Category: travel

I’ve been wanting to buy myself a new Lamy pen for quite some time. I was looking at either getting the black Safari, AL-star, or Vista. I’d looked up pen stores in Dublin before my trip and narrowed down to discovered Pen Corner. I’m happy that I didn’t go entirely broke shopping there. I got myself the black Safari. It’s a beauty to write with and two Rhodia notebooks. I’ve heard a lot of good things about Rhodia and it does handle fountain pens really well. I have a problem with hoarding stationery – especially notebooks. I’m finally using the paper I got from Tokyo last year. I’ve been using the meeting book though. It helps a lot to sit down after a meeting and write down notes and action items in pen and paper. It makes it more final for me rather than using a Google doc alone.

In Dublin last month, I did the Howth cliff walk. I originally intended to do the walk, but when I reached Howth, I wasn’t sure anymore. I was tired and it looked like it might rain. Turns out, I was just hungry. I stopped at a pub for fish and chips, and cider. Then, I decided I was going to do the walk anyway. I picked up a map of the route along the way. There are four different routes: Lower Cliff Loop (easy), Tramline Loop (easy), Masts Loop (moderate), and Bog of Frogs Loop (hard). I was pretty sure I didn’t want to do just the easiest loop. I was contemplating doing the Bog of Frogs Loop as I started. The route starts off with a paved road that takes you along a sharp uphill. There are some views out to the beach along the way. Once you reach a reasonable height, there’s a parking area. This is where the hiking trail actually starts. The map in the parking lot said that the Tramline Loop would take me a good 1.5h to 2h to complete and Bog of Frogs Loop would take about 3.5h. I decided I’d take a mix of both. I wanted to go as far as the Baily lighthouse. Then, I’d trek back to the Summit and head to the railway station.

The weather was near perfect. To Dubliners, I suspect, it was just hot. The trail was crowded as well. I saw people of all ages along the way. On the trail, I watched the Dublin Bay Cruise ship making its way out of Howth. I even saw a couple of flights on their arrival path in Dublin. On my own flight into Dublin, I had seen the cliffs. The cliffs were windy, green, and the air was filled with the sound of seagulls and the waves crashing along the cliffs. I stopped to take pictures along the way, but was among the more faster walkers.

I’d picked up a local SIM earlier in the day, so I was also sending pictures of the cliff walk to friends and we had a banter about it going on. Every turn brought with it new sights. I finally reached the turn, from where I could see the lighthouse. That’s when I noticed that I’m at the highest point of the path I was currently taking. The walk down to the cliffs would be a sharp downhill. I have pictures of this, but the pictures don’t do justice. Climbing down was scarier than climbing up. If I had to do it all over again, I’d tell myself to travel with a good pair of hiking shoes rather than running shoes 🙂

After I reached the lighthouse, I went back up to the sort of “peak”. The path to the actual Summit was a little more harder than I expected. I managed to brave it through. Sadly, there are no pictures of this feat. I was busy trying not to fall. From the top, I expected to see Dublin city. It was a gorgeous day, but not clear enough for me to get a clear picture of the view. With most of the hike done, all I had to do was walk back to the railway station and finally head back to my hotel. This stretch was much easier. I should have done this hike in reverse. That would have been a much smoother experience. When I was crossing a row of houses, I met someone who lived nearby. He walked in step with me and asked me about how the hike went 🙂 He’s done the Bog of Frogs Loop, the path I did not fully take. The next time I travel, I’ll plan to allocate more time to hiking.

In September, I attended Open Source Summit Europe. I realized this week that I haven’t written about it yet. The conference is massive. This edition had 2187 attendees from 65 countries according to the post-event email. The great part of the big event is the chance to meet and socialize with people I don’t otherwise get to meet. The side effect is that you often have more than one session you want to attend. The other end of that is you’re about wiped out at the end of every day. Even before the social events for the day start.

I did not get to attend all the talks I wanted to. I did skip a few sessions and spend some time recovering. Here are the talks that I liked.

The keynote by Reuben Paul about security was quite fun. It’s rare you see someone show a live demo on stage and have it work well. His talk is a reminder to developers that obfuscation is not security. When you build something, think about it from the point of view of an attacker. In the world of IoT, the question is not “if” you’re compromised, it’s “when” you’re compromised.

My colleague Robert Kratky talked about modular documentation. This is one of my favorite talks from the event. I’ve taken copious notes about it. The summary of the talk is to build modular use-case oriented documentation. “How to make an omlette” rather than document that talks about knives, chopping, onions, and eggs. While references need to exist, documentation needs to solve users problems.

The first evening, there was a CentOS-Fedora-EPEL BoF hosted by Jim, Peter and Brian. This session teased out problems in the ecosystem and how it some of our solutions aren not perfect. For instance, a package in EPEL cannot override a system package, because it’s meant for RHEL as well. A package in CentOS SIG can override system packages. This is the recommended route for non-EPEL packages into CentOS.

On the second day, I attended a half day session about CHAOSS project. It was a good introduction to metrics and what other communities do. Amar and I attended the session together. We’ve come back with a long-list of things we want to do to track the health of our community. The session was quite long, technical and educational. If I had spare cycles to contribute, that’s where I’d be spending my time. This session also gave us a chance to talk to our friends from Bitergia.

My talk was on the last day of the conference. I like my talk being on the first day because it lets me be stress free for the rest of the event. I talked about testing products where there’s a wide range of configuration options. The premise of my talk is that “Unless you can prove it with a test, a feature is assumed to not work.” My approach is that the product needs focus on solving use-cases rather than features. We need to view every feature with the lens of what problem it helps solve. This will let us narrow down configurations which work best for use-cases. This reduces the permutations of configurations which need to be tested.

Image credit: Linux Foundation OSS EU (license)