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Kicking off California Summer

Monday, Jun 22nd, 2026 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

I returned from the Open Source Summit just in time for Memorial Day weekend, which was also the beginning of the last week of school for the boys before summer break.

Saturday of Memorial Day weekend was spent doing errands, but one of those errands was going to REI and buying a couple cots that Adam and I could use for camping. Our first attempt at back yard camping last year was a bit rough, the small blow-up mats weren’t the best on my back, and we weren’t quite prepared for how chilly it got at night or how annoying the air conditioner would be. This time we brought lots of blankets, and MJ agreed to keep the air-conditioning in the house off for the night. Also, Aaron joined us. But the evening started once again with s’mores!

Inside the tent, Adam and I got the cots while Aaron happily plunked down between us on one of the small blow-up mats. It was a much better night than our previous attempt, but it was also a late night for all of us, and the boys didn’t get as much sleep as they usually would. Still, I think we’re ready to level up from backyard camping. Next stop: Camping at our local campground.

The next day we got to enjoy my belated Mother’s Day celebration by taking BART up to San Francisco to see a Giants game during Star Wars Day! We got there when the gates opened, partially to make sure we got our Grogu bobble heads, but we also just wanted to take in the whole stadium experience for our day out. Aside from a plethora of food, the Coca-Cola bottle in the stadium is actually a series of slides for kids, and the boys had a lot of fun with that, before and during the game. The Star Wars stuff was naturally a lot of fun, especially as we got to see Daniel Logan (little Boba Fett from Episode II) throw out a ceremonial first pitch. Having just been to Minneapolis for Star Wars night, it was fun to compare the two, and see that it was not a uniform experience, the teams really have a lot of flexibility in what they choose to do. No cookie-cutter entertainment here!

Now it’s time for me to make an aside about the use of AI in the stadium. They no longer publish a food directory, instead depending on a chatbot that you query to get information about where specific things are. It’s very, very bad. Like, I don’t know how they could have made it this bad. Looking for chicken tenders? They’re everywhere, but the chatbot will tell you about just the specialty spicy ones. Cotton candy? Everywhere. But it’ll tell you it’s just in an exclusive part of the stadium. Helmet nachos? Not great results. Asking where the Ghirardelli ice cream spot is? It tells you the wrong stall number. It felt like a tiny bit of RAG could have saved the whole thing, why didn’t they just train it on the directory and menus? The other place it was used was with scanning items you place on a platform designed for it. There was still a human standing there to make sure it got it right and check for any alcohol purchases. It did fine with our food, it missed an item when we were at the fan shop. In all, it was pretty much a disaster. We still found everything, but when things are this bad, forcing people to be beta testers for an experience we paid a lot of money for is not cool. Just publish a food directory, please.

The game was a lot of fun though, we got to watch the Giants win! And since it was a Sunday, the boys got to run the bases after the game! It was a long day though, and though no one fell asleep on the BART ride home this time, they did fall asleep pretty quickly when bedtime came around.

I told myself that Monday (Memorial Day) would be a much more chill day, but I rarely am effective at executing on that. The morning was spent with the boys helping me do some chores and projects around the house and making banana bread, before heading out to the park to toss around a baseball. Aaron’s t-ball season was coming to a close the next weekend, and we were trying to get some final practice in before that, since Memorial Day meant that practice with his team was cancelled.

Lunch was at a nearby all-you-can-eat sushi place we’d never tried before, and I was very pleased to see that the boys actually ate a reasonable lunch there. From there, it was over to our local go-kart place so Adam could do a race and both of them got to play some arcade games. At seven years old, Adam is one of the youngest kids there, but I’m really impressed with how quickly he’s gotten the hang of it, this was only the third time he’s been, and the first time I got to see him race.

With Memorial Day weekend behind us, the boys began their final week of school. For Adam we learned that the transition from 1st to 2nd grade will be a little easier than expected, since the large size of his graduating class means his 1st grade teacher will be teaching 2nd grade next year, and Adam will have him again! As for Aaron, they did a little graduation for the Transitional Kindergartners as they move up to Kindergarten, and that was the first time I got to confront the fact that he’s in the graduating class of 2039. That’s 40 years after I graduated high school. Oof. It was a cute graduation ceremony though, and I’m glad we could all be there, and to say goodbye to their classmates on that last day of school together.

Our weekend began Friday night with a leaky kitchen faucet. Because houses suck. We had to shut off the water immediately because it was leaking under the sink and Adam helped make me a sign to remind everyone not to use it. Thankfully, it hadn’t caused any serious damage that needed to be address, we just had to let the cabinet dry out. It did require an emergency trip to the hardware store so we could look at new faucets and pick one out, which MJ was able to install that night. Phew!

On Saturday Aaron said goodbye to his T-Ball teammates for the season. I’m hoping we can convince him to sign up again next year to re-join his team, but we’ll see where his interest and skill level lands. We’ll be practicing with him until then to try to help with both. Plus, playing catch is just fun.

After lunch we loaded up the car to spend a couple hours at the Cull Canyon beach lagoon in town. It was our first visit of the summer, and it wasn’t the warmest day to go, but I wanted to make sure we squeezed in a visit before leaving for Philadelphia for the summer. We still had a lot of fun, the boys played in the sand more than they usually do (it was warm) and as the afternoon progressed the water did warm up a little bit so we could properly enjoy it.

That evening we followed-up on those local-camping plans, kind of. We drove up to the Anthony Chabot Family Campground on the edge of Lake Chabot for a public Campfire Program. I learned about it last year, but circumstances arose that made it so we couldn’t go to any of the events then. It was nice to finally visit, since it allowed us to see the campground before we reserve a spot for the night in the near future. It was also a nice opportunity to explore a new part of the town. The program about animals was fun too, they talked about some of the local wildlife, how nocturnal animals operate, and they concluded the night with s’mores around the campfire!

The next day MJ left for a conference, so I decided to take the boys down to Ardenwood Historic Farm for their regular Wake Up The Farm event. That gave the boys a chance to use historic tools to grind up corn, and then feed it to the chickens, goats, and sheep around the farm. They had a lot of fun, especially feeding the chickens, much to my chagrin (I’m not a fan of chickens). Naturally, we also took a ride on the train while we were there.

Reading back through this blog post, wow, we do a lot! It’s true. But the boys are five and seven, and we all love adventures. As exhausting as it can get, having us all get out of the house to spend time outdoors and experience new things is really important for them, and us. They have plenty of time to ride bikes at home and play video games too.

Filed under: animals, baseball, castro valley, events, family, kids, life

The 3D printed Index Typewriter: Part 2

Friday, Jun 12th, 2026 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Back in March I wrote The 3D printed Index Typewriter: Part 1 where I covered our experience printing and beginning to assemble the Index Typewriter – AEG Mignon by Keenan Finucan. That blog post basically got to the end of Stage 1: Baseplate Assembly and I got started on Stage 2: Carriage Assembly.

So that’s where I pick things up! Carriage assembly was the easiest part of this whole thing. The only thing that tripped me up were the instructions to insert a wire into some of the long, thin pieces. Insert? Where? Oh! There’s a little hole that spans the whole part! Got it.

Stage 3: Type Arm Components Assembly is where things got interesting again. I had to take some sandpaper to thin a few parts (yes, I could have also just reprinted them a couple percent smaller). The first of which was the Type Arm and I actually broke my first Alignment Wheel because I really tried to wedge it on there, oops.

