So this morning we asked you the question, what is the best city to live in when it comes to South Africa? When it comes to the world rankings, our three main cities make the top 100 cut. A list which Vienna in Austria tops at number one, followed by Zurich and Auckland. Now with popularity in surrounding cities, what does that mean when it comes to property? And joining us in conversation today, we have Simon Bray, CEO of Private Property. Simon, lovely to have you in studio. This is interesting. So we make the top 100 cut. That's great. All three cities and we managed to slot into the top 100. Yeah, I love it. So we're talking about popularity in surrounding cities. Do you think that increases property sales when it comes to it? Absolutely. Property like any asset class is driven by perception. And the better the perception around a specific city, what it's like to live there, what the international attention is like, the sense of space and recreation pursuits that you can get up to in that location. All of that drives a positive perception around a particular place and that really fuels the property market. All of that attention creates demand and that demand results in higher prices for the property. So let's talk about that list. The cities are ranked at Durban, then Cape Town, then Johannesburg lost. Would you say that is a fair assessment looking at our three main cities? Well, it's fascinating to see Durban top the list, but I mean if you just part that for a second, the fact that we've got three cities in the top 100. I mean this is the world rankings. These are cities from across the world and I mean you can think of some beautiful names in that list. So it's great to see three of South Africa's cities there and I think that's driven largely by the great scenery that we've got in the country, some excellent infrastructure. Our cities really do work for the most part and you just have to travel outside of South Africa's borders to see what a city can look like. So we're doing particularly well. I think where we let ourselves down, obvious areas around safety, a lot of the cities that top the list are very, very safe cities to live in. So if we can address those concerns, we can see those cities climb up the ranking and that's excellent news for any property owner. Now with the standings as is with Durban being the number one, you know, most liveable city in South Africa at the moment, Cape Town and Johannesburg are still more expensive to live in. So why is that? Why is it still relatively more affordable in Durban being at the number one city? It's really interesting, you know. Cape Town for a long time has had the international focus. It's the focus of parliament obviously and so even within South Africa it's the darling of the property market and so it's interesting to see Durban come out on top. Jobig you often think of as the economic powerhouse, you think of it as the centre of commerce but I think what's really driving this Durban resurgence is a growth as a true African city. We're seeing a very multicultural, diverse scene happening in Durban. A lot of older areas are completely transforming. You're seeing an emergence of a black middle class in areas like Morningside and Berea and Glenwood and that's really good to see because that's really what we need from a South African perspective is to start tapping into those real areas of growth in the economy. So Durban's got a great story. Thank you so much Simon once again for joining us and give us a little bit of an update. Nice to know that three of our cities make that top 100 list around the world. So whether you are team Durban, Cape Town or Johannesburg, South Africa really does host some spectacular cities. So what you can do is you can log on to privateproperty.co.z to discover more about them and who knows one of them could be the city you call home next.


Okay, good afternoon everyone. My name is Hong Fu-Tang from Vietnam. I run a 4th Asia organization. Supporting open source and free software movement in Asia we are connected with many developer communities and of course GBN is one of our favorites. So we host I think two midi DevCon at our 4th Asia annual summit in the past but this is my first time in DevCon. I'm really happy to be here and okay so I have here on stage with me six excellent developers, GBN developers coming from very diverse backgrounds and especially they come from six different regions around the world. So today they will share with us their life story experiences challenging working in the community and also they will suggest ideas and best practices how we can scale and sustain projects within DBN. With that I will start to briefly introduce our panelists. I will start with Peter Gabby. He's from the US. He is probably the earliest DBN contributor here in the room. Started in 1994, 24 years with the project. Yeah I was blown away by reading about all his work in the Wikipedia page. It is an honor to have you here with us. Thank you. And super happy to have Debbie Breville from a very special place, Tahiti. Yeah anyone here have been to Tahiti? You know where that is? Well Debbie perhaps will tell you more later. So Debbie right now working as a high school teacher from... The current government? Yeah the current government. Okay yeah you can explain more later. I met Debbie last night in my first impression with you really friendly and very helpful. So thank you very much for showing me around the way and everything. And I have here Jonathan Carter from South Africa. Jonathan actually became a DBN developer early last year. He's a very special story about his journey and his relationship with DBN which you will share with the audience later. And Hideki Yamane from Japan right. So maybe you already know Hideki, he played a very important role in drawing the community, the local community in Japan. He also tech writer for a local magazine. Yeah and I have here, I try to have to say your name correctly, Hoshui Otega from Guatemala. Even though he looks very young, he actually has more than 10 years experience as a free software advocate. And he's also a member of the software label Guatemala which is a very important organization that foster free software movement in the country. And last but not least I have here with me Nikola Demontri. Thank you. So Nikola is actually one of the organizers of this DevCon. If you haven't noticed that, he's the man behind the scene. But not only this DevCon but many other events. And thank you, I know you are very busy but thank you very much for taking this one hour here with us. And seeing I have you here, thank you and the team for putting up such an amazing event. Thank you very much. Okay, so to kick things off, I would like to ask each panelist this question. What brought you to DBN in the first place? And what is your current goal? What is your involvement in DBN D-Day? And finally, please tell us one thing about you that people he wouldn't know. So I will start with Peter. Okay, let's see. The story of how I became involved in DBN is actually kind of long and involved but interesting. There was a reporter in the UK several years ago who published a lengthy interview