Entries tagged 'SCALE21x'

Today was the last day of SCALE 21x. Again I didn’t make it out for the opening keynote, and I just took a quick spin around the expo floor to see it looking sort of quiet and winding down.

The first talk I attended was Jonathan Haddad on“Distributed System Performance Troubleshooting Like You’ve Been Doing it for Twenty Years” where he shared some of his insights from doing that the title said for companies like Apple and Netflix. His recommendation for greenfield deployments was to have Open Telemetry set up to collect traces and logs, and he was also a big fan of the BPF Compiler Collection (aka bcc-tools) for getting a realtime look into system issues. He was not a fan of running databases in containers, and even less of a fan of running them within Kubernetes. (You could almost see his eye twitch.)

The last talk that I attended (there were just two slots today) was Jen Diamond on “The Git-tastic Power of Conventional Commits.” It was a good talk that used a little light lexical analysis to explain the basic concepts of working with Git (and the revelation that it stands for “ global information tracker” although now a little more research shows that’s only sort-of true). This all led into talking about Conventional Commits which is a way of structuring commit messages, and how you could use that in automations and in driving semantic-versioning in the release process.

The final session was a closing keynote from Bill Cheswick titled “I Love Living in the Future: Half a Century of Computers, Software, and Security” but really could have just been “give the old guy the microphone and let him go!” I left a little over two hours ago, and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that he’s still going. I hope they let him take a bathroom break.

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.

The second day of the Southern California Linux Expo meant the start of the expo, and the more talks.

I started the day with “Best Practices for Running Databases on Kubernetes” with Peter Zaitsev, who was a coworker at MySQL and went on to found Percona. While I am getting a better sense of what Kubernetes is all about and already had some idea of how databases might exist in that world, his talk was a great overview and the “best practices” seemed to cover a lot of bases.

That was followed by “Kubernetes and Distributed SQL Databases: Same Consistency With Better Availability and Scalability” which showed off using Kine as a way to plug in different systems as the data store for Kubernetes instead of etcd. I wish the speaker had spent a little more time giving some practical examples of why is something you would even want to do. It was a good reminder that k3s exists and I should play around with it. And the speaker just using an outline in an open text editor (Pico!) as his slides reminded me of when I gave a talk on MySQL and PHP using plain-text slides. (Looks like my talk has been disappeared, though.)

After that, it was back over to the other side of the expo for a talk on “Leveraging PrestoDB for data success” which was an overview of the Presto project, which provides an ANSI SQL query interface to a collection of other data sources (my paraphrase). Kiersten Stokes, the presenter who works at IBM, called MySQL a “traditional database” which struck me as funny. Presto is a very slick and powerful system that I will probably never need. I appreciate that everyone I have seen talk about the concept of a “data lakehouse” is appropriately embarrassed about the name.

Before the next round of talks started, the expo floor finally opened, so I took a quick spin through that. It was pretty busy, and seemed like a good crowd of projects and companies. I think the largest footprint was maybe a couple of 10' × 40' booths from companies like AWS and Meta, but otherwise it was a lot of 10' × 10' booths with a couple of people handing out stickers or other promotional items from behind a table (and talking about their projects/companies).

After that I went back to the MySQL track (four talks!) to see “Design and Modeling for MySQL” which was really more of a speed-run of database history and concepts. The presenter made the classic mistake of white text on a dark background so it was pretty tough to see what he was showing until someone dimmed the lights.

That was followed by “Beyond MySQL: Advancing into the New Era of Distributed SQL with TiDB” from Sunny Bains, whose time as the MySQL/InnoDB team overlapped my time working at MySQL, but I don’t think we ever met. TiDB seems like a very impressive cloud-native distributed database which doesn’t actually derive from MySQL, but instead has chosen to be protocol and query-language compatible.

The last session I attended was a panel from the Open Government track on “The OSPO POV.” OSPO stands for “Open Source Program Office” and can act as kind of the interface between companies or organizations and the open source world. There were a bunch of projects and communities mentioned that I want to look into further: TODO Group, Fintech Open Source Foundation, CHAOSS (Community Health Analytics in Open Source Software), Sustain, The Open Source Way, Inner Source Commons, and OSPO++.

Things got busier today, which was nice to see. I wasn’t in a great headspace most of the day, which pretty much sucked, but I think I came away with a lot of things to dig into on my own, which is one of the reasons I wanted to attend.

Today was the first day of the 21st Southern California Linux Expo, also known as SCALE 21x. I gave a talk at way back at SCALE 4x and hadn’t made it back since then.

I attended a couple of talks on the UbuCon track at the beginning of the day. They weren’t technical talks, but focused on how the Ubuntu community operates and how Canonical relates to that. It sounds like Canonical has opened itself up more to the community by adopting Matrix as both their internal communications tool as well as what the community uses, which I think is very important for encouraging the developers in a commercial open source environment to engage with the community. This was an issue for us back in the MySQL days, too.

(There was also a comment about “neck beards” being annoying about not adopting newer communication tools and wanting everyone to stick with IRC, I think coming from someone involved with openSUSE, which I thought was kind of funny.)

After that, I popped over to the beginning of the Kwaai Personal AI Summit because Doc Searls was giving a (brief) talk and I thought I would see if there was anything to this AI thing that I’ve been hearing about. The room had a lot of old dude energy that just wasn’t sitting right with me, so I ended up bailing after Doc’s talk.

Since I left that earlier than I had planned, I ended up wandering into a PostgreSQL talk on how “wait events” can be used for troubleshooting performance, and I had a déjà vu moment because only yesterday I had run across the old Worklog for MySQL’s PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA which blames credits me for suggesting that’s what the name of the schema should be. It was yet another random “plate of shrimp” moment that has been happening with frequency as of late.

Then I attended a workshop from the Kubernetes Community Day track on using Argo CD to put the OpenGitOps principles into practice. While I have been using Docker for a while, I haven’t really played around with Kubernetes or other container automation tools, so I figured this might be a good way to start learning more. Unfortunately, the hands-on workshop part of the session didn’t actually work due to some problem with the training environment from the sponsoring company, which kind of helped reinforce my instinct that a lot of these tools still have a lot of sharp edges. The concept sounds great, though.

Finally, I popped back over to the PostgreSQL track for their (apparently popular) “Ask Me Anything” session with some of the prominent community members and core developers that were in attendance. I was reminded today that the PostgreSQL project doesn’t have a bug tracker aside from their mailing list archive. I remembered writing about this before, and it turns out that was in 2008. (No shade intended that they don’t have one, it seems to be working out okay.)

That was the day. I really don’t want to seem like I am passing any judgement on anything because I know that putting on an event like this is tremendously difficult, and while there is an impressive line-up of sponsors this is clearly a community-driven and focused event. I was disappointed by how old, white, and male the crowd seemed to be (fully acknowledging that’s my demographic), and I’ll be interested to see if that holds true for the whole run or if this an outlier day because it was more workshop-oriented and the expo floor wasn’t open.