Recent content on Adventures in Open Source Software
Today marks the start of my fourth week at Percona and these few weeks have been, well, exciting to say the least. 
 I was hired to manage and develop our business around MariaDB Server . Percona has long been recognized as a leader in customer-focused solutions around MySQL , and we want to extend those same values to the MariaDB Server ecosystem. 
 One of the things I love about Percona…
After what happened to me this morning, I expect the North Carolina School of Science and Math to ask for my diploma back. 
 I got scammed. 
 This is very embarrassing for me, as I consider myself pretty savvy when it comes to these things, but I want to share this just in case it happens to someone else. If I can prevent one person from being taken in by a scammer, then I will consider it…
Today I am excited to announce that I have started a new job as the General Manager for MariaDB at Percona . 
 I’ve been an admirer of Percona for some time. In fact, I always hoped that I could grow OpenNMS into an organization like Percona, so joining that team feels like coming back to my roots. 
 Percona is a “pure” open source company in that they don’t…
Back in November of 2024, my father (who is now 86) moved in with us. We are lucky enough to have a house with a basement apartment, and after my mother died we were able to take him in. 
 As an older person he has certain needs, so I’ve been looking for technology that could help out with taking care of him. At first I just wanted to get a couple of low cost buttons that he could press…
Last month I had the opportunity to attend an event hosted by Omnistrate at the Amazon office on Market Street in San Francisco. 
 I really wish a company like Omnistrate had existed when I was at OpenNMS. Omnistrate provides “Control Plane as a Service”, which enables companies to quickly offer their software as a service without having to build all of the supporting architecture.…
Wow. I really didn’t expect my post about being fired from AWS to get as much traction as it did, but verklempt doesn’t even begin to describe my feelings. The outpouring of support on LinkedIn was humbling, and the fact someone posted it on Hacker News and that it hit number one, however briefly, allowed me to check off a bucket list item. I don’t have a screenshot of that but I…
I have just returned home from a two week work trip. As part of that trip I spent two nights at the Grand Hyatt in Seattle. It was a nice hotel in a good location, but apparently they now have an AI agent, or “virtual assistant” answering the phone. 
 I got a good laugh out of it, although it took four calls for me to reach a human. 
 While I was on this trip I realized that I…
Today marks four years since I joined AWS. My last day will be Friday. 
 I have to say being fired from AWS is actually a relief. There have been a lot of changes to the company since I joined in 2022, and the company I wanted to work for is no longer the same company. 
 This past year, while I was doing my best to make AWS play nice in open source communities, there were two main drivers…
Recently a saw an article come across my feed that Notepad++ was now available on MacOS. 
 Turns out that was partially true. 
 TL;DR; Trademarks are incredibly important to the success of open source projects, and one should not be criticized for trying to protect them. 
 What happened was someone ported Notepad++ to MacOS , but it wasn’t the maintainer. Thus the functionality…
I recently attended my first GrafanaCon , held in Barcelona, Spain, from 20-22 April. 
 I hated it. 