with me with lots and lots of details. The very short version is that I was involved in a project to develop a payload for an amateur radio satellite. And I was collaborating with people in many different countries. And this was before Linux had become a really big deal. And one of my friends started using Linux as his platform for working on the project. And that caused me to begin to take Linux seriously. And I started looking for which sort of version of Linux I should play with. And I discovered that there was an effort to figure out how to use Devian for doing ham radio related work. And that sort of the thing that brought me into the project. I got sucked in very, very quickly. And within two or three months of joining the project, I had taken over several packages, was maintaining different pieces of software, had built the first server that was fully dedicated for Debian use, and had become sort of very involved in the center of the project. That was in late 1994. Something about me that people don't know. Well, okay, today I've done lots of things in the project. Those of you who know me will recall that I was Debian project leader at one point. I spent almost 10 years as chairman of the Debian technical committee. I've been involved in all sorts of craziness over the years in terms of architecture for our infrastructure in the project and some other things, big decisions over the years. Today, I'm actually retired in the corporate world. And the things I still do for Debian are to maintain a few base essential packages, things like GZIP and TAR and SUDU, which I've been working on fixing some bugs in today. And something that people don't know about me. Actually, many people have been immensely surprised that given the amount of travel I did during my corporate career, this is the first time I've ever been in Taiwan. So there's something most people don't know about me. Well, just a quick question there. So I just heard over the break that you also run your own company that developed hardware for rocketry. Do people here know about this? Yeah, actually almost everyone knows about that. But for those who don't, and those who are watching on the video stream, Keith Packard and I are partners in a small company that does open hardware and open source solutions for the electronics that are used in high power model rockets, which is a hobby thing. I've also personally built electronics that's now on satellites that are in orbit and lots of other stuff like that. But yeah, it's enough about me, other folks. I'm sure I have things to say. Okay, thank you. Hi. So to answer the question, I'll get involved in the project. How did you start it with the DPN? Yeah, and I had quite a busy life 15 years ago when I was living in Paris. And after that, when I moved overseas in a little island, I began to manage too much time in front of me. And I could finally use that time to do something constructive about the tools I was actually using. That's where our, for the tips that made me, free me some time, actually, to contribute. And first thing that I met because I was not in the computer world, actually, was to have the translation project to have people who don't speak English very well, like me, as you can see, to actually be able to install software or understand the documentation. And that's what drove me in the beginning. And once you get involved, if you're happy with the project, you do more. And that's how I came involved in that project. And say some things that some people might not know about me, it's pretty hard. I don't know. Maybe you don't know, but I am very much like rabbits. Okay. Cheers. So my Debian story and how I got there is also long and twisty road, so I'll try to make a short version of it. But in 2000, when I finished high school, my family wasn't doing so well. So there wasn't a way for me to go to university. So I just continued support doing a bunch of IT work around the neighborhood and a few companies I knew. And at this stage, I discovered Linux and played with it more and more and found that I can do a lot of things that I did with Windows servers, just with Linux, just installing Apache and Samba already blew my mind. So I started doing this for all the companies I supported already and found that it was great. And I thought I should really get Linux into schools and teach other high school kids how to use Linux and how to administer it. So at this point, I posted about it on a Linux user group. And at this point, the Shuttleith Foundation, who was also in that Linux user group, was talking about getting thin lines into schools for educational purposes. I thought that this is great. I should get in touch because I could piggyback on that to teach Linux in schools. And so a year later, I started working for them full-time and it snowballed into a lot of things. I became a Ubuntu contributor and later on a Moto and by 2012, I joined my first debconf and then things snowballed into the Debian direction from there on. So, yeah, and last year, I finally became a Debian developer. So that's, that's in a nutshell. Something that someone might not know about me. I'm a big StarCrate fan. That's all I can think of right now. Thank you. Hi. I was, I started to use Linux as a system administrator in small company. And because there's no money, so I should use Linux for the proxy or DNS or web server. And there are people and Debian people in Linux user group, local user group. So I choose Debian for the first choice. And I asked many questions to local mailing list. Then I thought, I want the answer from the reliable people. Then what should I do for it? Then, and I thought, if I am kind of contributor, they probably don't ignore me. If there's people and just a user and a contributor, probably they choose the questions from the contributors I built. So I started to work in about translation work because I'm not good at English. So I don't read much English at Google. So I studied to the translation, Debian message from English to Japanese. That's the, that's the start of my Debian contribution. Recently, I play with some packages, like Debut Slop. How many uses Debut Slop? Oh, thank you. And fix bags and make some regressions. And some people are angry with me. Why? When you update these packages? But it's a fun time for me to get some reactions from users. That's all. Well, my first approach with Debian was in the university with the compiler scores. For some reason, it was a requirement to install Debian to run some Java lecture tools. So I installed it and I really liked it. Then I went to DevCon 2012. And I really loved the community. It was like, oh, I need to be part of this. So I started to contribute maybe two months after DevCon. And then I become a DD two years ago. Actually, yeah. And one of the most things I like is I started contributing with the Debian Astro team, which I am kind of astronomy fan. So I'm kind of contributing with a lot of people in the astronomy community. One thing you don't know about me is I'm a hobbyist bass player. So that's all. Hi. So I started using Linux when I was a high school student. I was using Gen2 back then because watching compilation lines scroll by was cool. And when I started university, I became involved in the student ISP there. And all the servers were running Debian. So I started using Debian to understand what was going on. And I guess I had to package something and I started getting involved in packaging. And then the infrastructure to actually submit packages wasn't that good. So I contributed there. And then I got root access to the server.  