rv's techblog: some kind of blog

Here's an email I sent earlier to advocacy-discuss

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Hey everyone

I've been doing a lot of thinking since my last blog post and I've realized that out of N different ways of expressing an idea, I ended up choosing the worst one.

I'd like to apologize for being unproductive and letting the frustration of not understanding the reasons why certain paths are taken get the best of me. First time this happens in ~12 years participating in different communities, it won't happen again.

Rafael

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I sincerely regret writing that post so negatively, and consequently burying the ideas and suggestions that I could've expressed more openly. I hope I haven't burned the bridges I worked so hard to build. But the post is out there, there's no point in removing it. I'm learning here.. and now that I realize my mistakes, I would never leave this unfinished.

I was glad to see the suggestion for a mascot contest. It made me understand something I had heard previously from coworkers at Sun, that it has been difficult to move from a closed to an open source environment. Being so used to open source, I had never completely understood that.

As much as doing things openly, in this case a contest, seems natural and obvious to me, it may be very far from the day to day others are used to - and to demand a fast transition is simply unrealistic.

Learning..

Over the past couple of weeks there's been a great amount of emails on the Advocacy mailing list about logos and colors for OpenSolaris. From what I understood, a design company was hired by Sun to come up with a logo for OpenSolaris. I sent out an email asking for someone to clarify if this was for OpenSolaris as a whole or OpenSolaris as Indiana. I didn't see any replies, but given the rush that's being put into this and the upcoming May release of Indiana, it's clear that this is for Indiana.

Okay, nothing new here. Sun's just moving ahead with their OpenSolaris == Indiana without putting it to a vote in the community. Strike three on my count (Previews 1,2 and now this).

But fair enough, they're doing it, most people don't like it and it sends a really bad message out there, but they're doing it.

But (1) there's supposed to be 60k people in the community, how difficult would it be to find someone talented enough to come up with a good logo? (2) Most OSS projects I know came up with their own artwork (and still do), how lame is it to hire a third party to come up with it for your community?

And, most importantly IMO, (3) why are we talking about colors when there's so much more to do to raise awareness, adoption, grow the community and make OpenSolaris widely the best OS out there ?

It's like a committee to design the new curtains of your data center when no one is using it.

Last week, our OSUG had its last 2007 meeting.

I'm really glad the group grew so much in its first year, we're currently the largest OSUG in Brazil - AFAIK.

We got some decals with our new logo on the way, started planning our participation on the upcoming FISL in April, talked about the future of the group and a couple of projects we are trying to get started.

Very likely to be my last meeting here, as I'm moving out of the country next year. I'm very proud of the work we managed to get done in these last 12 months. OpenSolaris is a technology that's growing quickly and I'm glad to see we're getting the word out to folks at UFRGS and in Porto Alegre.

Left to right, that's Vitorio, Cristiano, myself and Glaucio

And let 2008 come, we got lots in store for you folks.

Last Thursday I gave a talk about the kernel at my university, about 20 people showed up.
I talked about the scheduler, dispatcher and virtual memory. I'm still working on the slide deck, it's an overview of those systems with some of the structures that represent things like processes, threads, cpus.

I'm trying to show it's not such a 'black box' - like some people might think - by pointing out how some things are implemented. My idea is to get more people interested in contributing to the project. Check out the slides and send me some feedback. I'm all in favor of improving it so any comment is appreciated.
You can get the BR-Portuguese version at our OSUGs website.

Here are some photos..

Then yesterday (Saturday) I gave pretty much the same talk at a kick ass event organized by the TcheLinux user group. I'm really glad those guys invited us there. It's just amazing to see a positive and open attitude towards technology, specifically open source technology. More pictures..

I'll tell you this, with the great work they are doing, I won't be surprised to see their events grow to national or even international size. We had a blast. I hope everyone who attended our talks left feeling they didn't wake up early on Sat for nothing.

We handed out around 30 'Intro to OSs with OpenSolaris' books and SXDE DVDs between the two events. Good to see our OSUG growing.

A couple of weeks ago myself and four other campus ambassadors were invited to visit the Menlo Park campus and present a panel to the ELT about our perspectives on Sun's technologies and the CA program.

We had the pleasure of meeting a lot of people from different areas inside Sun, from executives to engineers. Not to mention meeting and hanging around with four CA's from different parts of the world. It was a really amazing experience.

From left to right, that's Kira, Rita, Hal Stern, Anil, Filipp and myself.

