Note to self: Backup bottlenecks # I learnt the following relations the hard way 10 years ago when trying to backup a rather tiny amount of data, went through the computation again three years ago. Still I had to re-do the computation this morning when trying to pull a final full backup from my old MacBook. Posting here for future reference: Note 1: Some numbers like 10BASE-T included only for historic reference. ...
How hard can it be - organising a conference # Setup a CfP, select a few talks, publish a schedule, book a venue, sell a few tickets - have fun: Essentially all it takes to organise a conference, isn’t it? In theory maybe - in practice - not so much. Without scaring you away from running your own here’s my experience with setting up Berlin Buzzwords (after two years of running the Berlin Hadoop Get Together, putting up a NoSQL half day meetup). ...
Berlin Buzzwords - Associated Events # Back in 2011 I had a weird idea: Berlin Buzzwords as a core event kicks off on Sunday evening with a Barcamp but closes on Tuesday evening. There’s way too little time to meet with all the interesting people. On the other hand the organising team really was all tired on Tuesday evening, so just adding another day at the end wasn’t really an option. ...
I love FS 2014 # It’s that day of the year again: Time to buy flowers and chocolate for your beloved one. However as with previous years, FSFE wants you to put the day to good use to also celebrate your favourite free software developer (you know, the people who get way more bug reports and complaints than positive feedback): So here’s to the people over at Apache, Debian, Eclipse, Elasticsearch, Linux, ZeroMQ and the many other projects that make my life easier: Happy I love Free Software Day - get yourself celebrated! ...
FOSDEM 2014 # By now FOSDEM turned into some kind of tradition in our family: Since 2007 every year in February we are travelling to that one comfy B&B in Brussels for a weekend - not to take a closer look at the city but to attend (together with thousands of other geeks and open source hackers) one of the biggest conferences on all things open source. I love the conference concept for scaling: As it happens on a university campus they only have a limited number of huge rooms, but a fairly large number of mid-sized and small rooms. ...
On being aggressivly public # If it didn't happen on the mailing list it didn't happen at all. ... with all it's implications this seems to be the hardest lesson for newcomers to the Apache way of development to learn. In the minimal sense it means that any decision a project takes has to be taken publicly, preferably in some archived, searchable medium. In a wider sense it's usually interpreted as: . ...
Scientific debugging - take 2 # Back in - OMG was that really back in 2010? - 2010 I wrote a post on scientific debugging. Today I was reminded of this post as I actually had the pleasure of watching this principle carried out - except this was for a medical “bug” instead of one in a piece of software. To quote the book Why programs fail the method of scientific debugging consists of 5 easy to follow steps: ...
Children tinkering # Years ago I decided that in case I got the same question for at least three times I would write down the answer and put it somewhere online in a more or less public location that I can link to. The latest question I got once too often came from daddies (mostly, sorry - not even a handful of moms around me, let alone moms who are into tech) looking for ways to get there children in touch with technology. ...
Don’t dream it, be it # After two years in a row of receiving 120 submissions for Berlin Buzzwords from the usual crowd - young, white, male, caucasian - only this year we decided we needed to work towards increasing diversity.One piece in the puzzle was to get in touch with several Berlin local “tech for non-tech” people groups. In a content exchange kind of setting I was asked to do an interview as some kind of role model. ...
On geeks growing up # I’m a regular visitor of the Chemnitzer Linuxtage in March - at first going to talks learning lots of interesting stuff I didn’t know about like aspect oriented programming, strace, squeak, which open source licenses are best for different strategies. As of late I had been there mostly to help out with the FSFE booth. For context: The conference itself is hosted by the technical university in Chemnitz, it takes place on a weekend, they charge the tiny amount of 5 Euros for admission. ...