Tag Archive for 'open source'

OSCON 2008 is next week

Published on July 18, 2008 in open source. 0 Comments

OSCON starts in Portland next week. This year there are a bunch of technical sessions that I am looking forward to including:

I’ll be giving a talk on Open Source Community Antipatterns. The content of this talk is based on my experiences with Apache, the Chandler project at OSAF, as well as general observation of open source projects in general. There’s a great panel on the same topic immediately after that talk, so you’ll be able to go two full rounds on this stuff if you like.

This is the first year I have been at OSCON as the employee of a sponsor, so I suspect that’s going to make the experience a little different this year. We are going do something a little different with the Sun booth this year. Instead of the usual booth stuff, we are going to host a two day unconference and a lounge with coffee, cookies and electrical outlets, so come by, chat or crash. Also, Sun, MySQL, and Zend are co-sponsoring a party on Wednesday night, July 23rd. If you were at OSCON last year, this is a bigger version of the party in the garage at the DoubleTree. Same venue, 8pm. I’m going to be at the Actors BOF right before that, so I’ll be fashionably late. I hope to see some of you in Portland!

Jython 2.5 Alpha 1

Published on July 15, 2008 in java, open source and python. 1 Comment

The Jython development team has released the first alpha of Jython 2.5. The guys were hoping to have this done in time for EuroPython, but it wasn’t to be. Still, they are ahead of where they planned to be, so this is good news. If you are interested in an up to date version of Python on the JVM, go kick the tires and report bugs. Getting more testing done should help speed the process of shaking out all the bugs.

My first EuroPython

Published on July 11, 2008 in Sun, open source and python. 1 Comment

I’ve been doing Python stuff since 2003, and my first PyCon was back in 2004, but this was the first time that I’ve been able to attend EuroPython. The conference reminded me very much of the first PyCon that I went to back in 2004. It was around 250 people, and it had a much smaller and more intimate feeling to it. That made it much easier to find and sit down with people and really dig in to what they are doing.

EuroPython 2008

There weren’t really any tracks per se, but I spent almost the entire time in a single room which was occupied either by a Jython talk or a PyPy talk. I somehow missed the PyPy talks at PyCon this year, so it was good to see the people and reconnect with what they are doing. We had a fun discussion about ways that the two projects could collaborate in the future. I really hope that we’ll be able to establish a good collaboration there.

EuroPython 2008

During one of the meals I got to spend some time with Raymond Hettinger, one of the Python core developers, who is also a professional photographer. It is always good to find people in the same tribe, even better to find multiple tribal overlaps. Thank you also to several of you who read this blog and stopped by to say hi. I completely appreciate the encouragement.

EuroPython 2008

The most riveting presentation of the conference was Hans Rosling’s presentation on the data visualization tools at GapMinder, which was really an excuse for him to present all sorts of interesting slicings of international health and economic development data. Despite being very sleepy and hungry, this talk had my undivided attention - I didn’t even really notice the passage of time. Professor Rosling gave a talk at TED earlier this year, and I expect that this is part of the content which we saw in the keynote.

EuroPython 2008

Python conferences seem to be taking off. In addition to EuroPython, there was PyCon Italia earlier this year, which was well attended, from what I was told. Also, in September, I will be speaking at PyCon UK in Birmingham, and I was able to meet John Pinner, one of the organizers, and nail down a bit more of that.

Thus far, I haven’t had any major travel hiccups. I made all my flights (2 from Seattle to Vilnius, and another 2 from Vilnius to Prague) and no bags were lost or anything else. I am writing this from a flexible office at Sun’s Prague development office, which is home to much of the NetBeans engineering team. I’ll save Prague for a posting when I make my way home.

EuroPython 2008

CommunityOne

Published on May 7, 2008 in Sun and open source. 2 Comments

Live or semi liveblogging conferences has been getting more and more difficult for me to do. The combination of meetings, networking/parties, and photographs means that it takes longer to assemble the requisite material. Here’s a bit on CommunityOne, which took place on Monday.

Many people (mostly Sun folks) have been asking me if this is my first JavaOne. My answer is, “it’s not, but it is my first one in ten years”. It’s been quite some time since I’ve been to a conference run by a big company like Sun (as opposed to an O’Reilly or open-source community conference). Even though the basics are the same, I definitely feel a kind of culture shock. I was asked to be on a panel during the general session, first thing in the morning, in order to get miked up and to run though the flow. Production values are much higher than I am used to. I keep thinking of CommunityOne as a small event, but in reality it is huge. I am told that registration was around 5000 people, which is twice the size of OSCON, which is the largest conference that I’ve been to in the last 4 or 5 years. Some pictures might help with the scale and production values:

CommunityOne 2008

CommunityOne 2008

The panel was on community models, although the content was closer to the edge where companies and open source communities meet/collaborate/fight. I think that I had two or three chances to speak, including the final set of remarks before the close of the panel. I have some more thoughts on that topic, but they are deserving of their own post, so that will be showing up after JavaOne is over.

Probably my favorite thing that happened at CommunityOne was the demonstration of ZFS’s reliability in the face of hardware failures. Sun Fellow Jim Hughes has demonstrated this a few times at Sun Tech days, and I’ve been meaning to write about that. I got to meet Jim before the keynote, and I had a very good seat to observe the hardware failure.

