Getting ready for the OpenStack Vancouver summit

Yesterday, I just realized that in the month of April I did not published any blog post.

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 @bluebox.) replied - What do you want to accomplish by attending?  That helped me to make the decision as well as helping me to define my objective for this trip.

There are 2 objectives that I wanted to accomplished in the summit:

1. Get a jump start on OpenStack
2. 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.