The other parts I brought sandpaper to were the Pivot Lever Axle and the Actuator Rod.

As I came to the end of assembly, I was testing out the Space and Typing levers and remembered what I had mentioned in my first blog post: “I have a couple springs that won’t quite stay put” with regard to the springs in Stage 1, Step 22. Indeed, in the couple of months this spent getting moved around the house between active work those springs were very gone and I had to replace them. I would not suggest addressing this after you get the Type Arm assembly installed! It’s tricky to get in there, but some patience and a pair of needle nose pliers, I managed to get all three springs replaced.

And with that, assembly was basically complete!

When I shared my photo on Thingverse (here), Keenan noted that I had ribbon threaded slightly wrong (oops), but I fixed that and it now clears the carriage a lot better.

Then I got to work on type alignment with regard to matching up with the Index. This has been tough, but I think I almost got it. I covered a whole paper with characters, but I managed to intentionally type the word “The”! Kind of :)

While trying to figure this out, I also discovered I have to fix a few other things (some of which are covered in the Troubleshooting conclusion to the assembly instructions, hooray!):

Ribbon not advancing: I really struggled with this mechanism during assembly, so I’m not surprised it needs a lot of love.

The stylus meets resistance on the right: When I navigate to the last 2 columns of the index, the stylus gets stuck and I have to gently force it over (and back). Could just be a wheel that’s not quite smooth enough or something, I’ll have to take a closer look.

Backspace does not work: I haven’t even looked at this.

Once these are sorted, I’ll have to see how general carriage advancement is working, since it’s been somewhat inconsistent as I’m testing my typing.

But I wanted to publish this blog post because we’re traveling over the summer and it’s going to be a couple months before I can finish this, I don’t want to forget anything and wanted to record my status so I’m ready to tackle the issues when I get back.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the journey thus far, I have!

Filed under: 3d printer, typewriter

Open Source Summit 2026

Friday, Jun 5th, 2026 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

Last month I had the pleasure of attending the Open Source Summit in Minneapolis. For the first time, I didn’t have a speaking slot or booth duty, I was there as an attendee with a list of people and projects I wanted to meet up with, and sessions I wanted to see.

On Sunday I met up with my friend and former OpenStack/HPE colleague Sean Dague who now also works on IBM Quantum. We’ve kept loosely in touch over social media, but it had been a few years since we’d actually connected in person, so it was really nice to have some time to catch up. That afternoon I also had the pleasure of finally meeting my colleague Rishi Misra in person, who I’ve worked closely with for years on s390x porting work. A nice start to a great week!

Monday kicked off with a series of opening keynotes. The other day I wrote a long, rambling blog post about open source and AI, so I won’t talk too much about the AI-heavy keynotes, except to say that there were some hopeful observations alongside the concerning ones around data and security. It was nice to see where the Linux Foundation was taking action to make sure we continue having an open source driven future. My favorite keynote of the morning was from Sean who talked about, you guessed it, IBM Quantum! Not only was I personally delighted to see Sean up on stage, I’ve always been fascinated by Quantum computing and have enjoyed seeing the progression over the past several years. His talk gave a whirlwind tour of the ecosystem and presented opportunities for developers that are still being offered by IBM. Also, it was a nice break from AI talks. Google and Microsoft also spoke on AI-related topics, with Microsoft also happening to mention an update around Azure Linux, which Steven Vaughan-Nichols helpfully covered here: Microsoft surprises with its first server Linux distribution: Azure Linux 4.0.

The next few talks I attended were around Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs), the first was a panel around scaling them, where I was happy to see a wide range of experiences presented from across industries, including Ford, Geico, and CISCO, with a moderator from GitHub. There’s definitely a trend of using AI tooling to help the work in OSPOs, especially as the work and importance of these organizations grow. I also enjoyed Dawn Foster’s talk on “Strategic Approach To Demonstrating the Value of OSS Efforts” where she presented the highlights of the Demonstrating Organizational Value Practitioner’s Guide that she co-wrote.

From there I dipped into a couple of MCP talks, starting with Automating MCP Server Testing from Neethu Elizabeth Simon of Arm. It was an interesting talk overall, but my big takeaway was the server she demonstrated with: the Arm MCP Server, which is “An MCP server providing AI assistants with tools and knowledge for Arm architecture development, migration, and optimization.” Cool. I took notes and was texting with Rishi about how we might be able to leverage something similar in the s390x world. From there I went to a talk on ContextForge in the context of managing MCP sprawl. It was also a timely talk for me since we had just on-boarded the project to our GitHub Actions runner a few weeks before and I’d been meaning to learn more about it. Done! It was also nice seeing Dave Neary and his What Developers Should Know About Hardware Architecture talk, where he throws out lots of interesting facts about things that matter in architectures, along with other topics like just how slow spinning disks are, especially compared to CPU caches.

Monday evening was the conference reception at the Mill City Museum. It’s a museum I had wanted to go to anyway, so I was happy to learn that was the reception venue. It was a nice museum about the history of flour milling in the city, and the elevator they converted into a “ride” that takes you up and down several floors through a history of the mill was an absolute delight. The views from the top where you’re let out were beautiful, especially since the rain hadn’t rolled in yet! Unfortunately, the rain did eventually come in, just as the scheduled drone show for the 35th anniversary of Linux was to start. The drone show still happened, but it wasn’t really dark enough and drizzle quickly turned into a thunderstorm.

Tuesday’s keynotes got us back in the realm of AI, with talks on Strands Agents from AWS and AI used in robotics. They also had a panel on the value of open source software foundations for projects, which surprised me as a keynote topic for an open source conference, because most of what was covered struck me as pretty basic, and I think a lot of folks in the audience had experience engaging with projects within foundations.

From there I went to a talk on Package Testing Across Distributions and Architectures at Scale where the presenter walked through a move away from dozens of servers and consolidated on x86 and arm64-based cloud servers, using Ansible Molecule. Alas, not immediately applicable in our s390x porting work, but it was an interesting tour of what they had done and how much disk speed impacts package building performance. An afternoon session from the OpenSSF that gave a whirlwind tour of their projects was also interesting, since it can be a little tricky to keep up if your day to day work is unrelated to security.

That evening was the Tux Trek in the expo hall, and in addition to some great conversations, including one where I got to nerd out about mainframe stuff to someone who was curious, I got a tux cotton candy! I then got to have dinner with Rishi and a colleague who I didn’t expect to see there: Cheryl Fillekes! She’s worked on various OpenShift products for Linux on IBM Z, and we’ve connected on various topics over the past several months (mostly when I needed something, hah!). It was really nice to meet her in person. I was also pleasantly surprised when she suggested our dinner adventure should include finding some Guinness 0 (non-alcoholic). You see, I’m a beer fan, but I got a bit sick back in March and have been taking a break from drinking until I feel better. Guinness 0 was a nice treat, and surprisingly good!

Day three began with the obligatory keynote discussion with Linus Torvalds, followed by another keynote about AI agents, but this time with a focus on specifically how they can help open source software maintainers. I really enjoyed Kate Stewart’s keynote on the Zephyr project though. Zephyr has been on my radar for a while, but playing with it is another one of those projects I am not sure I’ll get around to anytime soon. But hey, it turns out my RISC-V board is supported by Zephyr! That gets me one step closer!