And you keep contributing, I guess. One thing that people might not know about me is that I watch way too many TV shows, like a lot. What kind of show do you watch? Oh, one of the last things that I rewatched was Halt and Catch Fire, very good show about the 80s. Okay, so before I move on to the next question, I just want to ask the audience quickly, how many of you here are non Debian contributors? You want to be in the future, but you are not yet Debian contributors. Could you please raise your hand? Okay, good. Okay, so back to the next question. What is your greatest accomplishment or your proudest moment during your Debian time? I will start with Nicola. So during my time in Debian, I've contributed to the outreach team, which runs Google Summer of Code and Outreachy internships in Debian. And I think the thing that I'm the most proud of is making sure that the project keeps funding Outreachy internships in a regular manner, so that people can get involved in the project under representative groups. A question for you. So do you need to be a Debian contributor to join the outreach team or is open for anyone to, what is the qualification to be? So I guess if you have some, I'm not currently involved in the outreach team anymore, but if you have something that you want to be done inside Debian and you're not a contributor yet, I think you're going to be accepted as a mentor inside the team and actually get like an internship slot to do the project that you want to include in Debian. It's way easier if you're already maybe known in the community, but it's not a strong requirement. And of course, if you want to do an internship, then, yeah, new contributors are of course welcome. The same question for, who's there? Well, my, one of the things I'm proud is the packaging of Globis, which is a data analysis tool, which I make helps to analyze astronomical data. So it took me like a packaging a lot of stuff to bring all the stuff to Debian. And I really like that. But actually, I really enjoy every time I close a product because I know there's a lot of people is relying in Debian packages. So I'm just there to help them. So that's a question on the book. So do you remember any like very difficult bug and how much time did you spend on the hardest bug in your life so far? There are plenty, probably once with PiSBN, which is not related with, yeah, but it's really hard packaging. It's really hard to keep it building in a lot of architectures. So that's one of maybe two weeks. You have a question? So we'll leave some time at the end for questions. We only have two minutes. So as she said, I'm a tech writer. So I am writing the Debian article in Japanese tech magazine for five years. So I read the Debian information around the people in Japan. Okay, so I have a question about when people talk about Japan, they always talk about the Japanese manga. It's really popular for Japanese people. Because my nickname is the picture, the Japanese manga character. Do you have plans to make a Debian manga to promote the project? There was the Ubuntu manga. I know, I know the author because I'm also the Ubuntu local Japanese team. But the magazine was suspended because of the company issue. It's nice if I can see and read the Debian manga. But I saw some hacker comic in Japan. The character uses Debian. Oh, that's the way he uses Debian, I guess. Okay, so another question for you.  So magazine is a very traditional media that could help to send out the message to the public. Are there more tech writers like you in Japan about Debian? Are there more tech writers like you about Debian or do you have any plan to get more people to become writers? If there's a lot of money, I don't know. Is there any incentive? Do you get paid by writing for the magazine? Yes, I got, but it's not so much. I spend every weekend. And the, but the, the time is not so much because probably you know the tech issue is so hard to reproduce or to use the correct word. Checking the correct word is hard. And I want more people to get involved to write about Debian. But if you want more money, I don't, I don't, well, it's not a money issue. It's a kind of love. So I think the motivation could be to have your name on a printed paper. Now everything online, but now you get open the book, open the magazine, it's your name right there. I think it could be a good motivation for people here who want to write about Debian. So there's a few things that, that I was proud of in Debian. One thing wasn't really my fault, but that was how well Debian 16 went in Cape Town, which is my home city. That was really nice. Debian for nice. Still have people telling me, oh, that was a great day. I'm glad to, but I was just a very small part of it. But that's definitely one thing that stands out for me. But also, during the stretch released, I did a lot of testing on the, the testing images that were available and found some bugs and fixed one or two of them as well. And that's something I'm really happy with. And I'd also suggest to anyone who wants to get involved into Debian, testing the pre-release images is extremely useful and valuable to the project. And it's a good way to get exposure to many parts of the project as well. Because you learn to file bugs, you learn to try to reproduce other people's bugs. So it's a good idea to keep a watch on when alphas and betas are released, and especially the final images and install something like virtual box or QMU on your machine and learn to install Debian images on there. And that, that will get you a long way to get involved with Debian. A question for you. I'm just curious, what is so good about the DevCon in CapTal? I think many people here haven't been to CapTal before. What is the, what is the good? Well, it was a lot cooler and not as you. Jonathan, we just started today. We haven't finished DevCon yet. You can't tell. And we had lots of places to relax and sit around and chat. And the social aspect of it was really good. And I think that makes a big difference. Okay, but we can't tell if this is not better. You know, we have to wait until the end. Sure. One of the things I was, I've been most happy to, when I was contributing to Debian was, was actually the first time, the first time I wrote a bug repo that was actually acknowledged by the manager. The first time I proposed a patch that was accepted by the manager. The first time I made my own uploads. The first time I met actual Debian developer in real life. That was, that was the thing that made me personally happy. And for the things that I'm most proud of, that might be the, the people around me that are now using Debian just because showing them there's something that works. It is interesting that, that might solve the problem. And, and so the, these people