This was the opening of Devopsdays2009. Quite a funny clip isn’t it? But what is a devop actually? Kris Buytaert is an expert on the subject, and I found a nice presentation of him explaining the concept:
DevOps is not about operators or developers, it is about how to get things done the right way. DevOps is also about how operators talk to developers, but is not about an operator who becomes a developer and visa versa.
A dev team that follows the DevOps principle, talks to the operators during the development of the applications. What do we need? What can we get? Doing you development on the same machines as the ones the production runs on, is always good. You find the bugs faster, you find other issues faster, and you end up with a better product, while you shorten the development time.
I’m already looking forward to the next devopsdqys in Europe. I just might join them to learn more, and share my own thoughts about the subject.
Yesterday we had our second Fedora release party. This time the event was held in Ghent, at our beloved hackerspace .
I arrived around 5.30pm, almost together with Vincent. He started out with placing the PXE boot server, and I went out hanging Fedora banners around the place, so people would find the venue in the labyrinth.
We expected some new people because the date of our event felt together with with the end of puppetcamp. But there were some regular Fedora attendees too. Around 8pm I asked Kris to order some pizzas via just-eat (he already has an account there). The regular hackerspace people were surprised we we ate 13 pizza’s.
After my talk Dag Wieers gave a lightning talk about his tool Dstat. In the end his talk lasted more than one hour. He showed us a nice demo of Dstat’s features. It was really cool because we weren’t even sure Dag would come.
After his talk it was time for some regular chit chat, and share some business cards
A big thank you to the hackerspace people and all visitors.
Yesterday I went to the Ubuntu Developer Summit M, because it was held in Belgium, and I was interested in how uds worked (I picked some ideas up for our own Fudcon ) . That morning Toshaan picked me up at Gent-Sint-Pieters. We arrived around 9am at the Dolce La Hulpe Hotel and Resort, Brussels, Belgium.
The day started off with an Introduction by Jono Bacon. After a quick search we know that bacon is also popular within Fedora! After Jono explained how UDS works Mark Shuttleworth gave his keynote. (video) Mark talked about ubuntu light and about talking to upstream if there work is ready and blah blah. I totally disagree with him there, you should start talking to upstream before you do cong fu. During the day I learned that working with upstream comes from the community, in stead of from canonical. *sigh* Mark hinted that the next release date should be on 10 October 2010 (101010b = 42d).
First I went to the opening talk (round table) about Security. As a Fedora guy, I started promoting SELinux there, as a solution for some of there ‘problems’, but they were still quite sceptic about it. Next I went to the Configuration management tools and files. It was a really fascinating look at the current state of config file management via dpkg. something RPM does better.
At lunch I got to hang out with Elizabeth Krumbach and Martin Owens. We had some interesting discussions about the cultural differences in the Fedora and Ubuntu community. Of course we had to take a picture, and mr Martin thought it was funny to give me bunny ears. I’ll get him back!
After lunch there was a series of Plenaries, starting with Ivanka Majic presenting for The Design Team (video) where she discussed some of their user testing of Ubuntu 10.04 which they’ll be posting on the design blog soon. Next up was Thiago Macieira presenting on QT Roadmap / Overview (video) and then Rick Spencer on Application Developers and Maverick (video).
In the afternoon I went to some other talks.
I got one good idea from UDS that we could use during FUDcon too: round tables in the morning, get work then afterwards.
Maybe I’ll come over to UDS on Thursday or Friday too, but I’m not sure yet.
so, what started as an event for the local – Belgian – Linux sys admins ended up as a -small- event with some top notch international speakers and visitors from all over Europe. I met some people from Austria, UK, France, Germany, … .
On Saturday Kris Buytaert opened the conference with a short talk about devops. After the opening talk we were proud to have the first European talk about CHEF by Joshua Timberman. You can view a list of all our talks here. On Saturday evening, we had a book raffle where we handed out O’Reilly books. To conclude our evening at the event location we had some free pizza and beer. The perfect combination for a geeky weekend! We finished our evening at a bar in Wilrijk.
On Sunday there was one talk that needed to be cancelled, Pieter Colpaert couldn’t make it because of a train crash. I had an open space about ‘Linux and education’ and learned a lot about the differences between colleges in Europe and the US. But we all have still a long way to go.
We had a lot of positive comments, so there will probably be a second version of Load.
I still want to thank the crew, all speakers and the visitors for making this all happen!
Yes, tomorrow is the first day of a new Linux event geared towards system administrators. As most of you probably already know, the name of this event is: Linux Open Administration Days , or load.