The final keynote on Free to Use, Not Free to Run: Reinventing Package Registries is one that stuck with me. Basically, open source communities are running registries (PyPI, RubyGems, crates.io, etc) that companies using the ecosystem depend upon, but they’re becoming expensive to run, and projects are now hyper-aware of security and supply chain concerns that they need to take very seriously. So they’ve launched a Sustaining Package Registries Working Group to discuss concerns, and develop solutions together, up to and including starting to charge for industrial scale traffic. I’ve seen the thankless work that goes into things like PyPI. Helpfully, Stephen wrote about this too: 10 trillion downloads are crushing open-source repositories – here’s what they’re doing about it.

Most of the rest of my day was spent meeting up with people, but I also happy to make it to Rob Landley’s Building the Simplest Possible Linux System talk. I’ve seen Rob speak a few times over the years, and I love the enthusiasm for the work that he brings to it. He’s also been friendly in the realm of s390x porting, and I was delighted to see on his screen as he was preparing to begin that the emulated build he had up on the screen was s390x.

I talked a lot about sessions in this blog post, but ultimately what makes these events is the people. Connecting in person make a huge difference, and there were a lot of people I saw there who I hadn’t seen in a couple years. And this time I made sure to take lots of pictures!

With that, the summit came to an end. To close things out, I went out to enjoy another round of Guinness 0s with Cheryl before it was time to call it an early night before my 7AM flight home the next morning.

Filed under: computers, events, mainframes, tech, travel, work

Open Source and AI brain dump

Thursday, Jun 4th, 2026 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

I hadn’t been to the Open Source Summit in a couple years, and boy was I in for a shift. It was a shift I expected, because AI/ML has taken over tech a big way, but experiencing it was a whole different thing.

I also don’t think I’ve every heard the word “human” said so many times in a week. It’s weird to talk like that.

This blog post isn’t meant to be anything shocking or insightful in the realm of AI. It’s more a brain dump checkpoint for me personally to share what working through the shift to AI tooling is like from where I’m sitting. The value you can get from this post may vary ;)

The first thing I’ll say that I’ve never seen a tech industry shift happen this fast, and having been in the industry for nearly 25 years I’ve worked through some major transformations. In the past 9 months I’ve seen multiple cases where a conference CFP being 6+ months before the conference causes a considerable change in the resulting presentation material, I’ve seen two talks change their titles from what was listed because tools and companies rose and fell in that time. Tech has always been an industry of continuous learning, and I love that, but today if you haven’t spent some time learning about AI in the past 6 months, you’re going to be blindsided by a whole slew of terms and concepts. You’ll likely find it hard to learn at conferences because there’s so much new foundational AI knowledge that’s assumed. Indeed, I like to think I’ve stayed fairly well-informed, and even I had to go back to my room in the evening and do some learning so I could properly absorb what I had been exposed to throughout the day, and be ready for the next day. My conference notes have a lot more “learn more about this” notes than usual.

Career-wise, this has already proven to be a difficult time for people in tech. Huge layoffs have hit major tech companies with AI given as a reason. Obviously, this is incredibly painful for folks who have a mortgage to pay, health care costs, and mouths to feed; suddenly the market has become unrecognizable and they can’t find a new job. That sucks. The core programming skills that coding boot camps were founded on as being a golden ticket to a high paying job in tech are rapidly being replaced by AI tools. We’re not there yet, I’ve been reviewing some very bad AI-generated code in the past few months as I touched upon in my blog post about CPOSC, but there is a fast-paced trend of improvements. If the rise of AI in programming turns out to be sustainable (capacity can be expanded and that it continues to be cost-effective), the need for straight up entry level programmers will continue to decrease, and we’ll need more folks with more advanced skills related to computer science and architecture. How do you get more advanced skills without learning programming basics first? I don’t know the answer to that, but there are a lot of smart people trying to figure it out.

I’m also aware of the fact that adoption of things like AI agents will actually take a while in most companies. I think back to the rise of configuration management, and in spite of all the benefits, the amount of work it would take to rebuild their systems with configuration management in place was simply not a priority (indeed, in most shops I saw it implemented slowly, and only with new systems that were brought up). Will this be the case for AI agents as well? I had more than a few conversations where developers were using AI-assisted coding tools, but having an infrastructure that supported using agents to automatically carry out tasks was nowhere close to their reality. There’s also the question of economies of scale. A massive tech company like Google may see the value of heavily investing in AI, but for a company with a tech department of a half dozen folks? Maybe it doesn’t sense any time soon. After all, using that Perl script we’ve always used is still faster than re-writing everything in Puppet, since our ten servers are unique pets (no cattle here!).

Coming back to open source, I’ve also been thinking a lot about the reason companies invest in open source software. At the core, it’s because… of the core. Core technology is what everyone uses and there’s no business advantage to it, so it makes sense to invest in them collectively. Kubernetes is not what makes money, Red Hat OpenShift and the ecosystem built on top of it is, so SUSE can also play that game with Rancher. Is there a future where that core technology is created by AI, and it’s good and cheap, so the need for open source collaboration is no longer “worth the trouble”? I hope not. And not just because my livelihood depends upon it. I’ve always believed that open collaboration on tooling across the tech industry has literally made the world better.

At the Open Source Summit the keynotes were AI-heavy, as was to be expected. Jim Zemlin had a lot of positive things to say about the role of open source software today at every layer of the AI stack, but acknowledged that the final layer is what is missing: data.

The open data community will always lag behind here, because those who hold private data will always have the open data plus their own. It seems like the question that’s being asked is whether a vast pool of open data can be “enough”, even if it’s not “better” than the private data. This is already being seen with AI models, the best ones are proprietary, but the open ones? Pretty good! Probably good enough for most of us! The statistic Jim shared was that open source models only lag proprietary ones by 3-6 months, whereas the gap was measured in years back in 2022. The concern with data is that the desire for open data is arguably in direct competition with privacy and the ability for us to keep our servers running. What happens when you’re running a webserver and 80% of the traffic is bots collecting data rather than serving your customers? You get that bill, and that bill is getting larger. This leads to an inclination for organizations to pull back what they share, and put more and more behind paywalls and proxy services, or in apps that aren’t on the web. Still, the Linux Foundation still believes we’re in a world where the problem is not lack of data, but lack of coordination to collect and curate these data sources. Maybe.

Open source contributions were also a big topic. Speaking personally from a tiny, niche project I run, things have clearly changed. Until 2026, every contribution was from someone we personally engaged with in some way. This year we’ve received multiple small patches that have zero contextual awareness of the project, but fix common errors in code (cool, thanks!). My current core developer has pulled back on self-assigning issues when he creates them because we’ve started to see new contributors just show up and start working on them. That has never happened before. And are they AI-assisted? Definitely. In some ways this is great. A major change landed this week that would have taken us months to do without it. We’ve gotten lucky so far, that particular change had a clever developer behind it who was willing to engage with us through a month of back and forth with fixes and improvements, and he actually understood the code that was submitted. We can’t always bet on that, and that erodes trust. My default reaction to new contributors used to be elation, now it’s turning to apprehension. I hate that. We have drive-by contributors who will never use or care about the project, so their motivations aren’t driven by usage or focused on holistic improvements, but done in order to fill up their GitHub contributions graph. Some of this has always been this way, not everyone who contributes becomes part of a project in a real way, and some of these are changes that can improve the project! But it feels like the community element that drives lifelong open source contributors like myself to maintaining a project is slipping away. As someone whose closest and longest friendships have predominantly come from shared involvement and values related to open source, this is very sad for me.