are either around me or further away, but I know I contributed for them to actually use Debian or go further. That, that makes me proud to be in the project. I think that it's very important to get people around you to use Debian. Not a question for you. So you are a high school teacher. Do all your students use Debian? Sorry? Your students, do they all use Debian? Actually, we, at the school, when I'm, when I'm currently, we, we don't use Debian on the, on the computer. But a few years ago, I managed to, because I'm a teacher in mechanical engineering and some of these software are not running under Unix BIOS, BASC computer. But a few years ago, I managed to teach some computer science. So I was able to install my own servers, install the actual clients. So I run Debian Edu. That's why I got involved in the Debian Edu project at the time. And yes, there was more than one room that is, that was running Debian, that is still running Debian actually in, in Martini. And at least one of the students of mine, after a few months, came back and, and showed me his computer and said to me, oh, now it's running Debian and now it's running. So, yes, that works. Oh, okay. So, but I think, you know, I have a story of one, a First Asia member who is also a high school teacher. So being a teacher gives you a lot of opportunity. You can just teach anything you want, even though there is a lesson line that you need to follow. But you can get the students together one evening and, and try to do something extra that get, that lead them into one direction. So I think that being a teacher is a really cool position to have the impact in the young generation. So thank you very much and hope that you continue to teach Debian to more people. Well, things I'm proud of. It's really hard to win that down to just one. So I won't mention three. One of them is that because my corporate professional career caused me to travel an immense amount around the world, many of you who know me know that there were several years where I did more than 400,000 flight miles per year. And in that crazy period, one of the things I got to do was to meet people in different countries who were interested in Debian but didn't have any way to get their key signed so they could start the process of becoming a Debian developer. I can think of at least three countries where the first DD in that country was able to join the project because I visited their country on business and was able to meet them and sign their key. And so that was, that's something I thought was really cool at the time. The second thing is that there was a year when I was invited to attend the Linux kernel summit on behalf of my employer to talk about what my employer needed from the kernel community. And I took advantage of that opportunity to rip off my HP shirt, exposing my Debian swirl T-shirt underneath and ask the kernel community the question is Debian violating its social contract by shipping the Linux kernel in Maine. And that was the beginning of the discussion about getting all the binary firmware blobs out of the kernel, which took several years of work and the kernel community had to buy in and agree to work on that. But the way we handle firmware for IO devices around the Linux kernel today, I think the only reason that work ever got done is that someone like me was willing to stand up and in some way sort of embarrass the kernel community about the issue and get them to take it seriously. But I guess on some level the thing I'm probably personally the most proud of and Debian is that today when people talk about Debian, many of the things they talk about as being significant and important are things that I articulated in the second DPL election platform that I wrote the year that I actually got elected. And there are things like the importance of internationalization, the use of the universal operating system as a meme for the project. I'm not the one who came up with that phrase, but I elevated it in my DPL platform that year and it's been around forever. And one other stupid little thing is that when I was the Debian project leader, I started a habit of writing bits from the DPL and where the bits thing came from is a very long story. But it amuses me now every time I see a status report from some Debian team that says bits from because that's something I introduced to the project. Sorry, that was actually four. I totally understand, it must be very hard for you to pick something like in your 24 years of history working in the community. There are certainly moments that are even more infamous to the crowd, but they're not necessarily things I'm proud of. So I know the audience will have more questions for you, but I have like all the topic questions a little bit. So you said that you travel so much, but this is your first time in Taiwan. Do you have any goal that you want to achieve during this trip or getting a partner for the rock history companies or something that you want to achieve? Right now I'm just trying not to melt. After that, we'll figure it out. Actually, I'm very excited to be here because I've had lots of business relationships over the years with companies in Taiwan and I don't actually know. I can't really understand how it is that I never had a reason to travel here, but it's been very interesting already and I'm looking forward to some of the things we'll see on the day trips and so on. Thank you. Okay, so let's move on to the next question. What do you see as current challenges in the community and do you have any idea suggestion for better scaling and sustainability? Who would like to start first? You can decide. I guess I can start. I think what I see in the community is gradually more diversity in the people that are represented inside the community and I think this is like really critical for the long-term sustainability of the project, having people from different backgrounds, from different viewpoints. I think the days where the average Debian developer was a 30-40-year-old Western male, are getting over and I think that's good. I hope this trend continues. To ask you, I just want to help you a bit here. The question is, you are an organizer of this DEF CON, so is there anything that the audience can help you during this week or anything that you want us to have for the upcoming? So if you're sticking around for the conference, please go to the DEF CON website, click on the volunteer link on the top of the website and sign up for some shifts and we'll be very grateful for you. I already shy of my shift, so please go look on the volunteer page. They do need more people to support. Yes. Can you repeat the question please? Okay, so what are the current challenges that you see in the community and you have any ideas to overcome the challenges? Okay, one of the big challenges, because I have noticed with the people that are normally in Guatemala is like probably it's really hard technically maybe to get to any commerce that are contributing in Debian. So probably we need a better infrastructure or better tools to get these people to get easier to contribute, because sometimes you have to jackshaving a lot of stuff, so that's the challenge I see in