 
 TL;DR; There was a lot to hate about this conference. It was incredibly well organized, which made me feel bad about the past events in which I’ve been involved. On the second day I didn’t get my choice of meal, and they never had enough diet soda on hand. The venue…
NOTE: As usual, this blog expresses my opinions and not those of my employer 
 As an “old” I really love email. It was one of the first ways I was able to reach other people distant from me. Even before I had access to computers on the internet, I would send messages using a Bulletin Board System ( BBS ) called WWIV . 
 WWIV had the ability to connect to other WWIV instances…
NOTE: As usual, this blog expresses my opinions and not those of my employer 
 I first got exposed to modern open source in the late 1990s, and I think it was via Red Hat Linux version 5, or perhaps version 6 (note: this was before Red Hat Enterprise Linux ). 
 I say “modern” open source because in the late 1970s/early 1980s a lot of computer code was shared via hobbyist…
Directly after attending this year’s Monki Gras conference, I was home for exactly one evening before driving to Durham, NC, for All Things AI. 
 All Things AI is the sister conference to All Things Open , one of my favorite shows of the year. All Things Open was started by the amazing Todd Lewis , and I used to spend most of our marketing budget to do things like bring MC Frontalot in…
Hazel Weakly starts off her presentations with the words “I have thoughts, lots of thoughts”. That pretty much sums up my mental state after having attended this year’s Monki Gras conference. 
 Monki Gras is an annual conference organized by James Governor of Redmonk . Redmonk is an analyst firm in the tech space with a focus on developers and open source. In my previous life…
Back at the turn of the century, open source was experiencing widespread adoption along with the growth of the Internet. The acronym LAMP was used a lot, meaning Linux , Apache , MySQL and PHP . 
 The first websites I built were on Solaris running the Netscape web server, but LAMP made building websites open to everyone. It didn’t cost anything in license fees, ran on commodity hardware…
It is hard to believe that I’ve been at AWS almost four years, but it turns out that is about the amount of time one needs to qualify for a laptop replacement. 
 When I joined I could choose a 14-inch HP laptop running windows or a 13-inch MacBook Pro with an M1 processor. I chose the MacBook. 
 I could have pursued a third, Linux-based option, and some of my teammates use Linux…
The first post I made on this blog was on this date in 2003. Rather than engaging in my usual anniversary navel-gazing, I wanted to respond to a post I saw recently on Mastodon . 
 Disclaimer: I currently work for Amazon Web Services . The ideas and thoughts presented here are my own and may or may not reflect those of my employer. 
 Recently the discussion platform Discord decided to…
One of my New Year’s initiatives is to move even more of my services from third-party providers back under my control. I have implemented a lot of home automation using Apple’s HomeKit , but I am hoping to move that to an open source solution, and I landed on Home Assistant (HA). 
 The main driver for choosing HA is to implement a “panic button” that can be used by my…
As I mentioned in my re:Invent post I got to meet Corey Quinn back in December and I follow his “ Last Week in AWS ” blog. 
 This week he posted an article about an agent he had created to help him deal with e-mail entitled “ I Hope This Email Finds You Before I Do ”. He wanted to create an agent with a particular personality: 

 
 I initially prompted…
First off, apologies for the click-baity title, but as this year marked the fourth re:Invent since I joined AWS I wanted to reflect on a major change it has made on my life - specifically how I celebrate the end of the year holidays. 
 In the US the winter holiday season tends to start with Thanksgiving , which occurs on the fourth Thursday of November. We used to spend the following weekend…
I wasn’t quite sure if I should put this post on this blog or my personal one , but since it is about two people who have been important in my life as well as being involved in open source I figured I’d put it here. 
 When I was in Zürich for NixCon I decided to stay a couple of extra days to meet up with some friends. The first person was Alex Finger . I met Alex in 2005 when he…
Apologies for such a late post on my trip to NixCon back in September, but my life has recently been overtaken by events. 
 The annual Nix conference was held at the Ostschweizer Fachhochschule (OST) in Rapperswil-Jona, Switzerland on 5-7 September. Rapperswill is about a 20 to 30 minute drive south of Zürich. 
 I had been to Switzerland a couple of times before but always on the Geneva…
When I moved a few years ago I needed to re-think my networking architecture. At the old place I ran a lot of Cat6 cable to various access points and that provided a decent amount of coverage. The new place is both “ post and beam ” construction and has no crawl space, so running cables is not an easy option. 
 I decided I wanted a mesh network and I went to Wirecutter to see what…
Months after migrating from Wordpress to Hugo , I’m still pretty happy about the switch. Whenever I read about a new Wordpress plugin vulnerability I don’t have to worry, and my pages load really fast. 
 One function I was missing was the ability to create a “ planet ”. 
 In the Before Times, back when people mainly communicated through blogs, a planet was a page…
One of my favorite TV shows of all time is The Big Bang Theory . It is somewhat divisive among my circle of friends, but I like it. One scene from the show has the character Leonard, a physicist, talking to his girlfriend Penny about his work. She asked what he did that day, and he said “I thought about stuff”. She asked if that was all he did and he said “I wrote some of it…
Back in March I was at the Southern California Linux Expo ( SCaLE ) in Pasadena and I had to go directly from there to Bangkok to get to FOSSAsia . 
 Now I’m not a very vain person, but on long flights trying to get some sleep in economy my hair tends to get messed up, so I usually carry a baseball cap to wear when we land. But I forgot to bring one. 
 My friends Ron Efroni and Ross…
There has been a lot of speculation and investment around Generative AI and how it will transform our society, but in the rush to capitalize on this new technology many companies are just going to end up alienating their customers just to save a dollar or two. One of those companies is Hearst Magazines , the publishers of Cosmopolitan . 
 Back in 2022 my mother died , and with her passing I…
Today is my third anniversary with Amazon Web Services (AWS). 
 If I had to describe this last year with one word it would be “change”. 
 Unlike a lot of people I know who really don’t care for change, I tend to embrace it. Those who have known me for a long time will remember when I had problems staying in any one place for more than about six months. As I’ve…
A few months ago, Anna Widenius , the CEO of the MariaDB Foundation , reached out to me about hosting a meetup in London to discuss database performance. AWS , my employer, has offices in most major cities, so I decided to use her request to learn how to navigate the process for requesting a room, and I managed to reserve a space in the AWS LHR16 building in the Shoreditch area of London. 
 I…
Hot on the heels of SCaLE 22x I found myself on the way to Bangkok for the 2025 edition of FOSSAsia Summit . 
 This meant an eleven hour flight from Los Angeles to Tokyo ( Haneda ), a seven hour layover in Japan followed by a seven hour flight to Bangkok. 
 In coach. (sigh) 
 But it was worth it. 
 
