ground
sways gently, suspended from the wires
conversations uninterrupted

Yesterday was simpler
It usually is

But you cannot go back
to the unbroken,
the unwounded,
put the oil back in the pan

So, I sit
waiting
waiting for the past to be
unbroken
waiting for the future
to come slamming back,
as the engine cools,
the coolant seeps into the soil

 

Moving to CentOS

TL;DR: Leaving OpenStack; Moving to CentOS; Still at Red Hat.

4 years ago, I came to Red Hat, and started as the OpenStack Community Liaison, working primarily with the RDO project, but more generally with all of Red Hat’s involvement in the upstream OpenStack project.

I took over from Dave Neary, but it took a while to actually replace him. His depth of knowledge and experience with the community were not easy to step into.

Over those 4 years, I’ve become much more knowledgeable about OpenStack – the community as well as the technology. It’s a wonderful community, with a passion for open source, for doing things transparently and collaboratively, and for doing things well. The individuals in the community have been great to get to know – both people here at Red Hat, as well as people in other organizations, and at the OpenStack Foundation. I could certainly call out dozens of individuals who have made my time with OpenStack smoother. The names that come to mind are Haikel Guemar, Stefano Maffuli, Perry Meyers, Eliska Malikova, Alan Pevec, Jakub Ruzicka, Rain Leander … see, I knew that as soon as I got started I would find that there’s no end in sight.

Rain, in particular, has really stood out as someone that was hugely passionate about the community around OpenStack, and was just such a delight to work with, particularly when we were able to attend the same events and work together in person.

This is why I’m so excited to announce that Rain will be taking my place as the RDO/OpenStack community manager for Red Hat, effective immediately. I cannot think of anybody more qualified, in skills and temperament, for this position, and I am completely confident that I’m leaving the community in good hands. One develops a lot of ownership of a project over four years, but I have no doubt she’ll take care of the project.

I’m not leaving Red Hat, though. Instead, I’m moving over to be more active in the CentOS community. CentOS is an exciting community that is absolutely critical to Red Hat. It’s the place where community projects, like RDO, as well as many others, do their development and testing, before being deployed and supported on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. I’ll be focusing on a variety of things, including CentOS in HPC (High Performance Computing) and IoT (Internet of Things).

CentOS presents a number of challenges from a community perspective, and I’m very pleased to be more active there. It will be an interesting and challenging place to be, and I’ll be, once again, working with an awesome group of people. I’m sure I’ll be telling lots of CentOS stories on this website in the years to come, so stay tuned.

Follow RDO on Twitter at @rdocommunity and follow CentOS on Twitter at @centos to keep up to date with the two communities, as well as learn how we work together.

World traveler maple syrup

This is very well traveled maple syrup. 

In November, Shane brought this syrup to Seville for me, from Boston. He forgot to give it to me until I had already left for the airport. So be gave it to Ruth to give me the next time we traveled together. 

Unfortunately, Ruth forgot to take it to LA when we were there last month. So she brought it to Boston to give it to me. And I just had brunch with Shane. 

So the syrup has come back home to Boston, and is now in my suitcase heading home.

Apache Board

This time last year, I was nominated for the Apache Board of Directors, and I wasn’t very keen on it. I was on the down-swing of getting burned out with ASF stuff, which comes every few years of any volunteer effort, no matter how much you believe in the mission of the organization. It does one good to step back from it every few years.

I made a rather half-hearted position statement that basically said: “all of the people on the ballot are great, and any board chosen randomly from this slate will be great.” I wasn’t elected to the board.

However, midway through the term, there were some resignations, and I found myself on the board again.

This time around, I am much more passionate about it and have actually made an attempt to state what I think the board needs. In short, it’s more delegation.

We have arrived at the size where we must delegate, trust those to whom we delegate, and resist the urge to tinker in the minutiae. This is very, very hard, and is especially hard for our current slate of directors, because we are all so deeply passionate about the mission of the Foundation.

Non-profit and volunteer-based organizations have the tendency to rely on heroes – people who take on 90% of the work, rather than delegating. The thing with heroes is that they are awesome as long as they are around. But eventually, they burn out, or retire, or move on to other things, and then suddenly you have a crisis. We need to find a way to identify areas where one person is doing a disproportionate amount of the work, and find a way to delegate that work to several other people, and then be willing to let them do the work, even when we think they’re not doing it exactly the way we’d do it ourselves.

The election of the new board will happen at the ASF members meeting on March 28th. And whether or not I’m elected, I have my work cut out for me in the coming year at Apache. There’s just so much to do.

Green

For St. Patrick’s Day, and for Poetry Friday, here’s Green, perhaps the best poem I ever wrote:

Oh, and here’s me reading it, too, over here: https://drbacchus.com/green/

Green
Dec 5, 2007

My favorite color?
Well, the question lacks context
and therefore meaning.

My favorite sky is
sharp aching blue,
the kind of blue you can
cut your fingers on
until they bleed into
and African Sunset
and plunge into a
deep purple African night,
with the diamonds of
faraway worlds scattered
like the dust thrown up
by the passing herds.