the community. Maybe we need more tools to get contributors easy and maybe now we are using GitLab in Salsa, so maybe we'll help better to get people to contribute with the packages. And how big is the Debian community there in Guatemala? Do you know? Well, in Hawaii it was a very big community, but the people start to work or having family. Now right now we are 2DDs there, but I'm the only active one, so basically it's just me. So do you meet up from time to time or how do you get connected with other people? Well, right now just I RC, that's kind of the problem, because there are the software industry over there is more like private private private software Microsoft is pushing a lot in the university, so people is not using Linux at all, so it's really really hard to combine people to show them, because they are like all money money or something like that, so they are not contributing for for passion or something. Yeah, so it's the same question we have in Asia, but maybe the audience could have could help us later on. The challenge, the people should share the current status of each other. It probably becomes a chance for the contribution. People should not shout about the idea of the package name, talk about the current program of the package, your translation or website or event, talk about anything in the current state and another challenge is many in Japan, many younger people says, Archie is cool, Debian is not, so we should make Debian cool again. Yeah, so I could talk all day about challenges, but one thing that I noticed, I was in Rwanda two weeks ago upgrading a computer lab there and all the young people, they only use their phones and tablets and this is the primary computer that they use and I've spoken to some locals in Taiwan and they say the same thing is happening here and if you're using Android then as your primary operating system then it's basically a consumer device, so you don't use your device to create and to make things, you just consume content, you watch videos, you download games and that's what your computer is about. So I think in the larger free software community we have a challenge to try to make mobile devices better for creating things and at least on Android you get fdroid now which is pretty cool, it's like Google Play but only contains free software and it's easy enough to use so that I can tell family and friends to install it and they can figure out how to install the apps from there, there are cells without any further involvement from my part, but there's a lot of things that's still difficult like just getting a good python environment on an Android device is quite difficult and I think projects like the Librim 5 which is a phone made by Purism that will basically Randebian will be great for many people who use a phone as a primary device and if that can at least support some level of of Android app compatibility then that will open up a huge world for people so I hope that because it's a pity for me that we're a universal operating system but we don't run on the most popular kind of computer that people have these days so it feels like something that really should be solved somehow or another I don't think there's any easy solution for it yet but I think it's something we can think about and talk about more often. Thank you. Among the challenges what I'm thinking of is on the human level sometimes we are a group of people when we see each other can work but sometimes when we are all in remote places we only address each other via mailing list or IOC and we come from various different places various different cultures and sometimes we forget it and we assume why is this person not thinking like me and sometimes we begin to fight with each other and it's not always all right but when we see each other in real life like this kind of event we remember that everyone around me is actually nice and I can have a real discussion and sometimes just based on the misunderstanding and we lose it so I just remember we are a diverse community and remember that we are human that's one of the challenges I think we are sometimes fighting against and we can improve and do better I hope. So it's sort of interesting being from the United States I sometimes think that the free software community in my country is disadvantaged in a way because so many of the large proprietary software companies are based in the US and this leads to a real inertia problem in industry and in the government to do things that are really in favor of free and open source software I also think sometimes we are handicapped by the fact that English is our primary language and English has this sort of horrible problem that the word free has multiple definitions and so when we talk about free software the difference between gratis and Libra is hard to explain to people and this led to the whole creation of the term open source is a sort of alias but not really for free software and it's led to a lot of discussion a lot of confusion over time and when I think about you know what would it take to make Debian cool again and what would it take to cause Debian to show up on all the mobile devices in the world I think in order to get there you know we have to somehow figure out how to make sure that our mission and our messages and the things that we're focusing on stay fresh without losing sight of the original sort of fundamental set of objectives that the people who started and put a lot of early energy into this project cared about and if you go back and read the Debian manifesto or if you look at the social contract or you think about the free software foundations for freedoms all of those things are even more important today than they ever have been in the past and yet it's really really easy for some of those fundamental values to get lost in the noise because there's so much going on and so many things that we're all talking about and so I worried that somehow with so much stuff being worked on that we have so many things to talk about that we forget sometimes the importance of focusing on some of those core original values which are still I believe a really significant part of why Debian can and should and must continue to exist. Thank you very much so I just want to do a quick sum up about the ideas about I hope here to overcome the challenges so diversity is a good thing to get like open up to more people to join the community and then we talk about the tool that have developed to engage to work with the project and also how to motivate people yeah different way different suggestion not only about money but you know that it's not direct money but people could be motivated in the way to work in the project and it leads to more opportunity for them in the future is something that we can go around like send out message and then we have something to create a good environment where people can meet more often face-to-face discussion is always good and then we want Debian to run on more mobile devices and what I have here so then finally we have be there talking about whatever we do we need to have a clear vision and we need to to focus on our core values not like to too many different project and finally just