Last week I went to Hanoi for FOSSAsia 2024. This is an event that I’ve been attending for nearly 10 years, but this is the first time it’s been in Hanoi, and my very first trip to Vietnam.

Hanoi was fascinating. It was exciting to see a city, and a country, that I have read about my whole life, but never experienced in person. And of course it’s always an interesting experience to be somewhere where one is illiterate, and relies entirely on the kindness of strangers for basic communication.

It took 35+ hours to get to Hanoi – via Atlanta and Seoul – and with the date/time change between here and there, it was 3 calendar days getting there.

Traffic in Hanoi is an adventure. I posted several videos on YouTube, where you can get at least a glimpse of that.

The conference itself was pretty great.

The different focus at Asia tech events, from those in the US and Europe, is always a bit surprising. Not only the list of companies involved, but also the list of technologies that people are focusing on, always takes a bit to catch up on. This year, a huge focus was blockchain/web3 kind of stuff, with a LOT of content around Etherium and related projects. This is not something that I have paid much attention to, so there was a lot to learn.

The two best talks I attended were:

A short history of AI, by Harish Pillay. Going back to the 1950s, this talk showed how it’s all been steady progress over the years, and that the current buzz around AI/ML builds on the shoulders of earlier work.

Pretend it’s a movie, by Greg Brown. This was a very cool way to look at promoting your project as though it’s a movie, with a villain (the problems you solve) a hero (your project), a tagline, and trailer, and so on. This provides a useful new lens through which to look at how you might promote your project to a new audience.

I also gave my talk about how to give better presentations, which was fun, and seemed well received. I think they’ll be posting videos at some point, and I’ll put it here once they do.

On my last day in Hanoi, I went to Hoa Lo prison, the infamous “Hanoi Hilton”,  where I learned a lot about the First Indochina War, and how the Vietnamese resisted the French occupation in the early 1900s.

Another highlight of the trip was visiting the Train Street, where a train runs directly down the center of a street with businesses close on both sides. You can watch the train coming through in this video.

This is useful supplementary information about my FOSSAsia talk, Raising the Bar on your Conference Presentations, linked from my slides:

Session Details – (On FOSSAsia website)

Slides – (On Github) (The FOSSAsia2024 tag reflects the specific point in time)

My contact:

Email: rbowen@apache.org

Twitter:  @rbowen

Mastodon: @rbowen@mastodon.social

Work:  @AWSOpen

LinkedIn: rcbowen

In the past few days, I’ve been in conversations in two different open source communities around the question: Who are the active maintainers?

There’s a variety of reasons to ask this question, mostly around who we hold accountable, how we measure the health of a project, and who to go to for answers. But in each case, it’s become clear to me that this is a much more complicated question than it appears on the surface. Let’s unpack that just a little.

Here’s a few of the things you should consider before even asking this question.

You should think a lot about why you’re even asking the question. That is, what will you do with the answer once you have it? How will it change how you interact with the project? Be specific. Because if you don’t understand that, then you’re likely measuring the wrong thing. Will you treat people differently based on how you have categorized them? Are there actual different levels of privileges, rights, or whatever, when someone switches “active” status? Does it actually matter if someone hangs around and isn’t active? (ie, does it actually have any costs – financial or social or otherwise – for someone to remain on the roll who isn’t “active”?) What *problem* are you trying to solve? If you cannot answer that, then the rest of this conversation isn’t very meaningful.

Understand that “Active” is a judgement call. What qualifies as active? Is it, in fact, something that you can measure empirically? Does it value certain kinds of actions more than others? Who does that benefit?

Keep in mind that “Active” is not binary, and changes over time. Particularly in open source where engagement is voluntary, people will be active one day, and inactive the next, which doesn’t mean that they’ll never come back.

Labels matter to people, and to their employers. Categorizing someone as an active maintainer, and putting that on your website, may have real impact on them, both personally and professionally. Not doing so, likewise. If you categorize someone as “not active”, you will likely make them feel pressured to do something that maybe they just can’t right now. This will often kill joy, rob passion, and drive people away who could be very valuable to your project. It may even have a direct impact on their employment. Maybe consider not doing this. Particularly not without the consent and knowledge of everyone involved.

Often, there is an implicit class system between people who are paid to work on $thing full time, and people who do it part time. The full time folks often look down on the part timers, who are not able to move at the same pace. This is not because they are less competent, it’s just because they have less time for it. Saying that those people are less active might be true for some definition, but it’s not True, and it’s not helpful. Be very careful what you measure.

You will feel tempted, because you are an engineer, to build tooling to measure “active”. Consider not doing that. Because any measurement that you encode in metrics makes assumptions about everyone that are sure not to be true for some people, and are likely to punish some subset for being human, and subject to human considerations.

Let people self-designate, and ask the question in a non-binary way. For example, possible answers might be:

• Yes, I’m active
• Yes, I’m here, but only partially paying attention. I can respond in an emergency
• No, not really here. I peek in occasionally, but no longer feel like I can respond meaningfully
• No, I have left, and am not coming back.

Today a colleague encouraged us to visit the wall gallery and I’m very glad I went.