See? I told you this blog post was personal. I’m getting all mushy when you expect me to only care about the code and what’s technically best for the project. But I’m human and me caring about community is what’s best for the project. That thrill of welcoming a new contributor and the connection we build as they move up through their career is what gets me through long nights, difficult decisions, and burnout, so I can continue being an effective contributor.

Another major topic of discussion at the summit related to AI was security. There have always been solid security teams for major open source projects, but the levels to which they were funded at and the tooling available have been less impressive. And smaller projects? Honestly, very little attention paid to security. This has started changing, but we’re not where we need to be, because the vulnerability landscape is changing much, much faster. By most estimates, the number of CVEs in 2026 is expected to exceed 50,000 for the first time. With AI-assisted scanning, it’s simple and cheap to find vulnerabilities in every single piece of open source code out there. So that little project on GitHub that had security through obscurity before? Not anymore. My little tool doesn’t just have bugs being identified and reported by AI tooling, it has security problems that are being identified and reported (or just exploited!).

There’s good work happening here though. The Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) is leading the way on the foundation side, and continuously coming out with new tools to help projects (now they just need to adopt them, me included!). One of the talks I went to at the Open Source Summit was a really helpful project overview of projects within the OpenSSF. I took notes to look into incorporating Allstar and to revisit SLSA tooling (it’s been a while).

Projects like OSS-CRS are also great to see, even if I expect the industry to play a much bigger role in this kind of vulnerability scanning and remediation. For my employer’s part, IBM joined Project Glasswing, but more importantly announced a $5B investment in our own Project Lightwell. I’m really proud this, it’s what industry should be doing.

So, overall, how am I feeling?

Unsettled. Scared. AI has the power to be an existential threat, and at the very least it will transform computer-based work over the next decade, and people will lose their livelihood over it. A lot of them. I can’t stress enough how serious this is in the United States where we are seeing support structures being dismantled when they should be built up to prepare for this future. I am deeply concerned about what this means for our society, and my own family.

I’m also excited. Remember how I like technology? I do, I do! I have dozens of projects in my head that I’ve never done because I don’t have that much hobby time. AI-assisted tooling has already helped me start tackling some of that. I had several very fun conversations with folks at the summit around personal projects that ranged from useful to ridiculous that we’re having fun with because we can suddenly cut out six weeks of coding time from the equation and knock out a prototype in a weekend. It’s probably a bad prototype, but maybe it’s functional enough for personal use, and it simply wouldn’t exist otherwise. It’s also an exciting time for non-programmers who can now get computers to do innovative and new things they want them to do by simply speaking to them, a goal which has been worked on at least since Grace Hopper wrote FLOW-MATIC in 1955. AI is removing the barriers that have kept the full potential of computing in the realm of technologists, and that’s a good thing.

At the end of the day, we’re not going back. Even if the recent push-back of building data centers succeeds in a big way and capacity is limited, we’ll write better models and find ways to squeeze more computing power out of reduced resources. Things probably won’t continue to grow exponentially, but AI is here, and I see no benefit in fundamentally resisting it. Let’s keep an eye on privacy and safety though, shall we?

Filed under: computers, events, reflection, tech

Work travel side quests

Monday, Jun 1st, 2026 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

A little over a week ago I returned from two back-to-back work trips. With one of them ending on a Thursday and the next not until Sunday, I considered flying from Atlanta back home to San Francisco, and then back out again to Minneapolis, but timing and cost-wise, even with additional nights in hotels, that didn’t make sense. So I spent a final night in Atlanta and then flew to Minneapolis on Friday.

Thursday I was able to spend time after the conference going to World of Coca-Cola, a Coca-Cola museum located just blocks from the Coca-Cola headquarters in Atlanta. I have mixed feelings about paying for a museum dedicated to a brand. And felt even worse about it when the introductory video to the museum was a montage of sweet human stories that make you cry, oh, and all these people have a Coke, because Coke is part of life. Wow, big ick. Couldn’t you just give me something informational instead of making me feel like I’m being manipulated?

Anyway, I do appreciate the historical aspect of Coca-Cola as part of Atlanta and American history and I like history. And even though I’ve joined the bandwagon of eschewing soda consumption these days for health reasons, I do really, really like Coca-Cola. Sigh. So I enjoyed walking through history a bit and learning about the company and the “secret formula” story was amusing. Worth the time and $25? No. I probably should have looked for a more interesting way to spend my afternoon. But at least I can answer in the affirmative next time someone asks if I’ve been!

Still, I got the $5 cup which allows you to take a full cup of whatever region soda you want to-go. Royal watermelon soda from the Philippines is pretty great and I enjoyed it as a treat as I sat in the Centennial Olympic Park for a little while to read.

That evening I hopped on MARTA to meet some family for dinner at Fox Bros Bar-B-Q. I was actually born near Atlanta because that’s where my father was working for a few years, and it’s not too far from where my uncle (father’s brother) and his family lived, and still live. I was able to reach out to them and gather my aunt and uncle, as well as my three cousins. It’s been a very long time since we’ve all gotten together, so I was grateful they were able to make the time. Plus, we’re basically a whole crew of liberal tech nerds (my uncle retired from IBM), so I truly enjoy spending time with them.

I woke up around 3AM the next morning to catch the first of two flights that would take me to Minneapolis. It was an easy journey, even with a connection, and I was in Minneapolis by noon. That gave me time to check into my hotel, walk over to Target for some breakfast food to have during my stay, and then hop right back on the Metro for my first adventure: The Mall of America.

It’s an unusual destination for me because I don’t really like malls, but it’s the biggest mall the country so it’s also a bit of a tourist attraction too. The big draws for me were the M&M store and the Lego store, both on behalf of my kiddos. Aaron’s favorite clothes over the past couple years have been his LOTS OF M&Ms hoodie and pants, and he was pretty sad when he grew out of his M&M hoodie (twice, I bought a second when he outgrew the first). I bought him pants when he outgrew the hoodie, but he was also outgrowing the pants! I was thrilled to find everything at the mall.

The Lego store was honestly a bit underwhelming. They had some big Lego builds on top of the store, but inside? Just a Lego store. It would be fun if stores in interesting places did exclusive things, but the only thing they had was custom mini-figs which had the city on it, which was fine. I made a couple of those for the boys.

I think a big draw of the mall is that it basically has a small amusement park inside it, complete with indoor roller coasters. That’s fun, but I’ve also been to the West Edmonton Mall which also has a lot of this and I did ride a roller coaster there, so I didn’t feel compelled to partake this time. I 100% would have done Moose Mountain Adventure Golf if I wasn’t there alone though, that looked like fun.

On Saturday I decided to go to the Minnesota Zoo. It’s a large zoo and I was able to pretty easily take public transit there (train + bus), even if it took a while. I realized as I was plotting out my route that I wasn’t actually crunched for time for the first time in a while, so I brought along my ebook reader and enjoyed reading during my journey through the Minneapolis suburbs. It was nice. The weather was nice too, it was sunny and in the 70s, making it perfect weather for walking around. I only spent a couple hours there, and started by checking out the penguins. From there, I decided to walk the 1.25 mile loop on the Treetop Trail, which gives you a pretty good glimpse of several of the exhibits from above. I was delighted to be able to see a tiger taking a swim with my lofty view!

