Tag Archives: conferences

CopyleftConf was great, you should go next year

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Two weeks ago, I was fortunate to attend the inaugural Copyleft Conference. It was held in Brussels, Belgium the day after FOSDEM. Since I was in town anyway, I figured I should just extend my trip by a day to attend this conference. I couldn’t be happier that I did.

Software licensing doesn’t get enough discussion at conference as it probably should. And among the talks that do happen, copyleft licenses specifically get only a portion of that. But with major projects like the Linux kernel using copyleft licenses — and the importance of copyleft principles to open source software generally — the Software Freedom Conservancy decided that a dedicated conference is in order.

I was impressed with how well-organized and well-attended the conference was for a first try. The venue was excellent, apart from some acoustic issues in the main room. The schedule was terrific: three rooms all day, each filled with talks from the world’s leading experts. I commented to a friend that if the building were to collapse, 80% of the worlds copyleft expertise would disappear.

For me, some of the excitement was just being around all of those people:

Molly deBlanc’s keynote was simultaneously inspiring and disturbing. She spoke of how software freedom matters to everyone, but how it matters to marginalized people in different ways. Ad networks can expose that someone at risk is seeking help. “Smart” homes can be used by domestic abusers to torment their victims. The transparency that free software brings isn’t just a nice-to-have, it can materially impact people’s lives.

The other session that was particularly interesting to me was Chris Lamb’s discussion of the Commons Clause. Chris was more focused on the response of the community to Redis Labs’ decision to adopt it than the Commons Clause itself. He viewed Redis Labs’ decision to adopt and subsequent refusal to abandon the Commons Clause as a failure of the copyleft community to make a compelling argument. Drawing on the work of Aristotle, Chris argued that we, as interested and knowledgeable parties, should have done a better job making our case. The question, of course, is who the “we” is that Chris is exhorting. This is a particularly key question for his advice to proactively address the concerns of companies.

Some of the other talks focused more directly on adapting to a new environment. Version 3 of the GNU General Public License was published in 2007. At the time, Amazon Web Services (as we currently know it) was just over a year old. The original iPhone was released on the same day. While the principles behind the GPLv3 haven’t changed, the reality of how we use software has changed dramatically. Van Lindberg’s talk on a new license he’s drafting for a client explored what copyleft looks like in 2019. And Alexios Zavras noted that the requirements to provide source code don’t necessarily apply as-written anymore.

In addition to meeting some new friends and idols, I was also able to spend some time with friends that I don’t get to see often enough. I’m already looking forward to CopyleftConf 2020.

What’s routine to you is interesting to others

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One thing about humans is that we’re really good at habituating. It doesn’t take long for something new to become normal. This really came to mind last month when I presented a pair of talks at the DevConf.cz conference in Brno, Czech Republic.

One of my talks was a 25-minute presentation on project management in community projects. As I was putting the talk together, I started thinking “this is a nothingburger.” Twenty-five minutes isn’t enough to give any useful depth of information. So all I’m doing is giving a basic description of my job.

As it turns out, “nothingburger” was the exact hunger level of the audience. When I asked the room, only three people or so said they were professional project or program managers. An intro-level talk was exactly the right target. Doing the work every day, I forgot that it’s not everyday for other people. Even people who do related work might find something worthwhile out of it.

l should have known better. Even in my own company, I’m the only program manager who works directly in upstream projects. The rest are focused on the company’s products. Unless they served in my role previously, the people on my team don’t necessarily know how my job is different from theirs.

I left DevConf.cz feeling inspired to seize the momentum and keep moving on some things I’ve wanted to do. And it’s a good reminder to myself and others that we’re not the best judges of what others will find interesting.

LISA wants you: submit your proposal today

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I have the great honor of being on the organizing committee for the LISA conference this year. If you’ve followed me for a while, you know how much I enjoy LISA. It’s a great conference for anyone with a professional interest in sysadmin/DevOps/SRE. This year’s LISA is being held in Nashville, Tennessee, and the committee wants your submission.