I was very impressed at how the MPK campus doesn't look like a corporate HQ. Looks more like a college campus. Here's a picture of the Blackbox that is parked inside - last April Fool's joke :)

One of nicest things about this trip was meeting the other four CA's and our manager, Gary Serda. I mean, when do you get the chance to talk to people from four different parts of the world at the same time? Not to mention they are all from the same field of work that you do, so you're learning new stuff pretty much all the time. Gary was just amazing, taking care of everything and making sure we had a good time. We definetly owe him a few gallons of gas.

On Wednesday we met Jonathan Schwartz, our CEO. An incredibly nice and forward thinking guy that just makes you wanna come work for Sun. We were really honored that he took the time to come chat with us.

Sometime during the week we spent about an hour talking to Bart Smaalders, a regular name on my 'Solaris Internals' book. Very inteligent guy, I was really impressed. He gave us some great news about the upcoming Nevada (and eventually Solaris 11) releases, stay in tune for that.

I managed to go say hi to some of the engineers on the Solaris Performance Group. They were really nice to take the time to talk some NUMA and memory management stuff with me - I've been studying that for the past months at college. Talking with people that work everyday with something I'm passionate about is a great learning experience, I had a blast.

You can't go to San Francisco and not see the Golden Gate Bridge. It's just beautiful.
The city seems really interesting. Some parts reminded me a little about some neighborhoods we got over here. Just great architecture. Living around the bay must be very cool.

There's just no way to talk about all the cool stuff we saw on a single post, so come by to check out the next ones. I'll get into some really interesting things..

If you got this far, I'm guessing you know that FISL just took place here in Porto Alegre. Last Thurs-Fri, April 12-14th.

It was pretty amazing, got to meet a lot of interesting people, learn _a lot_ of stuff and watch some pretty cool talks. I was participating with our OpenSolaris User Group, so we had a stand on the floor, just near to Sun's booth.

We didn't really keep an exact count, but we handed out nearly 200 OpenSolaris Starter Kits and demo'ed Zones and Dtrace to 40-50 people. The folks at Sun's booth also handed out a lot of kits, plus a really cool pocket book on OS.

On that same morning we met Alvaro Ortega, who's working on JDS, and Sara Dornsife, from OpenSolaris marketing. Really cool people, hope to hang out with them sometime in the not-so-distant future.

On Thursday afternoon I took Manyi Lu, Josh Berkus and Louis Suárez-Potts to the university, I had invited them to do a couple of talks there. Had never met them personally, but they were so into it that it felt like nothing to drive across town with a almost complete stranger. Thank you for coming over, it meant a lot to me :)

Friday morning I watched Josh's talk on FISL about PostgreSQL performance. You gotta love that stuff. Later on, me, Manyi and Erwin Tenhumberg went to Louis' talk on OpenOffice. It's always a great experience to watch someone talking about what they're passionate about.

Later that night, we had dinner with most of the people from Sun who attended the Forum. I was in awe for sometime. Felt like a really really lucky person to be sitting with so many interesting people. You look down the table and there's Simon Phipps :D

Also met Brian Leonard, one of the most down to earth guys I've ever had the pleasure of talking to.

Saturday morning I went to Erwin's talk on ODF. This will be the topic of my next post, so I won't ellaborate now.

Since I was responsible for our UG, I was asked to host a couple of talks. I picked Jean-François Arcand and Charlie Hunt's talk on Project Grizzly, and François Orsini talk on Offline Java DB apps. Both on Saturday. JF's talk was very intensive, advanced connection handling stuff - hey, I haven't read Grizzly's code so 'stuff' is as far as I'll get here without embarrassing myself (?).
François' talk was very good, he's a very cool guy and definetly knows his db. I got a little carried away and let him talk for more than I should've so we didn't have enough time for all questions - the girl in charge of the room wanted to kill me - sorry for that.

I got to meet (briefly) Bruno Souza, who's a really cool guy, really passionate about his work.
Also met Tom Marble and Rich Sands from OpenJDK, Phil (who speaks great portuguese) and Sue from Java ME.

On that night we had dinner with everyone and went out later, my girlfriend joined us on that part. Glad to see everyone was so friendly, Rich helped me explain to her how a company can profit from open source software.

Overall, it was a great experience. I had never been to FISL before.
The most interesting thing about it is that everyone seems to be on the same vibe, to learn new things, to meet new people and to promote and help others understand what free software is all about. I met quite a few interesting people just standing in line to get a cup of coffee.

Hope to be here for next year's.