one last question before we open up the floor to the audience if you could change one thing what what would that be yeah just one okay so if it's to do it doesn't matter if it's too difficult to answer this question then I would like to open the floor to to the audience we have about six minutes for you to interact with the panelists when you asked the question was what's the most difficult buck you fixed I'm I do not remember but I remember the most difficult buck I was able to put on somebody else which was an outreach student and she took two weeks for this but it was really cool I'm probably able to have taken longer and she reported on the depth on it and I think it's more spreading the workloads to to young people is also something I remember more lively than maybe other things I needed to fix any other question or some idea so how do you you can reach out to more people like in Guatemala if people young people nowadays care about having a good job and earn more money so how do we motivate them to contribute into a free software project any idea we have a very big idea it's just sometimes the needs are very very local and very very specific to the people involved so I remember hearing a story about getting grandmothers learning grandmothers learning how to code motivated by their need to have access to photos of their families who are far away so it was just photo management and so they were motivated to do that just a little thing but I think it exposes a principle of solving the need presented by the people who you're trying to help maybe ideas to attract people before they are and at the age that they need money because if you talk to kids they it's usually easier to relate to express them our values and why we think free software is important and since they don't have to think about money yet then they can already share some values with us because if we wait until they are young new professionals then it's more difficult yeah I totally agree with you so recently I visited a high school in Vietnam in Hanoi and I was really surprised at most of the students there you are clean up you know most of the people in the university even university didn't actually they all use windows but they went to high school they actually started to use Linux already at a very young age so it's a very good suggestion to reach out to younger generation and it's the job of teacher like you so more people should become teacher and bring free software idea into school or even your kids and raise you have kids right okay I saw a few children here I hope they all become DBA contributors in the future any more question for our panelists over here please to the previous question about what can we do to sort of bridge the goals of financial incentive and and also helping the community that actually at our company Hudson River trading we do summer internships for college students and this year what we did was just paid college students to fix open source bugs so now they get a feather in their cap for the resume they get some experience maybe we hire them to do general purpose development but at the same time give back you know to the community to the people for some things that were requested in the first place I I think the main challenge in like bringing new people inside the beyond is that we have a strong culture of scratching on each so basically we welcome people that want that have an issue and want to fix it inside the project we are starting to shift towards having a few lists of things that people could do but we don't really have time to do but this is like a very very marginal part of the project there's the for instance in the bug tracking system there's a newcomer attack that maintainers can use to mark bugs as being fixable and buy newcomers and basically they're offering mentorship to get the bugs fixed but this is really a very very tiny part of the issues that the project has and it's been a challenge for a few years to get actual internship subjects for the outreach team I don't know how to fix it mentorship I actually I have a question about how do you practice mentorship here in the Indian community I know that Jonathan wrote an article about you got your boss to play a very good mentor in the beginning so how is it here so I think the main the main area where there's mentorship in the beyond is packaging we have a few processes that are in place to actually get people to well maintain new packages or update existing packages I think there's some initiatives around the beyond science as well mentorship of the month is that still running so that's not from the beginning probably we are doing this is mentoring of the month and I get three to four people finishing one package per year so starting from scratch and to ready package and frequently these are upstream developers who learn packaging and then they are most competent people way more than we ourselves and this is I really try to propagate this because other teams could do this as well any other question so we have time for one more question I totally agree that they've been used more young people to join so I am here I'm just challenging when they've been come through a rules that encourage diversity people to join deepcon over 35 years old that that rule needs to change to add one rule if the diversity people under 35 years it's also welcome yes you're right okay everyone so we have come to the end of our panel please a big round of applause for our panelists here big round of applause please thank you very much for sharing your story your experience and thank you the audience for your participation again final reminder please go to the website on the volunteer page and sign up for some shit thank you very much


This week, we discussed big data processing systems. We looked into the origins of MapReduce and Hadoop and saw how they were inspired by functional programming. We discussed how these systems used two primitives, mapping and aggregation, to separate the paralyzable portion of the user code from the portion that has high data dependencies. We also found out how these systems achieve resilience, which is important because they were designed to run on commodity clusters, where failures have to be considered the norm and not the exception, especially for long-running jobs. Hadoop was highly popular, but over time new applications emerged, which had different requirements and richer patterns of interaction. So we looked into Spark, how in-memory computation supports a more iterative and interactive style of applications, and how the emergence of topics like data science and machine learning fueled this development. We recognized how the programming model is much closer to functional programming, but as we will see, there are also other ways to interact with the system, like through Spark SQL. We saw how the system is based on immutable data and the abstraction of RDDs, but also how the alignment with data science made alternative formats like data frames more popular. Your final task for this week is to set up an environment in which you can work with Spark, because next week it will be all about programming the system and crunching some data.