 I had never attended a FOSSAsia event before. I was supposed to speak at the…

 
 NOTE : When I initially wrote this article I used “they/them” pronouns when referring to Hazel Weakly instead of the preferred “she/her” pronouns shared in her speaker notes. People have pointed out that this was a microaggression. This was not my intent, and I recognize I made a mistake and I’m sorry. I corrected her pronouns and promise to do better in…
This post was inspired by the fact that I am going to be traveling and I needed a new laptop. 
 I am not a “laptop” guy. I much prefer to use desktops, even though I do connect an external screen to my work Macbook and that kind of works okay. For home I like having a machine that is always on, and if I need to I can just ssh in or use rsync to get what I need off of it. I’m…
I am not as much of a free software user as I was in the past. There was a time where almost all of the technology I used was open source. That is no longer the case (I am heavily invested in the Apple ecosystem) but I still try to use FOSS whenever I can. 
 One of those cases is with social media. I’ve never been a big social media person, but I did like being on Twitter . I travel a…
Apparently I started this blog 22 years ago. Sheesh. 
 This anniversary is a bit more nostalgic than most because I just went through over 1200 posts to make sure they worked after my migration from Wordpress to Hugo . 
 This isn’t the first migration I’ve had to do. Originally this blog was published using Moveable Type , but that migration was easier since there weren’t…
For a variety of reasons I run a local version of dovecot on my computer, which let’s me access older mail files stored locally in my account. 
 Using the amazing Homebrew package manager I installed dovecot on my Mac and it has been working pretty flawlessly, until just recently when I did an upgrade. 
 The upgrade went from dovecot version 2.3.21 to 2.4.0, and there have been a ton…
I’ve been writing blogs since March of 1999. Yes, I’m old. 
 When I started, my friend Ben suggested Moveable Type , and it worked well until around 2003 when they decided to switch their license from an open source one to proprietary. We decided to move to this new open source publishing application called WordPress . 
 WordPress would go on to become one of the most dominant…
I traveled for much of the last two months and during that time I went to four conferences. I usually like to write about them when they are happening but I wasn’t able to manage it, so I’m offering them up a little delayed. I’m going to start with the last one, which was the Coalesce conference hosted by dbt Labs . 
 I’m a big dbt Labs fan, as they create a ton of useful open source software…
This year marks the 40th anniversary of my graduation from the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics ( NCSSM ). Attending NCSSM was one of the most formative experiences of my life, but to be honest I have never been that big on the reunions. For some reason I am super eager to go to the 40th. 
 Since it has been four decades since I’ve seen most of my classmates, I thought it would…
This is a long post about overcoming some challenges I had with a recent network install. It should have been pretty straightforward but instead I hit a couple of speed bumps that caused it to take much longer than I expected. 
 Last year I moved for the first time in 24 years, and the new place presented some challenges. One big upside is that it has gigabit fiber, which is a massive…
One of the perks of my job is that I get to work with some incredible partners. One of those is Confluent , probably best known for being the primary maintainer of the Apache Kafka project. 
 