CommunityOne 2008

Jim usually destroys 2 of the drives in the ZFS pool, and it looked like Rich Green (EVP of Software) was going to get to smash the other one, until Jeff Bonwick, the inventor of ZFS, showed up to do the honors himself.

CommunityOne 2008

Smashing things makes for cool demos - you can watch the video replay if you like.. I’ve been paying more attention to ZFS ever since Theo Schlossnagle sat with me and a few other people in a bar at ApacheCon in Atlanta last year. We were talking about the voracious storage needs of photographers, and Theo was really singing the praises of ZFS. There were so important things that happened to ZFS for OpenSolaris 00805 (which was launched at CommunityOne). The most important is that you can now boot off of a ZFS volume. I hope (but don’t know for sure) that the work that made this possible will make it possible for Macs to boot off of a ZFS volume. My photo storage is getting all fragmented, and I could really put ZFS to good use. I suppose that I could build a ZFS storage appliance based on OpenStorage, but at the moment that is more work that I want to do.

I spent much of the rest of CommunityOne at the Redmonk unconference. I was drafted for an impromptu discussion on dynamic and other programming languages, which included a drop in from David Pollak, developer of the very cool lift framework for Scala, and organizer of the Scala liftoff which is happening on Saturday, right after JavaOne. There was also a very active session on Twitter - probably the biggest of the unconference. Jim Jay Evans Edwards from Twitter came along to participate in that one

CommunityOne 2008

I have a bunch more photos from CommunityOne. At the rate that things are going, I will probably just do a single post on JavaOne. There are plenty of other people doing liveblogging, for those who need a bigger information flow.

Update: corrected Jay Edwards’ name. Thanks to @monkchips

Speaking at OSCON 2008

Published on April 24, 2008 in community and open source. 0 Comments

This year at OSCON, I’ll be giving a talk called Open Source Community Antipatterns, which is all about the many ways to mess up an open source community.


OSCON 2008



Python at CommunityOne

Published on April 21, 2008 in Sun, community, open source, programming and programming languages. 1 Comment

CommunityOne is a free and open developer conference that is run by Sun on the day before JavaOne. This year, there will a space at CommunityOne dedicated to the Python community, complete with whiteboards and wifi. If you are in the Bay Area for JavaOne, or in the Bay Area, or just plain interested in Python, please register for CommunityOne — space is limited.

Registering for CommunityOne gets you a bag of swag, a free lunch the day of CommunityOne, access to all the CommunityOne events and sessions, and a free pass for Day 1 of JavaOne. When you register, put “Python/Jython” in for the referral code.

I will be on a panel on community models during the general session from 9:30AM - 10:45AM, and Frank Wierzbicki and I will be doing a Python/Jython panel. In addition to the usual developer stuff, there will also be a two day Startup Camp, and the folks from RedMonk will be back to do their day long unconference thing.

Stefano is looking for a job

Published on March 12, 2008 in apache and open source. 2 Comments

My good friend Stefano Mazzocchi is looking for a job. If you are looking for a good person for your organization, you should definitely take a look before he’s taken.

OSAF 2.0 and Me

Published on January 10, 2008 in open source and osaf. 2 Comments

On Tuesday, OSAF announced a substantial restructuring of the Chandler project. We’ve accomplished quite a lot on Chandler over the last 12-15 months, and I am particularly proud of what the Chandler Server/Cosmo team has accomplished during that time. The project is entering a new stage, with a much smaller staff. That staff will not include me — I felt that the project would be better served by letting me go and keeping one more engineer on staff. It is likely that I will remain involved with the Chandler community, although I’m not sure what form that will take at the moment.

I am looking for a new opportunity, and am open to lots of possibilities. I have done a wide variety of things in recent history: development work (server side Java, client and server side Python), open source community work, and engineering management. Depending on the opportunity, I’m able to do any of those things, on either a full time or consulting/contracting basis. My contact information is on the about page of my blog, as is my LinkedIn profile, which is a pretty good summary of my credentials.

Prism App for Photophlow

Published on January 5, 2008 in flickr, internet, open source and photography. Closed

I’ve been using Photophlow a fair amount over the last few days - It’s been pretty fun, although the real value will come if we manage to use it for shoot planning or review, which hasn’t happened yet.

One thing that I’ve noticed is that having Photophlow open in a browser while I’ve got other webapps running tends to make the overall experience a bit less nicer. So taking a page from Travis Vachon, I created a Prism (Webrunner) application for Photophlow. This lets you run Photophlow as a standalone application, in a container which is essentially a custom version of Firefox. You can get the webapp here. You will also need a copy of Prism to make this work.

ApacheCon US 2007 Update

Published on November 16, 2007 in apache. 0 Comments

Yesterday I did my talk on Open Source Community Antipatterns. I am always nervous talking about community stuff in front of an Apache crowd, because these are folks who have a huge amount of cumulative experience in this area. There were some good questions and several people asked me if the slides would be available. I’ve put them up on the page with some of the other for ApacheCon US 2007. I was happy to have that under my belt.

I also co-hosted the ApacheCon Lightning Talks with Brian Fitzpatrick, last night. The Lightning Talks at ApacheCon are very entertaining, to the point of really being part of the entertainment as opposed to being part of the technical program. A no slides rule helps keep it that way. Kudos to those brave folks who gave “straight talks”, and to those who found ways to make their funny talks relevant somehow. Thanks to Fitz for asking me to do it with him — I expect Wilfredo Sanchez to be returning to his regular spot as the co-host, though.

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