It’s also just a nice nature walk, and Minnesota has some really nice nature to enjoy. From there I walked down to Grizzly Coast where I got pretty close to a big bear. Very cute. I concluded my day by having lunch at the zoo cafe and got my first round of fried cheese curds and local root beer. Yum. And then it was back on the bus to make the journey back.

Saturday night I had tickets to a Twins game. I enjoy baseball games, and I have gone to them on my own, but I wasn’t sure about this one because I also enjoy resting and it had been a busy couple of days! Then I learned it was Star Wars night. Well, now I have to go! I’m glad I did, it was a beautiful evening for baseball.

And I might not have gotten the Star Wars night Grogu bobble-head (those tickets were long sold out), but I did get a cool Luke and Leia Twins t-shirt (you see, they’re TWINS!).

And with that, my side quests came to a conclusion. Sunday I started meeting with folks who were in town for the Open Source Summit, which is how I spent the rest of a great week.

Filed under: animals, baseball, family, travel

Red Hat Summit 2026

Tuesday, May 26th, 2026 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

For the second year in a row, I had the pleasure of crafting the IBM LinuxONE booth presence for the Red Hat Summit. I went into this knowing that last year was going to be impossible to top, 2025 was a launch year and we not only had our own big activity space with four laptops, but a plexiglass encased IBM LinuxONE 5 right there in our booth that drew people in continuously.

This year we were just a small component of the booth, and had a monitor that was set up for going through technical demos (shared with Storage and Cloud), and a small table in front I could put my conference laptop on to walk attendees through an activity. But we could work with that.

First stop in prep: Activity criteria.

As an open source advocate, my goal was to bring in as much open source to the activity as possible. Leadership wanted a demonstration of Red Hat OpenShift AI. And so began my search! IBM Z has an excellent technical sales department and we also have a variety of teams that do cross-training across the company and out to our clients, so I knew there would probably be something out there that I could use. It took a few weeks, but I was finally introduced to Artem Minin who presented a workshop at SHARE late last year, and a portion of which beautifully met my expectations. As a bonus, it not only relied upon LinuxONE, but the new IBM Spyre card that I hadn’t had an opportunity to interact with.

Over the next few weeks Artem took the time to prepare the environment and run some tests based on my own criteria, using an IBM z17 technical document I prepared as a source for AI-driven document summarization and AI assistant engagement with the material. The goal was to use the open source tooling defined in the diagram above to integrate with OpenShift AI, all within the confines of your mainframe environment. Effectively, critical, secured data doesn’t need to leave your mainframe to benefit from leveraging the latest models and AI tooling. Once Artem got me access to the system, he was kind enough to more carefully walk through it all with me so I was able to rewrite his documentation from the SHARE workshop into a more concise document for use at the booth. Plus, Artem was able to join me at the Summit! On my end, I prepared the laptop with a fresh Ubuntu install, got the VPN we’d need set up, and prepared all the materials on the desktop to be ready for the summit. I also tossed a bright orange, 3D-printed IBM LinuxONE 5 and am [unofficial] Lego Telum II in my backpack so I’d have some props at the booth.

I arrived in Atlanta on Sunday afternoon, and had the pleasure of meeting up a few IBM Z colleagues for dinner at a local Mediterranean restaurant.

On Monday I got everything set up at the booth and by the time we opened at 2PM, we were ready!

It was a busy week at the booth. Artem and I swapped off shifts Monday through Wednesday, with Leon stepping in as well, and Catherine Guo from LinuxONE Marketing supporting us (and bringing some new LinuxONE swag!). Several others from the IBM Z and LinuxONE team came by throughout the week too, some of whom were participating in the broader event through talks and other client-focused direct engagements. IBM also had a firm come in to help with booth traffic, and they were great at starting conversations with attendees that lead to finding the right place for them at the IBM booth, including with us!


With Catherine and Artem

With Amit and Leon

With Amparo and Latasha

On Tuesday and Wednesday I had the opportunity to attend the keynotes. As expected, they were heavy on AI with some things like the RHEL Long-Life Add-On (offering even longer support for the distribution) sprinkled in. It was nice to also hear from users like NASA and Nissan.

Tuesday was also the day that I kind of hijacked the monitor where we were showing off demos. But listen. Storage was very happy to chat with folks around the giant interactive box they brought to show off near life-size storage demos, and Cloud wasn’t actively staffing the booth. Plus, I told everyone they could take it back to show off the tech demos whenever they wanted. The result was the lovely “Hero video” of the IBM LinuxONE and Spyre card running on a loop and looking really nice at the booth.

The conference wasn’t all work though. During my breaks I was able to explore the expo hall, which gave me time to catch up with folks from the community I’ve worked with throughout my career. It’s always nice to see how many people I’ve worked with through my involvement with Ubuntu and OpenStack are still around, and to find an opportunity to catch up. I never had much of a social life outside of a handful of very close friends, so these bonds I’ve made through contributing to open source are very important to me, and attending these conferences to connect in person gives me a nice burst of connection that I really long for.

The expo also had some fun little activities to do, like assembling a gardening kit that would go to children in the area and free play with white and red Lego bricks, which I really enjoyed as a decompression activity.

The conference reception was also a lot of fun. It was held a the Georgia Aquarium, which I hadn’t managed to go to! I missed the OpenStack Summit in Atlanta due to an unexpected surgery (gallbladder) and the last time I was in Atlanta was for TechU the first week I was at IBM, and I was juggling a bit too much at the time to enjoy any local attractions. But you know me, I love zoos and aquariums. The Georgia Aquarium is notable because they have a whale shark, and they’re the only facility in the Americas to have one. That means I’d never seen one! They are huge. It is quite the experience to get up close and see one gliding by, and I highly recommend it if you’re in the area. They also have belugas and penguins, and as an all adult event, the bravest among us crawled through the penguin tunnel to get a close up look at our favorite birds. I saw some people throughout the evening, but I mostly did the event solo, which was perfectly find for me as I enjoyed an evening communing with water-loving critters.

We’ll see if I continue doing these events. Booth work is a lot, and I think I can dig up other expertise within the organization, depending on what the focus is next year. I always enjoy it though, it gives me a deadline to learn a bunch about our latest tech, and in this case actually use a Spyre card in our booth activity, something I wouldn’t necessarily get to do in my day to day work.

Huge thanks to everyone who made it possible for IBM to participate this year, and it was a nice start to my two city journey for this trip. What was the next stop on my itinerary? Minneapolis for the Open Source Summit! But I’ll write about that later.

Filed under: animals, events, mainframes, tech, travel, work

Space, t-ball, fire and making a bunch of holes in the wall

Wednesday, May 13th, 2026 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

We’ve had busy kiddo schedules lately. Aaron has t-ball practice on Monday evening and games on Saturday morning. Both boys have swim class every Tuesday evening and religious school every Sunday morning. I know it doesn’t sound like a lot, but after a full week of work/school, having weekly obligations like this (which also include gear and logistics) is definitely a change for us. It’s worth it though, we’ve all gotten so much joy and a sense of achievement over these activities. The boys are finding a connection to their Jewish culture through a more immersive experience with a community, and they’re almost ready to graduate to the next level of swim class!