 This year, Confluent is doing a multi-city “ Data In Motion ” tour. The name comes from a focus on real-time data processing. Modern applications often have a requirement to collect data from one or…
I’m not sure where I first learned about the inaugural Open Source Founders Summit , but I can remember thinking that I’d wished this had been around 20 years ago. 
 In many ways, starting and running an open source business is no different than any other business. You still need to take care of your customers, create a useful product, and control expenses. But even though open source…
Today marks my second anniversary as an AWS employee . Time flies and I’m still having a lot of fun. 
 After I sold the company I founded in 2019 and parted ways two years later, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I’ve often joked that I enjoy working in open source and in network monitoring so much that I would do it for free, so I still wanted to keep working (although probably not so much…
Two stories this week caught me up in a little bit of old computer nostalgia. The first was that chip manufacturer Zilog was ending production of the Z80 CPU chip , and the second was that NASA managed to restore communications with the Voyager 1 spacecraft. 
 Now to be honest I didn’t know that Zilog still made the Z80, and I was impressed it had such a long run. My very first computer was a…
I was a speaker at this year’s FOSS Backstage conference, which was held 4-5 March in Berlin , Germany. FOSS Backstage is gathering dedicated to the “non-code” aspects of open source, and I was surprised I had not heard of it before this year. This was the sixth edition of the event, and it was held in a new location due to growing attendance. 

 
 TL;DR; I really, really enjoyed this…
It’s hard to believe but this blog is now 21 years old, having started back on this day in 2003. In the beginning I only had the one reader, but now I’m up to a whole three readers! I’m hoping by the time it turns 30 I can get to four. 
 
 I am writing this from the French Quarter in New Orleans, where I am attending a meeting. I was trying to think about a topic for this auspicious…
I am working hard to digitize my life. Last year I moved for the first time in 24 years and I realized I have way too much stuff. A lot of that stuff was paper, in the form of books and files, so I’ve been busy trying to get digital copies of all of it. Also, a lot of my my life was already digital. I have e-mails starting in 1998 and a lot of my pictures were taken with a digital camera. 
…
The final day of Percona Live started off with a keynote and a panel discussion. 
 As on the day before, Dave Stokes starting things off with some housekeeping notes. 
 
 After that he introduced Percona’s Chief Technical Officer and co-Founder, Vadim Tkachenko , who presented a roadmap for Percona’s products. 
 
 I am always interested in the customer angle for any product, so…
The first day of sessions at Percona Live saw me recovered from the food poisoning I experienced on Monday. It was a miserable experience but I’m happy that it didn’t last very long. 
 Whenever I go to a conference I always like the opening keynotes as they tend to set the tone for the rest of the event. The room in which the keynotes were held was dominated by a large screen featuring the new…
This week I am in Denver attending the Percona Live conference. As part of my job I tend to focus on relational databases, especially open source relational databases, and Percona Live has become the conference that focuses on that topic. This is my first time attending. 
 Back when I was mainly focused on monitoring, I would go to an open source monitoring conference in Nürnberg, Germany,…
The final day of SCaLE 20x was bittersweet, as I was eager to see more presentations but not ready for it to be over. 
 
 The opening keynote was given by Dr. Kitty Yeung . Dr. Yeung is one of those amazing people who makes me feel completely inadequate. A graduate of Cambridge and Harvard, she has worked in fields as varied as fashion and quantum computing. She is also an artist, and most…