Aloha. Welcome to Talk Story with John Whitehead. Today I have Representative Chris Lee as my guess. The representative represents in the state legislature, I guess it's Waimanalo District. Waimanalo and Kailua. And more importantly, in addition to his public service, he is a leader of what we would consider to be the progressive movements in Hawaii. People who are on the cutting edge of making sure that Hawaii remains Hawaii. So welcome, Chris. Oh, thanks for having me. Well, look, not everybody is from Waimanalo or from your district, okay? And hopefully people are watching this all over the island. So tell us a little bit about yourself. I mean, where did you grow up? Where did you go to school? All of this stuff. I grew up here. This is home, right in Kailua. And never imagined I'd get into public office or anything like that in my years at Iolani where I went, but came home from college realizing that, you know what, people can individually make a difference and got involved to help with that. I think it's been a tremendous ride. This has been my ninth year in my office. What did you do before you ran for the House of Representatives?  Okay, double majored in that and some engineering and eventually switched into political science. And after that, I got an internship at the Capitol. So I did a lot of background analysis, looking at policy and the process and how to actually engage more people in that. And that's something I focused on behind the scenes for about three or four years before I ever decided to run for office. Well, did you get married along the way? You know, I think the job, it eats up a lot of your time. So this is my opportunity maybe to put it out there. Out there, he's available, right?  So you've been elected nine times. Four or five times now. Five times. That's that's 10 years. Yeah. I can't believe it. I remember seeing you for your first race waving on the streets there. Oh, yeah. Well, you know, what it takes to get in, right?  And I think that's something that from from yesteryear today into the future is going to be the gold standard, right? You got to show your commitment. You are always I've known you as being somebody who's interested in the ocean and the environment and things like that. And why don't you tell us a little bit about your work in those areas? Yeah, I think growing up here, you know, you really appreciate what Hawaii is, but you don't really appreciate it till you leave. Right. And for me, it was going to college. And I was lucky I went to college at Oregon State up in the Northwest where there's a different kind of beauty and came home and realized, you know what? We've got it good here. We really do. And we got to protect and promote the things that we value so that our kids can take advantage. And so I really focused in on a lot of the environmental policy and energy policy. In the legislature, I chair the Energy and Environmental Protection Committee. Right. And we've taken a lot of big steps recently. We made Hawaii the first state to be 100% renewable by 2045. We've written a whole new Hawaii Climate Adaptation Initiative to deal with our erosion. Explain that to us. I mean, what do you mean when you say that? Yeah, I think the debate we're having at the national level right now about where the priorities are. And I think this recent election, this past week, electing President Elect Trump really underscores some of the policy shifts we're seeing in the bigger world. Right. But here in Hawaii, we know we're the preeminent state that knows firsthand what it means to be susceptible to climate change. To global warming. Yeah. I mean, really. We've seen 17 miles of our beaches erode in recent decades. We've seen sea level rise more than half a foot. We're seeing 15-plus hurricanes per year. This is not normal. This didn't exist. Didn't exist. There were no hurricanes when I was growing up. I mean, seriously, the first hurricane that in modern times that hit Hawaii was Iniki. In 80, what, 84? Oh, Eva. Eva. Eva. Eva. Iniki came when I was in office. There were two, 10 years apart. And that didn't happen before. And scientists have told me that that has something to do with the fact that the ocean around Hawaii is getting warmer. That's right. And we see this happening all over the world. Yeah. I think we look at it as, you know, in Hawaii, we're not going to solve this problem by reducing our carbon emissions and all that. But we definitely have a leadership role to play, particularly with respect to the rest of the states throughout the country, because we feel these effects, and we can already measure them. Well, you can describe it, but you can also, I think that the Pacific, the Pacific islands are looking, would like a leader. They need a leader. They need somebody to carry their voice into the United States halls, into the halls. Congress, even, you know. And they need to have somebody speaking up to them. In fact, what I've been told is that there might be a relationship between global warming and some of our homeless problems. Because often what's maybe happening is that islands are shrinking, and people have nowhere else to go for economic, well, just living, just to go and live. And Hawaii may be the first part of call. So this is an important issue, not only because it's a good thing, but it sounds like survival, don't you think? It very much is. I think it's our culture and way of life here that we want to perpetuate, and it's going to change whether we like it or not. So we've got to take steps now to do what we can. And we've already seen, and this is the important thing when we talk about Hawaii as a role model for other states. You