But sometimes it feels like all any of us really wants is to sink into the couch and play video games ;)

It probably doesn’t help that I’ve not been feeling well lately. In mid-March something started going wrong with my “stomach” and it isn’t getting better. I’ve seen three doctors and had a bunch of diagnostic tests and a couple procedures and biopsies. I’m on a prescription that’s mostly helping, but it’s not a long term fix and I need to go back for an MRI, which I can’t get until mid June. I’m chugging along in spite of it, but some days are pretty rough.

Activity-wise, one of the first things we did when we returned from Philly last month was head up to the Chabot Space and Science Center to see the Artemis II splashdown with a bunch of other space fans. We met up with my friend mct, and got to spend a bit of time inside and out exploring exhibits before we went inside to the theater to see the final hour of preparations being streamed for the splashdown.

The boys were unusually chill for this as we talked through things that were happening on screen and they got excited for seeing the capsule land in the ocean. Then, about a minute before splashdown, the laptop running the stream showed a battery warning. They rushed to fix it, but it was too late, 30 seconds before splashdown the laptop shut off. People immediately pulled out their phones to watch it on tiny screens. It was disappointing, but it was also funny enough to counteract that somewhat. At least we were all there together to celebrate.

One of my diagnostic tests took us our to Dublin on a Saturday, where MJ ran some errands with the boys during my appointment, and then we met up to try to get a slot at our local go kart place for Adam, which we didn’t manage to get. The next day we had better luck though, and after Sunday school MJ took Adam directly to the go kart place. He’s having a lot of fun with it, and I’ve been impressed with how quickly he picked up the controls and rules on the track. Aaron and I split off and went back home to get his T-Ball pictures taken with his team, which were super cute even if they couldn’t find his jersey, oops. Fortunately, they had a spare, even if it was a little too big for him. The two of us then enjoyed a massive brunch before meeting Adam and MJ back at home.

Our next weekend kicked off with an elementary school sponsored showing of Super Mario Galaxy at our local single screen theater. It wasn’t as chaotic of an affair as The Minecraft Movie the year before, but it was still a… boisterous showing. Adam loved seeing it again and Aaron definitely enjoyed it, even if the rest of us now have to live through him shouting “I’m YOSHI!” all the time now, hah!

The next day after Aaron’s T-Ball game I headed south with one of our former au pairs to attend the baby shower of our first au pair, who is expecting her first child this summer. Baby showers are not my thing (I didn’t even have one of my own!) but our au pairs have been like family to us, so I put my apprehension aside and really enjoyed catching up with everyone.

The rest of our weekends have mostly been filled with house projects. We’re still cleaning out the garage, and have started turning the utility closet into a server room by adding some ventilation. Moving furniture, installing fans, creating holes in the walls, moving outlets. The boys have even been helpful here and there, our first weekend was spent doing some cable and pipe tracing under the house, and they jumped at the chance to do some spelunking in the crawl space under the house. Now every weekend they’re enthusiastically asking, “can we go under the house again?” I’m glad someone is excited about it. It’s also required more than a few stops at hardware stores, which the kids are less enthusiastic about. It’ll take some time to get the server rack in there and the systems moved, but we’re making good progress.

Other adventures lately have included visiting the Meta office one Friday afternoon were we could all enjoy the rooftop gardens, ice cream, and video games. I really wish I had been feeling better for that, I had to skip the ice cream (and I never say no to dessert!) and it was a bit of a tiring day.

That Sunday was the last Sunday school before summer break, and after some local errands, we drove over to San Francisco to shuffle around some storage we keep in our old condo building, and we also grabbed some dinner at the Metreon and enjoyed a few minutes on the roof deck with the gas fire pit.

The gas fire pit reminded me yet again how much the boys and I enjoy them. So in the midst of all these activities and projects, I made the case for getting a simple, propane-powered one for our own back yard. I’m glad we did. It’s nothing fancy, but the one we had delivered from the Home Depot was reasonably priced and easy for me to set up one evening. Everyone has been enjoying toasting marshmallows and making s’mores, and I look forward to some lovely summer nights coming up where I get to enjoy it while reading or playing video games.

That was my second mention of video games in this post. I’ve recently gotten back into Dreamlight Valley, and both of the boys are enamored with Minecraft. I’m playing on my Switch 2, and the boys were swapping off playing on the PlayStation 5 or my original Switch, but contention was building for mobile Switch usage when we’re traveling or doing something “boring” (like digging around storage in San Francisco). So ultimately we decided to stop by Tony’s Retro Games in Hayward to pick up a Switch Lite for Aaron to use. It was cheaper and honestly feels sturdier for a younger user, and it was there that I learned about the joycon drift issue for the Switch I had. Indeed, I’ve noticed it some, and it was getting increasingly irritating to the boys when they were playing, so I boxed my left joycon that was acting up and shipped it off to Nintendo for repair last week. I also set up one of my old laptops so Adam could play some of his school games over the summer, and we attempted to install Minecraft on it, but I think we’ll have to revisit the laptop I chose for it, because I don’t think it’s going to be powerful enough.

In my own tiny carved out space for hobbies, I’m making progress on my 3d printed index typewriter, slowly. I also was able to pitch in a little bit to the Xubuntu 26.04 launch by shipping out the stickers and Xubuntu 20th anniversary coins to winners of our wallpaper contest. As always, it’s a pleasure to work with that team and I wish I could make more time for it.

We spent the second Saturday in May attending Aaron’s t-ball game, and then walking through the Castro Valley History Festival on our way to an early Mother’s Day dinner at our favorite local restaurant.

And now I’m back to business travel! I’ve been writing this blog post on the plane, the night before my first event, and breaks I have from the booth at the Red Hat Summit in Atlanta. From here I’m off to Minneapolis for the Open Source Summit.

Filed under: baseball, castro valley, family, kids, life, san francisco

Spring break and Passover in Philly

Wednesday, Apr 15th, 2026 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

At the end of March we all hopped on a plane to head to Philadelphia for an extended (2 week) spring break!

We flew out on Friday, so we were able to attend a birthday for their cousin Sam. The birthday party took place at an large indoor playground with all kinds of fun stuff for the kids to run around and play on. It was a lot of fun for them, and I enjoyed the Godzilla theme and cake.

Afterwards we did a bit of shopping nearby, but it was a pretty long day having just arrived the day before! It was nice to check off some shopping things off our list at the beginning of the trip though.

The following day we made our way over to New Jersey to visit with some family and continue a TV setup process that MJ started over the winter holidays. It was nice to visit them again, and the boys enjoyed playing on their power lift recliner.

Since MJ and I work while we’re there, the weekdays were pretty normal with our au pair, who travels with us, watching the kids during the day. The weather was beautiful for most of the time were were there, so throughout the trip the kids got to visit lots of interesting playgrounds and Ana also brought them to a K1 go kart place one day, which Adam hasn’t stopped talking about (Aaron isn’t big enough yet, but he enjoyed the video games!).

One evening I took the boys to the theater to see Hoppers. They’re getting a lot better at being quiet and focused during visits to the theater, which is nice because I enjoyed taking them, even if they weren’t huge fans of the movie. I was surprised at how expensive it’s become though, I clearly need to find a cheaper way to do this in the long term, but in the short term I found a pile of AMC ticket vouchers that MJ bought YEARS ago that should still be valid. With all the great movies coming out this year, we’ll have a summer full of theater adventures!

