Today is already April 21. What have I done in these 21 day?
I was in fact getting ready for the OpenStack summit in Vancouver next month. After pondering for quite a long time I decided that I will make the investment and attend the OpenStack summit. It is unfortunate that my employer will not sponsor me to go to this conference. :(
While I was making the decision to see if it is worth going to the summit, I made a tweet about my contemplation and Jesse Proudman (@blueboxjesse -Founder and CTO of
There are 2 objectives that I wanted to accomplished in the summit:
- Get a jump start on OpenStack
- Meet people in the OpenStack community.
Get a jump start on OpenStack
I have discovered that the weekend before the summit there is a upstream training. This is a hands on training in which all the students will pick a bug in OpenStack and fix it. The great thing about this upstream training is that it does not end after the 2 day training in Vancouver. We are assigned a mentor to help us with another 10 hours so to make sure we are able to commit our fix to OpenStack.
To prepare for this training, I have also invested in getting a previous generation Dell XPS 13. I had the Intel i7 with 8GB of RAM and a 256 GB SSD drive. Incidentally, Dell pick XPS 13 to ship with Ubuntu and advertise as "Designed for Developer".
The Dell XPS that I bought is loaded with Windows 8.1 and I did not want to wipe out the Windows OS and I decided to configure the XPS to duel boot from Windows and Ubuntu. The process is smoother that I thought.
Last night I have picked 3 bugs and replied to the upstream training stating that I am interested in fixing them.
On this coming weekend, I am going to load DevStack onto my desktop running Ubuntu 12.04 first and play around it and the load DevStack on my Dell XPS which I will bring to the summit.
Meet people in the OpenStack community
There is a Chinese proverb saying "to talk to a knowledgeable person is better than studying a book for 10 years". I still remember the inspirational conversation with Gabriel Chapman (@Bacon_Is_King) at the Puppet conference and that changed my perspective in being a generalist in the technology field and he had motivated me to engage in giving presentation as well as becoming a blogger. I have signed up for the vBrownBag TeckTalk at the OpenStack summit.
I have picked my sessions to attend and all of them are networking related. I have been working on networking for over 20 years. With this background in networking I think I should jump into Neutron. Plus this also align my desire to take the VMware VCIX-NV certification exam this year. VMware NSX and Cisco ACI both interface with OpenStack Neutron.
There are a lots of people that I follow on Twitter, and I am hoping to have a chance to meet them in person.
Let's see what inspiration I can get by talking to one of you.
