Thoughts from SCALE 21x, day 3

Another day, another set of thoughts on the experience. It was a busy day at the 21st edition of the Southern California Linux Expo, and the site was more crowded because an episode of America’s Got Talent was being filmed at the Civic Auditorium that is between the two buildings that the conference were held in. If I’d been on the ball, I would have taken a picture of Howie Mandel standing outside his limo.

I will admit that I took my time in the morning and didn’t make it over to Pasadena until after the keynote that kicked off the day.

The first talk that I attended was “Contribution is not only a code.” by Tatiana Krupenya, the CEO of DBeaver. She did a great job of breaking down the many ways that people can contribute to open source development aside from writing code, and I appreciated her final point was that the simplest contributions that anyone can make that will be well-received is just a heart-felt thank you to maintainers of tools that you find valuable.

She also brought up what I am sure is a great talk by Zak Greant from Eclipsecon 2019 titled “When Your Happy Dreams Are About Dying” about burnout in the open source developer community, which I’m looking forward to catching up on.

After that, it was off to Brian Proffitt’s “Measuring the Impact of Community Events” where he provided his perspective from his roles at the Red Hat OSPO, Apache Software Foundation, and other places. It was a great companion to the first session, but more from the perspective of why companies and projects may want to think about measuring how they engage with the community.

I took another spin through the expo during what was supposed to be the lunch break, picked up my conference T-shirt and a free bucket hat from AWS.

After lunch, Tyler Menezes from CodeDay spoke about “Nurturing the Next Generation of Open Source Contributors” and how the non-profit he founded works to connect high school and college students from underprivileged backgrounds with resources to help them thrive in tech. One of the programs pairs small teams of students with a mentor to help them make a contribution to an open source project, and it sounds amazing. I plan to find a way to get involved once I have some my employment situation sorted out.

For the next talk was Heather Osborn on “Organic isn't always good for you” which was sort of a case study of her experience as a DevOps leader tackling the complicated environment that had taken root place at the startup she was working at, and how they figured out a strategy to straighten that out. It was really interesting to hear the language she used about convincing the company management to buy into the plan, which seemed more adversarial and dismissive than the working environments that I’ve been in.

“Solving ‘secret zero’, why you should care about SPIFFE!” by Mattias Gees was by far the most technical talk that I attended today. Like the presentation on Presto yesterday, it seemed a bit like the sort of system that is very impressive and I will probably never need.

The last talk I attended was Michael Gat on “Anti-Patterns in Tech Cost Management” which was pretty true to the title. It was a little light on the open source aspect, but there were definitely insights there on the importance of laying the groundwork early for being able to do cost analytics on systems you’ll be scaling. There were three or so questions from people that started with “I’m an engineer, and ...” which I thought was great. I think what bothered me about Heather Osborn’s talk was how it implied a certain distaste for connecting the engineering to the business realities, and I think it is very important for engineers to understand, and have respect for, business decision-making.

One more day to go. I am surprised how heavy the program is on cloud computing and DevOps, but I guess that’s a huge chunk of what people are working on these days. What I have been missing from the talks so far is programming-focused talks.