I already wrote about spending the next Saturday at CPOSC. On the way home we took the scenic route down 340 and the boys enjoyed seeing all the horses and Amish buggies, counted farms along the way, they stopped when they got to 100. We haven’t properly done Lancaster with them, so maybe that’s an adventure we’ll embark on over the summer. On the way home we needed some dinner, so we stopped in King of Prussia and went back to the Netflix House and had a surprisingly chill dinner at NetFlix Bites.

On Wednesday I took the day off from work to prepare for a Passover Seder. I’m glad I did. Even though I wasn’t cooking the meal, I did have to pick up the catered food, and I made Charoset for the first time! Making Charoset is actually pretty easy, I looked at a few recipes and then settled on a version of My FAVORITE Passover Charoset where I simplified it spice-wise, swapped out the walnuts for almonds, and wine for grape juice, so the recipe ended up being:

  • 1/2 granny smith apple
  • 1 gala apple
  • 3/8 cup sliced almonds
  • 3/4 Tablespoons honey
  • 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
  • 2 Tablespoons grape juice

For chopping the apples I pulled out the food processor that I got a couple years ago for latkes.

I know it’s dead simple and all you do is mix everything together, but I’m no chef, so anything is a win. I think I will double the recipe next year so we end up with leftovers.

Then it was time to prep the dishes! I decided to pull out nice china that belonged to MJ’s grandparents, a set of glasses that my father-in-law explained came from a trip to Italy, and took some polish wipes to the silver utensils, also inherited from MJ’s grandparents. We didn’t have a Seder plate in Philly, but I solved that the week before with a drive down to Jerusalem Israeli Gift Shop. The women who own the shop were incredibly helpful, and I left with a Seder plate, a matzoh plate, a matzoh cover, and a couple bottles of wine. The last bit of shopping was picking up some endives from Acme. Finally, I had to roast the lamb shank bone that we picked up from House of Kosher, along with the hard boiled egg, both for the Seder plate.

It was a lot to do for a day when I’m “not cooking”. All worth it though, things came together really nicely and the boys enjoyed having grandpa come over instead of just doing a Seder with our immediate family in California.

I wanted to make sure I slowed down to enjoy our time too, so we didn’t really focus on home improvement projects. However, a built-in microwave repair was thrust upon us a couple days before we left. I wasn’t a microwave person until I had kids, and now we use it all the time. The switch inside the door had stopped working properly, so it could no longer reliably sense when the door was open or closed, which meant sometimes it would work. Thankfully, an appliance repair company was able to come out the next day and get it fixed. I still have mixed feelings about repairing it verses replacing it for how much we paid, but I kept an otherwise perfectly fine appliance out of a landfill, and saved us all the stress of shopping and coordinating a mounted installation, so it was probably the right move.

And I wasn’t completely idle. I realized one of the ways I want to enjoy our home there is by using our deck. We’re coming up on our 9th year with the townhouse, and we’ve never had deck furniture! Sometimes I’ll haul a folding table out there for a “picnic” or the boys will use it to run around, but effectively it wasn’t a space we could really enjoy. To change this I did a minimal amount of searching and found a nice patio couch and coffee table set that I could pick up at the Home Depot right away, and got that assembled one evening. Hooray!

Coincidentally, a neighbor also posted on the Facebook group for the development that she was looking to get rid of her patio table and six chairs. It’s a nice set, so I reached out and arranged a pick-up time. That’s how MJ and I ended up hauling a table over a deck railing and into our house the night before we left Philly, hah! It’s on the larger side, but I think I found an orientation that will work for us on the deck. I’ll take some better pictures when everything is set up over the summer.

Super Mario Galaxy came out while we were in town, we planned on having all of us go, but Aaron fell ill with a stomach bug that slowly made its way through our household, and so I just took Adam. It was a fun movie, and it turns out the whole family will get an opportunity to see it together at the end of this week when we go to our local single-screen theater to see it with their elementary school.

As the visit wound down, we managed to get lunch with cousin Lauren and her husband and new baby. I think we’ll be seeing a lot more of them over the summer, as they’re only about 40 minutes away now and they have pools at their development. And what do our kids love? Pools. And we got to see Aunt Irina and cousin Sammy one last time before we left, we picked up some takeout sushi and had a nice time in her recently renovated back yard, and then down in the playroom basement where I got to play with Lego. Oh, and the kids played with Lego too. I also managed to successfully make matzoh brie on the Saturday before we left, even if MJ and I were the only ones who enjoyed it.

In all, it was a really nice visit that didn’t end up feeling like too much, in spite of how much we packed into it. The kids had plenty of down time to play video games, and I did too. I finished reading a book while we were there, and definitely got some springtime enjoyment out of that new couch in the back, from nighttime playing on my Switch to having breakfast outside with the boys. We also had a deck umbrella delivered which will fit nicely into the hole in our new table, we’ll just need to get a small umbrella base when we get into town so that it stays put during our visit (we’ll bring it inside between visits).

Filed under: craft, events, family, food, kids, life, philadelphia, spirituality

CPOSC 0x10

Tuesday, Mar 31st, 2026 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

This past Saturday MJ and I piled the boys into the van for a 90 minute drive out to Lancaster for the Central Pennsylvania Open Source Conference (CPOSC), which was celebrating it’s 16th annual-ish event (hence, 0x10). It was my fourth time attending this event, having been in 2009 before I moved out to California, and then again in 2023 and 2024, when our spring break visits to Philadelphia lined up with the event. The decision to bring the boys this time was carefully considered, at ages 5 and 7 they aren’t really old enough to appreciate a conference aimed at adults, but with both MJ and I there, and their backpacks loaded with devices, we figured the bases were covered emergency exit-wise.

Honestly, it went better than I expected. During most of the sessions the boys decided to ignore the presentation entirely and focus on their phones or Nintendo devices (we brought my old Switch and DS for them). They only forgot a couple of times that they were supposed to be quiet and would louder-than-full-volume ask me a question, but I tried to sit in seats where that would be the least disruptive, and I think we succeeded. There was one moment when a presenter was showing his Minecraft-inspired TNT toy he made on the screen and Aaron shouted “MOM WHY IS THERE MINECRAFT TNT ON THE SCREEN?!” but that was met with laughs from the rest of the audience (and the presenter did ask the audience if there was familiarity with Minecraft, so it was arguably appropriate). MJ and I also switched off on kiddo duty for a couple sessions, but that gave us some time for snacks and to explore the rest of the activities at the conference.

But on to the talks! I really enjoyed the “Where AI Meets Hardware: Designing and Building a 3D Satellite Tracker” talk by Tom Courtney. He’s a retired technologist who has been spending a lot of hobby time over the past year+ playing with LLMs to help him build devices. He’s effectively been using AI as a collaborator to bring his ideas to life based on his strict criteria for what he’s looking to accomplish, and used his recent device that tracks the ISS orbiting Earth as a use case. He begins with a design phase where he goes back and forth with the AI to determine the base hardware he should buy and basic electronics, and even design the CAD files (with FreeCAD) for the enclosure he 3D printed. He then uses the AI to do a lengthy debugging phase where he checks where any failures are and goes back to the AI to see if it can figure out where there are wiring problems, or why a brownout occurred, and other issues. And then the final build-out where things like app support and other finishing touches are applied. He shared that you can’t expect the AI to spit out a perfectly working device, and you still have to have the “hacker mentality” to stick with it over the iterations, but that the AI ultimately helped him get past issues that would have doomed the project in the past if he were doing it entirely himself, or even with the help of volunteers on various Maker forums.