Photos

What I discovered, listening to the album Rush, the first album from the band Rush, is that, other than Working Man, I’m almost completely unfamiliar with this album.

That is, I’ve heard all of the songs, of course, but they don’t really form part of my mental list of Rush songs. I listen to them, and know that they’re Rush, but they don’t sound like Rush, and when they’re over, I don’t really think of them as Rush songs.

And of course that’s often the case of a first record from a long-lived band – like the first episode of a TV series, they’re still trying to figure out who they are, and who they want to be. You can see a glimpse here and there of who they might become later, but they’re not there yet. You might say they were … finding their way, but it still needs some love.

I know that folks get yelled at for saying it on Reddit, but I really think of this debut album as an entirely different band. Which is, I suppose, just another way of saying that Rush without Neil (both before and after) isn’t *real* Rush.

On the other hand, it’s clear that some people really love it – especially folks who were fans earlier than I was. And, as always, my opinion is just an opinion. Like what you like, friend.

There’s several tracks I still don’t care for. Animate is  … annoying. The “let’s find as many things that rhyme as possible” thing just doesn’t work for me.

But Cold Fire is wonderful, musically and lyrically.

A phosphorescent wave on a tropical sea
Is a cold fire
The pattern of moonlight on the bedroom floor
Is a cold fire
The flame at the heart of a pawnbrokers diamond
Is a cold fire
The look in your eyes as you head for the door
Is a cold fire

The juxtaposition of poetic love and actual human experience is ugly and beautiful. This is Neil at his best I think.

Double Agent is also good but I’m not always sure what it means.

Everyday Glory is just hard to listen to. Heart wrenching even. Makes me wonder what story is behind it, because there’s always a story.

Mama says some ugly words
Daddy pounds the wall
They can fight about their little girl later
Right now they don’t care at all

That verse makes my heart hurt every time.

I have no idea what Stick It Out is about. Someone tell me.

Between Sun and Moon is also great in its unexpected juxtapositions.

There is a fine line between love and illusion
A fine place to penetrate
The gap between actor and act
The lens between wishes and fact

This is a fine place
To hesitate

I think I still need to spend more time with it.

I’m not going to do the track by track, because Craig already did that.

This record has a lot of good stuff on it, but far and away the best two are Losing It, and Subdivisions.

The fact that Neil was only 30 when he wrote Losing It make it all the more impressive. This song hits me harder and harder as I get older. I remember when I discovered the (yes, I know, very obvious) fact that the second half was about Hemingway, and that led me to read all of Hemingway. I think I was probably 19 or 20 at the time. I don’t suppose I could stand that much Hemingway at 50.

Subdivisions is just a great jam, but is also one of the better written, lyrically, of Rush’s songs. It’s also, I recently realized, the only time (I think – and I could very well be wrong) that Neil’s voice appears in a Rush song. (He’s the voice saying “Subdivisions.”)

Oh, and Analog Kid was, for some reason, left off of the bootleg version of Signals that I had on cassette as a kid. Maybe for space? I don’t know. But I’m less familiar with it, so it was cool to discover such a lovely memory of that edge between childhood and growing up, imagining the future. Good stuff.

And, yeah, I know Countdown is cool and all, but one thing ruins it for me. That one line – “Excitement so thick, you could cut it with a knife.” Really, Neil? With all of the great stuff that Neil wrote, he has this annoying habit of throwing in trite cliches far too often. I think Neil could have been a great poet, if he had anyone to offer him serious criticism of his work, Stuff like Losing It, The Larger Bowl, and so on, were just really well crafted, poetically. And then there’s an opportunity like Countown and he does … that. *sigh*.

His books are another example of this. So much poetical, lyrical narrative, and then there’s just lazy writing interspersed in there, and I wonder if he just never really had an editor that he trusted.

Thanks, again, Craig, for the opportuity for fresh ears on an old album. Looking forward to next week!

Roll the bones is definitely in my top 3 or 4 Rush albums. The songs revolve around the topic of fate, or chance, or luck, or randoness – depending on how you look at it.

Dreamline and Bravado are, or have been at times, my two favorite Rush songs. The line “Learning that we’re only immortal for a limited time” occurs to me all the time as I get older.

You Bet Your Life is another song that occurs to me frequently, when I think about how much we trust the strangers around us – how often we bet our lives on the surety that those strangers will do the right things, even while they are not necessarily what we might consider good people.

Other great lines on this album that resound in my mind incude “Life is a diamond you turn into dust”, and “we will pay the price, but we will not count the cost” and “I’m in a groove now … or is it a rut?”

“Ghost of a Chance” is perhaps the most beautiful love song in the Rush catalog. Rush doesn’t do traditional love songs, but when they do a love song, it’s wonderful.

Where’s My Thing (part IV in the Gangster of Boats Trilogy) is another glimpse into the weird sense of humor of these guys. I often wish I could have listened in on some of their conversations.

Really, I’m not sure I can pick a least-favorite song on this album. It’s pretty much perfection. Ok, so I’m not a big fan of the “let’s list all the words we know that rhyme with -ica” section of Neurotica. But other than that, this is one that I can listen to again and again.