I think load has a good schedule, and everybody will be able to find a talk or tutorial that fits his or her interests.
But load is more than 2 days of interesting talks and tutorials alone! On Saturday evening there will be a social event, where everybody can have a chat with each other, while having a beer and a slice of pizza. Just before the social event, we will draw 6 O’Reilly books between the visitors. Don’t forget your business cards if you’re interested in a book (or if you want to meet new people).
Some may already know, but the loadschedule is online, and we have a pretty loaded schedule!
It promises to be a great weekend for the linux system administrator, with talks from people like Kris Buytaert, Thomas Herve, Jeroen van Meeuwen (European rhce of the year 2008) and many more! We also have some nice tutorials scheduled, and there will be room for some chit chat. You won’t get bored, that’s for sure!
On Saturday evening, we will have a social event at ‘T Spant, about 500 meters from the events location. I hope to see you all there!
Two weekends ago, I went to clt. Man, what a great event was that!
On Friday, around 9am, I took the car, and drove to Chemnitz. After picking up Yaakov and Gregory in Eindhoven, and Christoph in Dortmund we arrived at the hotel around 7pm. While driving trough Germany, I was astonished by the scenic landscape, and I found out that my old car isn’t really powerful enough for the German mountains. After a meal in a little restaurant, we went to a brewery were we linked up with other fedora, centos, xfce people.
On Saturday I met Christoph, Robert and Joerg in the lobby of the hotel. We arrived at the university around 8h30 am, and there were already a lot of people. After setting up the boot, I went to the ‘contributors-room’ provided by the clt organisation. There we could could enjoy a nice breakfast. During the day I talked to some people, got to know some Fedora people, and talked to the visitors about Fedora and load.
Saturday evening We went to the social event. We sat together with our centos friends, and had a beer (or more than one). After some beers (according to Ralph: after to much beer), Yaakov started building a fish out of the beer caps.
Sunday was a bit of the same as saturday, but I had a good time again. In the evening we had a nice meal in our hotel. We went to bed early because we had a long trip ahead of us tomorrow!
We changed the deadline for the call for papers. You have now one week extra to think about a talk you want to give during LOAD . We want to see your papers before march 23.
I have one of those ‘I should quit school’ days.. And just today I saw a post on planet fedora from Mel Chua .
She is not alone one of the most awesome geek girls I know, but she also helped me out a couple of times already. (big thank you Mel!)
The title of her blogpost was ‘How to do stuff?‘. While I was reading the post I saw some very familiar things.. I C/P’ed some of her text (I hope she doesn’t mind):
In My Parents’ World – How to Do Stuff (answer: “Get A Job according to these Complex Procedures”)
Be interested in something
Study (very, very, very) hard
Get (very, very, very) good grades
Make a resume
Buy suit
Apply to jobs
Get introduced to recruiter
Get interviewed
Get hired
Do Stuff
Except that the “Do Stuff” might be… well, entry-level job, filing stuff, doing thankless gruntwork waiting ’till you could move up the ladder and really Do Stuff, you know…
In The FOSS World – How to Do Stuff (answer: “Do Stuff”)
Be interested in something
Do Stuff
get hired
As she is already working,she must be one of people that know what they are talking about. right? So I told her on IRC I was thinking about quiting school, and start searching a job in open source.. But then she said something interesting:
<biertie> but, I also want to thank you for your blog post :p
<mchua> ah, thanks!
<biertie> because I’m considering stopping school -_-
<MooDoo> biertie: why?
<biertie> because they don’t care about foss
<MooDoo> that’s not a reason to stop is it
<biertie> I wanted to help loupgaroublond out, and do a project for them
<biertie> and it’s not good enough, because I could learn something from it!
<biertie> #wtf
<MooDoo> ?
* mchua wrestled with similar things as an undergrad, would be happy to talk with you about this.
<mchua> biertie: if schools don’t care about foss, and everyone who cares about foss leaves school, who’s ever going to bring foss /into/ schools?
<biertie> so then I send a mail to them, about open source, and the about a changing world and blah blah
<biertie> and he thought I was rude then
<biertie> mchua: good point
<mchua> You may decide that you’ve got better things to spend your life on than fighting that fight for however many years you’ve got left, and that’s fine. It is a long and thankless one, but it does make a difference in the long term.
<mchua> biertie: Yeah, it’s a hard balance to strike, and it’s also hard to know how administrators and profs will respond sometimes.
So maybe I should stay at school, and try to fight the big forces in our school, so we can have lessons in a culture where they DO care about foss, and maybe even work with it!
:p