My favorite sea is
gray-green-blue stormy
swirling seaweed churned
from depths beyond imagining,
the sky a reflection of a
reflection of infinity,
winking back at you from
a million million miles down.

My favorite earth is the
dark maroon red brown
of the Maasai clay
brittle and cracked
under the Tsavo sun,
gummy sticky under the
monsoon rains
sweeping up from Victoria,
thundering past on their way
to green the highlands,
glisten on the tea leaves,
pound the coffee flowers
from their branches,
and drench the faces
of the beautiful children
running around in what
God dressed them in,
laughing and shouting
in a language I will never know
but that sings fluently
in the memory of my heart.

So, you see,
the question is unfair.
As well ask a man
to choose one food
to live on forever,
one wine to drink,
one song to sing,
one painting to gaze at
for all my days.

But if I must choose,
I choose the green
of the Kericho fields,
stretching to the horizon,
the beginning and ending
of my world.
The green of a
1952 Ferrari Barchetta,
with its greedy grinning grill
sucking in the wind
of a winding Italian mountain road
tires squealing around the corners,
flashing past a
sleeping countryside
content to be stuck in a simpler time.
The green of
the foothills of Ngong,
acacias and baobabs
clawing at the
dark, angry sky,
promising threatening delivering rain,
the hills singing to my heart,
come and walk our paths,
come and feel the
wind tugging at your hair
come and
lay on your back and
watch the clouds dance
across the sky,
dance from one end of the sky
to the edge of the world,
where the
blue falls back once again
into the red dust
of the far Mara horizon.
The green of my voice,
singing across the years,
telling my stories to
the attentive ears,
the deep green eyes
of the friend of my heart.

todo.txt

1 Comment

Reposting from an email I sent a while back:

As several people have asked about my todo list within the last 2 weeks, I thought I’d share the goodness with everyone.

I’ve been using todo.txt for about a year now. http://todotxt.com/

Don’t let the website fool you. todo.txt isn’t (primarily) a gui app, or a phone app. The todo list is in a plain text file. There’s a dozen different tools that you can use to manage it, but I just use the command line:

t ls – what’s in my list?
t add ITEM – Adds ITEM to my todo list
t pri ## A – Makes item ## priority A
t do ## – Marks item ## as done, moves it to DONE list for later reference
t ls blarg – Lists todo items that match ‘blarg’
t lsp A – Show me all the things that are priority A
done – An alias to ‘cat ~/Dropbox/todo/done.txt’ which shows me what I’ve done most recently

If you happen to store your todo list in your Dropbox directory, you can then also use the free Android app to manage your todo list from your phone. (I’ve heard it also work with google drive, or owncloud, or a variety of other things.)

As someone who has used every possible todo list out there, including a dozen issue trackers, and writing a few different todo list webapps, sticking with a single tool for a whole year is unprecedented. Being able to work from the command line made all the difference for me, since that’s where I always am anyways.

OpenStack PTG, trip report

last week, I attended the OpenStack PTG (Project Teams Gathering) in Atlanta.

Even more in depth: PTG info at https://www.openstack.org/blog/2016/05/faq-evolving-the-openstack-design-summit/

TL;DR:

1) This is a hugely productive event, with project teams getting an enormous amount of work done without the distractions that are usually present at a conference.

2) I remain very concerned about how this event will effect the
character of OpenStack Summit – removing the bulk of the engineers from that event, and making it more product/marketing/sales focused. Time will tell

At the gathering, I did 23 interviews with Red Hat engineers about what they did in the Ocata release. You can see some of those interview on the RDO YouTube Channel. I’m not done editing them all yet, but they will appear over the coming weeks as part of various blog posts, as well as all of them appearing in that YouTube playlist.

I am constantly blown away by the passion, expertise, and
professionalism of the folks I get to work with. Wow.

Anyways, more about the PTG.

I was (and, really, still am) very skeptical about this new format.
Splitting OpenStack Summit into four events rather than two has already had significant impact on travel budgets, not just at Red Hat, but also at other companies involved in OpenStack. A lot of companies, for example, didn’t send anyone to FOSDEM, and we had a hard time staffing the OpenStack table there. Usually people work one shift at the table, but this year several of us worked 4 and 5 shifts to cover all the slots.

I am concerned that splitting the engineers off into their own event
will significantly change the character of OpenStack Summit from being a community-centric, tech-centric event, to more of a sales and marketing event, light on technical depth.

But this event, for what was intended, has already been amazing.
Everyone is commenting on how much is getting done, how much less distracted the team meetings are, how much better the teams are gelling than they have at any previous event. This is a working event, and people are here to get work done. They are meeting all day, every day, working on plans and blueprints, and fighting out agreements on things that would take weeks in email, and everyone seems VERY pleased with outcomes.

So, perhaps the trade off will be worth it. Time will tell. Regardless, Erin Disney and her team put on an amazing event that fulfilled, and exceeded, its goals.

On Wednesday  night, everyone that has ever contributed a patch to RDO was invited for drinks and hors d’oeuvres at the SideBar, and while there the RDO Ocata release announcement was sent out.

We had about 50 people in attendance, who ate and drank up all of my budget in about 2 hours.

Here’s some pictures.

 

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.