After the session, Aaron got to get a close up view of the tracker, and was even invited to press the button to turn it on!

It all reminded me of the keynote I saw at GitHub Universe back in October where the presenter pulled an old Bluetooth-enabled Furby out the closet and brought it back to life with modernized code, and some vibe-coded enhancements. These are projects that are fun and fulfilling, but as busy adults they wouldn’t have even been attempted if the AI hadn’t made the finish line a lot closer. It opens a lot of doors for me too, there are TONS of projects I’d like to work on with my kids to get them into an engineering mindset, but between my limited time and their attention span, the projects we can tackle are quite limited and may not succeed in creating the curiosity and Maker spark I would love them to have.

At lunch I was delighted to meet up with some of my old pals from PLUG and elsewhere in the eastern Pennsylvania tech scene. I don’t get out to events much even when I am in town, so I treasure the times I do have.

After lunch I went to a talk by Dr. Stephanie Schwartz, “From Hype to Habit: How Software Engineers Are Using Generative AI”, and this really drove home what I love about regional open source conferences. Professor Schwartz teaches right there at Millersville University and did a survey of her community regarding how everyday developers are using AI assistance in their work. After all the hype and very future looking big conferences I go to, it was nice to find some grounding in her survey results. She discovered what we suspected, that a vast majority of developers today are using AI to some extent, and there’s no going back. There’s still a lack of trust in the code the AI generates, so expertise and reviews are still essential to any adoption. One slide in particular really struck home for me, and it was quotes from more senior developers implying that it’s increased their workload because there is sometimes a disconnect in understanding the code from the more junior developers submitting it so the review burden is more onerous. I can personally speak to this additional pressure and frustration, but my hope is that this will ease as we develop a better, more thoughtful way of using these tools. It was also a complementary talk to the one later in the day by Erica Windisch on “The Vibe of Agentic Infrastructure” which did give that more future-focused tour of the emerging technologies available and being developed, with a keen eye on things like security.

From there, I took the advice of Joshua Boyd and brought the boys over to the Retro Hardware room, which was a lot of fun. A local group had brought in about a dozen vintage systems, all loaded up with games. They got to play Super Mario World on an SNES connected to a color portable TV, and then Aaron and I got to play Oregon Trail on an Apple IIe and Adam played Pac-Man on a Commodore SX-64.

The final talk of the day we went to was by our friend Walt Mankowski on “A Brief History of Time Syncing” where he talked about history of time in general, and then some of the internals of NTP. He was even kind enough to add some bonus slides at the end because Adam was curious about how time worked in space, I made sure he had put his phone away by the time we got to that part.

The event concluded with some lightning talks. I gave one on using GitHub Actions across architectures, where I demonstrated using GitHub’s free bare-metal runners for x86_64 and arm64, and then s390x using qemu in a container for emulation, and finally the GitHUb Actions runner service for s390x and ppc64le that a team I’m on launched last year. I kicked off the workflow when I started my talk, ran through my slides, and was done in time to see successful results of the test show up in GitHub. Woo, a successful live demo! Slides from the talk are here: GitHub_Actions_x_Multiarch_-_CPOSC_2026.pdf (140K)


Thanks to Tom Swartz for taking a photo during my talk! (source)

And then it was time for the farewell!

The CPOSC team held an after party at a nearby office, which I’ve enjoyed attending in the past, but with a pair of tired kiddos who were eager to find some dinner they had a bit more control over, we decided to start on our journey back to Philly. It was a great day, and I’m glad I could attend with the whole family this year.

Filed under: family, kids, mainframes, plug, tech, work

Purim, T-Ball, and Lego

Tuesday, Mar 17th, 2026 by pleia2 | 0 Comments

March began with the observance of Purim. Purim tells the story of Queen Esther saving her fellow Jewish people from a genocidal plot by the King’s evil advisor. Hooray! In modern days, Jewish people in the US celebrate by making Hamantaschen, something we’ve been doing for several years now, and my attending costume parties and carnivals together at the synagogue. The latter is something we have not really done. Now that we’re finally settled into a synagogue that we’re regularly taking the boys to for religious school, it was front and center on our calendar earlier this month.

But first, the boys helped me make the Hamantaschen at home!

This year we used cherry pie filling, home made plum jam (from our tree!), and Nutella for a few, upon Aaron’s request.

The boys had a lot of fun at the carnival at the synagogue. They dressed up in their Halloween costumes from October to join all the other kids (and some adults) in the costume parade and songs before the carnival. Then there were jugglers, a bouncy house, lots of games, and they both even agreed to eat hot dogs for lunch there. And they really loved adding up all their prize tickets at the end to pick out some prizes.

The following weekend I was at SCALE, but MJ brought Aaron to his first t-ball game, and I had the pleasure of joining them the following weekend. Watching a bunch of 4-5 year olds scattered around a baseball diamond trying to do something resembling a baseball game is absolutely adorable. They’re not great at hitting, or catching, or throwing, or knowing much about game mechanics at all, but they’re all having a lot of fun outdoors with some new friends. At this second game we also had our first au pair and her husband join us to watch him play, and go out for lunch afterwards.

I am practicing catch with Aaron in the evenings when we have time and the weather cooperates (it’s been HOT!), I even picked up my own baseball glove. He’s also still got practice with his team on Monday evenings too. Lots of baseball!

Getting into the routine of baseball and religious school over the weekend will take some getting used to. I’m usually scouring email and websites for the latest activities at our local parks and museums to keep us busy. On the one hand, it’s nice to not have to do that, but on the other, will I miss our constant adventures? We’ll see!

The rest of our weekends have been taken up by obligatory errands and chores, including our continuing project to clear out and reorganize the garage while the boys ride their bikes outside.

Aaron and I have also been doing a lot of Lego together, most recently we’re working our way through a set with four Star Wars astromech droids wearing costumes. The boys have also started playing video games together a bit more, with Adam showing Aaron how to play the games, which is super cute. They’ve even brought me in to play sometimes, especially when they’re playing on Realms and the two of them join on the PS5 and I can hop on with my Switch (how many copies of Minecraft across devices are we going to end up owning?).

F1 season began too, and though we’ve never watched it before, Adam asked if we could this year. Sure! That means putting on some practices here and there, and then watching the 30 minute race recaps each week. It’s been a lot of fun. They have so many questions about cars that I don’t know how to answer, so we’re learning a lot too.

So as much as I love adventures, bonding with them over things we can do at home from the couch is really nice too, and gets me at least a little of the rest I need over the weekend.

This week I’m packing for us to head to Philadelphia for a couple weeks. We’re aiming to attend a cousin’s birthday party, go to an open source conference, and Passover host a Seder at our house with as many family members as we can convince to come by. Packing has me a little overwhelmed, as always, but I’m sure we’ll have a nice time once I can settle in.

Filed under: baseball, family, food, kids, life, spirituality
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