All Things Open 2024 Wrap Up

~all things open ~open source

Two weeks ago I chose to go to the All Things Open conference in Raleigh, North Carolina. This happened to be the first tech conference that I have gone to that was not because of my employer. It was one of the most encouraging and best events that I have been to. They put a strong focus on community and being welcoming to new people. Todd Lewis, the creator, said at the beginning that when you’re standing in a group of people to make sure it’s in a Pac-Mac shape, so that new people can join in. I lean towards being an introvert. That encouragement gave me a space to be comfortable approaching people that I did not know. It was such an amazing conference and won’t be my last at ATO.

Below are some personal highlights of the conference. 🚀🚀🚀

Interesting Talks

  • Kelly Vaughn - Kelly definitely gave the least technical talk on Influence without Authority. Yet, it was the most impactful one that I heard. She spoke on understanding the impact of my work on the org, encouraging and amplifying others, understanding personal strengths and weaknesses, and how to improve emotional intelligence. I’m currently at the point of my career where I am technically competent, but want to improve the social skills that I have. Lately, I’ve focused on how to tell a story well since it is so integral to all parts of life, including work. Kelly’s talk was encouraging and was a push in the right direction.

  • Brian MacDonald - A significant part of what I write is documentation. I’ve had training writing up methods within scientific paper, but nothing around tech documentation. Brian’s talk opened me up to a world that I didn’t know existed. I have long known how great DigitalOcean’s documentation is, but never thought of the methodology behind it. Brian went through how he thinks about writing documentation and it has radically changed how I think about it now.

    • Vale.sh - A tool that Brian alluded to that helps with writing documentation. It is a linter used to check for style and grammar issues. Microsoft, Google, and others use it to provide a consistent style across their documentation. This was my favorite tool that I learned about at the conference. I’ve already started using it in my own documentation and updating previous articles that I have written.
    • DigitalOcean’s Technical Writing Guidelines - A detailed guide on how to write tutorials for DigitalOcean.
    • DigitalOcean’s Vale Package - The Vale package used by DigitalOcean.

  • The Changelog - I’ve listened to and supported the Changelog podcast for a few years. They introduce me to aspects of the tech industry that I would not have known about otherwise. I spoke with Adam Stacoviak, one of the founders, and he encouraged me to be more a part of their Zulip community (an open source chat platform). It’s a community that I already enjoyed. In the spirit of ATO, I thought it best to take the encouragement and participate.

  • Community Leadership Summit (CLS) - The event happened on Sunday, the day before the start of ATO, and the topics were planned in the first meeting of the day. It’s an unstructured time to talk about what it means to build a community within open source. I knew little about the topic. The most I’ve done is helped out Boomi’s community team and that has always been them inviting me in to help with an event. The CLS made me think about all the work that they do to help build the Boomi community. Yet, the CLS was an inviting space and I was able to listen and speak with amazing people. Jono Bacon led one of the sessions on community productivity hacks, which included facilitation techniques. Later I picked up his book, People Powered. I’m about halfway through and hope to be able to use the techniques in my own community.

Interesting Companies

  • Keebio - I recently started getting hand pain in my pinkies from typing. It was initially scary because that’s what I do the majority of my day. About that time I listened to The Changelog Podcast with Erez Zukerman of ZSA. It convinced me to purchase a ZSA Voyager mechanical keyboard. I’ve been putting more thought into how I type and the entire ergonomics of my home office setup. Keebio had a similar keyboard at the conference called the Iris CE. It is a split, ortholinear keyboard with low profile choco switches. The keys are slightly smaller than MX keys, which gives it a nice feel.

  • Red Hat - Red Hat’s headquarters is in Raleigh and they had a fair amount of employees there. One of the nicest experiences of the conference was talking to a current and former Red Hat employee about the change in their business model with RHEL. RHEL’s source code is available to customers and redistribution is prohibited. I’ve always heard about it but never had to worry about it. It was interesting to hear their take on it and the reasoning behind it. Plus, we talked about the early years of how RHEL was compiled or built, and the complexity behind it.

  • DevCycle - DevCycle created a feature flag platform. Their initial main product was something different. They started the feature flag product as a side offering. Customers were so receptive to it that they decided to change the focus of the company to a feature flag platform.

  • Tailscale - Tailscale is a VPN that is commonly used among homelabers. I’ve used it for a few years and have always enjoyed the simplicity of it. It was nice being able to talk to their team and hear about features that I was not using, such as MagicDNS.

Interesting Things I Learned From Individuals

  • Red Hat Open Decision Framework - The framework describes how to make progress in projects when there are many voices within.

  • Edward Tuft - Edward teaches on communicating with data. He brought up how NASA’s Challenger Shuttle crash was a result of a bad powerpoint presentation. The concern was nested 3 bullet points in. I care about how data is presented since starting in cancer research and noticed that some papers conveyed data better than others. I’m looking forward to reading his book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.

  • Apache Iceberg - Apache Iceberg is an open source table format use by analytic platforms. One of the main strength is that it is platform agnostic and, therefore, portable.