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June 2, 2015
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@RogueRunning Trail Series 2015: The Ranch

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Last Sunday, I had the opportunity to finish the Rogue Trail Series at the beautiful (but a little muddy from all the rain) Reveille Peak Ranch:

I finished in 02:58:58 with the first two 10K laps taking about 54 minutes each and the final painful lap taking about 70 minutes. I ended up fighting some stomach issues in the last few miles and just couldn’t keep my pace in check (hey it happens).

In the series, I finished 10th overall with a cumulative time of 08:26:23 which I’m happy with, definitely not my best but I’m getting back in the swing of things.

Next up is my favorite trail series of the year… Capt’n Karls! Nothing more fun than running races in the dark with your headlamp, who doesn’t love 7pm start times?

June 1, 2015
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Protip: Airline Customer Service via Twitter DMs

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Here’s a secret for those of you who travel a lot like me for business. Some airlines have fantastic customer service via Twitter Direct Messages (DMs), even better than using the phone for most issues in my experience!

Over the past several months, @AmericanAir has been a pleasure to work with over Twitter DMs for when travel issues unfortunately happened. I’ve shared this little secret with friends and they had similar success with other airlines like @VirginAmerica and @Jetblue, especially when phone wait times were atrocious. Also, I’m definitely not the only one who has noticed this.

In the end, I hope more airlines and businesses follow this customer service model, or at least offer it as an option. For most issues, it’s usually simpler to deal with things over direct message (text) than having to interact with someone over the phone, especially when you’re on the go. I even see a future where you can even automate most of these interactions so you may not need a human being for a good portion of customer service requests.

Anyways, happy and safe travels!

April 28, 2015
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@ApacheParquet Graduating and Mesos with Siri

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The last week for me has been fun in open source land outside of me getting two of my wisdom teeth pulled out of my face. On the bright side, I have some pain killers now and also, two notable things happened. First it was nice to finally graduate Parquet out of the Apache Incubator:

It’s been a little over two years since we (Twitter) announced the open source columnar storage project with Cloudera. It’s a great feeling to see a plan come together and see this project grow over the years with 60+ contributors while hitting the notable achievement of graduating out of the Apache incubator gauntlet. If there’s any lesson here for me, it’s much easier to build an open source community when you do it an independent fashion with at least someone else in the beginning (thanks Cloudera).

Another notable thing that happened was that Apple finally announced that they are using Mesos to power Siri’s massive infrastructure.

In my experience of building open source communities, there are usually your public adopters and private adopters. There are companies that wish to remain private about the software they use at times and that’s fine, it’s understandable when it can be viewed as a competitive advantage. The challenge is how you work with these private adopters when they use an open source project of yours while wanting to collaborate behind the scenes.

Anyways, it’s a great feeling to see Apple opening up a bit about their infrastructure and open source usage after working with them for awhile. Hopefully this is a sign of things to come from them. Also, it would be nice if Apple just updated Siri so when you ask what Mesos is, it replies with a funny response and proclaims her love of open source infrastructure technology.

Overall, it’s been a great last week.

April 26, 2015
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@RogueRunning Trail Series 2015: The Tangle

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This morning I had the opportunity to take part in The Tangle 30km:

Besides getting rained on a couple times, it was a beautiful run in the hill country. It was my first time at Flat Creek Crossing Ranch and I enjoyed the wide open terrain and even a cave on the course. Time wise, I ended up finishing in about 2:43 which isn’t fantastic but I’ll take it given the course was challenging and new to me. I’ll be better equipped next year.

Anyways, next up is the last race of the series, Reveille Peak!

April 5, 2015
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Hells Hills 25K

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Yesterday, I had the pleasure of running the Hells Hills 25K in Smithville, TX

It was a beautiful course and I averaged 8:54 min/mi.

Next up, the Tangle 30km trail race.

March 30, 2015
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@RogueRunning Trail Series 2015: The Maze

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Yesterday, I had a fantastic time running the first edition of the Rogue Trail Series for 2015, The Maze:

I managed to finish in about 2 hours and 37 minutes according to Strava:

I definitely went out of the gate a bit to fast and suffered later on, but the course was beautiful. Anyways, I’m really looking forward to the next race in the series which is at Flat Creek Ranch.

March 25, 2015
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Thoughts on running an open source program (via @TODOGroup)

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I recently posted on the @TODOGroup blog on why we run an open source program at Twitter:

Outside of just my experience, it’s been great to see other companies participating in this effort so you can hear from them too on running open source programs:

There should be more blog posts from us in the future about this topic, on top of us discussing other issues pertinent to companies working with open source communities.

Anyways, I hope you learned something new from these posts and if you’re a fan of company open source programs, please consider pushing your company or others to establish an official open source program or office. We all should give back as it’s in our best interest.

March 25, 2015
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FoundationDB and Open Source Foundations

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Just like any other day, I saw a funny tweet across my timeline this morning:

Not sure if you heard the news, but FoundationDB was a company with a decent amount of open source projects around a NoSQL database. They recently were bought by a much larger company and decided to close down the project, including removing the source and binaries from distribution channels.

I don’t want to sound like a broken record, but open source foundations are really useful. As a consumer, it helps you ensure that there is an independent governance structure in place along with fair ownership of the code (usually the foundation). This means that code won’t disappear overnight since an independent entity owns it, along with the broader community. From a producer point of view, you can build diversity in ownership and committers which will help you in the long run in building a sustainable open source community.

Oh well, c’est la vie.

Quick update and nice set of genuine tweets from the CouchDB folks who saw the benefits of having the code exist at an open source foundation:

March 11, 2015
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Linux Kernel’s Code of Conflict

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The Linux Kernel recently has come up with an aptly named “Code of Conflict” to deal with some of the criticism inside that community:

There’s also an interview from the Linux Foundation Executive Director, Jim Zemlin about this topic:

While not perfect in my opinion, it is the step in the right direction to ensure a well behaving community. While most people will be excellent to each other, there will also be outliers. Also, it’s important to set expectations within a open source community and really just set the ground rules.

Finally as a prediction (and hope), I expect to see more open source communities, foundations and even companies start implementing these code of conduct style guidelines this year.

March 2, 2015
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FYI: Open Source Initiative (@OpenSourceOrg)

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If you aren’t aware of the Open Source Initiative (OSI), you should be. They are fantastic not-for-profit organization responsible for the Open Source Definition (which everyone should read once in their lives), they maintain a a list of compliant license definitions on top of promoting open source across the world.

They are also membership driven organization, which is supported by individuals and affiliates. As far as I know, they are the only organization that brings together a variety of open source individuals/institutions to cross-promote ways to work together improve the adoption of open source software:

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They are also in the last month of their membership drive, so if you’re interested in supporting their cause, I highly recommend you consider joining as a member:

Also more selfishly, the OSI currently has nominations open for the board of director election which I’m partaking in. The current group of nominations include a great group of folks from all over the open source ecosystem and I’d love to have the opportunity to serve, my plans include expanding corporate membership and more.

So please consider supporting the OSI and vote your interests, they really make the greater open source community a better place.

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