As in years past, LISA content is focused on three tracks: architecture, culture, and engineering. There’s great technical content (one year I learned about Linux filesystem tuning from the guy who maintains the ext filesystems), but there’s also great non-technical content. The latter is a feature more conferences need to adopt.

I’d love to see you submit a talk or tutorial about how you solve the everyday (and not-so-everyday) problems in your job. Do you use containers? Databases? Microservices? Cloud? Whatever you do, there’s a space for your proposal.

Submit your talk to https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa18/call-for-participation by 11:59 PM Pacific on Thursday, May 24. Or talk one of your coworkers into it. Better yet, do both! LISA can only remain a great conference with your participation.

Conference talks: “how” versus “why”

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Recently in the #public_speaking channel on Freenode, we were discussing two types of conference talks: the “how” talks and the “why” talks. SomeKittens said:

too many talks are “how” when I really want to hear “why”

I couldn’t agree more. I struggle with “how” talks at conferences because conferences are a fire hose of information and it can be hard to take it all in, never mind retain it. By the time I get back to real life and am ready to implement this new thing I’ve learned, I have forgotten so much. If I’m lucky, I can watch the recorded version a few months later. But then why did I go to the session in the first place?

“How” talks are also often meaningless without the context of “why”. What good is knowing how to frobble the bobulator if I don’t know why a bobulator needs to be frobbled in the first place?

“How” talks are often very specific. A certain person in a certain organization accomplished a certain task in a certain way. How much of that is applicable to another person in another organization? Even if they want to accomplish the exact same task, the conditions aren’t the same.

“Why” talks tend to be more about identifying and presenting principles that can be broadly applied. As genehack pointed out, they tend to be stories. Stories make for much more engaging talks.

If you were to think about a talk mapped to written form, consider a “how” talk like a blog post. It might give a bit of introductory context (and if not, it’s a bad post) but then it gets straight into the matter at hand. There’s a well-defined flow and set of steps. It’s very amenable to copy/paste-ing.

A “why” talk is more like a book or maybe a magazine. You’re not going to copy and paste from it. You may put it down partway through, mull it over, and then pick it back up later. The aim is less about accomplishing a particular task and more about developing a mental framework.

When you’re developing a conference presentation, come up with whatever you want. But at least consider making it a “why” talk.

HTCondor Week 2015

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There are many reasons I enjoy the annual gathering of HTCondor users, administrators, and developers. Some of those reasons involve food and alcohol, but mostly it’s about the networking and the knowledge sharing.

Unlike many other conferences, HTCondor Week is nearly devoid of vendors. I gave a presentation on behalf of my company, and AWS was present this year, but it wasn’t a sales pitch in either case. The focus is on how HTCondor enabled research. I credit the project’s academic roots.

Every year, themes seem to develop. This year, the themes were cloud and caching. Cloud offerings seem to really be ready to take off in this community, even though Miron would say that the cloud is just a different form of grid computing that’s been done for decades. The ability to scale well beyond internal resources quickly and cheaply has obvious appeal. The limiting factor currently seems to be that university funding rules make it slightly more difficult for academic researchers than just pulling out a credit card.

In the course of one session,  three different caching mechanisms were discussed. This was interesting because it is not something that’s been discussed much in the past. It makes sense, though, that caching files common across multiple jobs on a node would be a big improvement in performance. I’m most partial to Zach Miller’s fledgling HTCache work, though the squid cache and CacheD presentations had their own appeal.

Todd Tannenbaum’s “Talk of Lies” spent a lot of time talking about performance improvements that have been made in the past year, but they really need to congratulate themselves more. I’ve seen big improvements from 8.0 to 8.2, and it looks like even more will land in 8.4. There’s some excellent work planned for the coming releases, and I hope it pans out.

After days of presentations and conversations, my brain is full of ideas for improving my company’s products. I’m really motivated to make contributions to HTCondor, too. I’m even considering carving out some time to work on that book I’ve been wanting to write for a few years. Now that would truly be a miracle.