know, the progress we've made on renewable energy in just the last 10 years has saved Hawaii over a quarter billion dollars already. And when people talk about global warming and climate change on the East Coast and in DC as sort of a hypothetical as our children's problem, we feel it now, and our progress demonstrates that we can save now and help people today. Well, that's fantastic. Well, let me ask you something, though. The new president doesn't seem to... Well, it doesn't seem to acknowledge the existence of global warming. And there is a kind of an international consensus that I guess President Obama joined into on the... I'm trying to remember the name... Paris. The Paris Agreements. The Paris Agreements. Now, how does... What's happening? I mean, how does this all work? Yeah, you know, I think what we have seen in the last couple of years has been a shift from trying to get the United States to lead to a point where we are now trying to catch up to other countries like China and others who are actually making significantly more progress in some areas than we are. And this agreement brings all nations around the world together to say, you know what, we're going to act together. It's no one nation's problem. It's our problem. Well, I heard Senator Schatz told me today that he was informed that there are countries that are saying, look, we don't care what President Trump may do. We are going to continue these initiatives. Oh, absolutely. I think... Oh, no, go ahead. I'll say, you take these things out of context, because we're in the United States and we're in our own media bubble and we hear certain things, but outside of this country, right? You've got 195 countries around the world. President-elect Trump is the only head of state who pretends like global warming isn't a real thing. Even Kim Jong-il, even Vladimir Putin, are taking significant steps in their countries to acknowledge the threat and take action to prevent the worst. And that's something that says a lot. Well, it says a lot. But it also says that, you know, and what is... There's a new... It appears to be like a new era going on with this... We don't know what's going to happen with President Trump, but most of the news has, at least to me, not been positive in terms of things like environmental issues. So how does this all relate back to your work in the legislature? I mean, what can Hawaii do? What can we do to ensure that, you know, we're moving forward in a positive way? Yeah, and I think we have clearly set the bar so far throughout the country with what we've been doing on energy and climate. But I think now in this new era, where I hope, you know, I give President-elect Trump sort of the benefit of the doubt in a way and hope that he rises to the challenge and says, you know what, we've got to work together. But assuming for a minute the worst-case scenario that we don't get a lot of support out of DC for four years, perhaps, it is incumbent on our parts as states to rise up to protect our residents, to protect our economy. And so I think we're going to see a lot more action at the state level. And in particular, we have an opportunity to partner with other states. And we've been reaching out around the country, California, Virginia, states you would not otherwise expect. And this is a network that you're part of and working with? That's right. We're working with legislators from over 40 states now to try and synchronize our actions and figure out best practices and how to move forward on our own, assuming that there's not going to be help. We hope there is. Well, one of the things that I think that people worry about is that they seem to make a choice. It seems like a choice. You're either going to take care of the environment or you're going to create jobs for people. You know, so there's, there's, there seems to be there, at least people like to put up this sort of this dichotomy. But is that, as you see it, or how does that all work together? I think it is, you're right, that it's sort of the conventional wisdom, but I don't think it's true. And I think we can point to our experience in the last like five years here in Hawaii is the clear proof of that where during the height of the recession, right, we saw jobs fall back and tourism dollars go down. The fastest growing sector of Hoy's economy was surprisingly renewable energy, which is environmentally focused one quarter of the building permits in Honolulu in about the 2012 timeframe were for renewable energy projects for solar panels and all of that sort of thing. Did that have anything to do with the fact that the legislature was had the foresight to, you know, provide credits or anything like any kind of programs? I think I think it definitely had to do with the support that the state put out, you know, you make a commitment that we're gonna we're gonna work on this and give businesses some certainty and make it a safe investing environment and you can build out businesses that create jobs and we saw thousands created in that period of time. So do you see all of this as an alternative to, you know, at one point in time, Hawaii really had three sectors in the economy. I mean, we have obviously still have tourism. Agriculture was a big part of what we did. And also the military. Now, does do you see a future for, for example, agriculture in as far as the economy is concerned, or how does that all fit together? I think agriculture is one of those areas of greatest potential. You know, I think a lot of people look at the demise of pineapple and sugar and say, you know, it's a thing of the past. But the truth is, we import more than 80% of our food that we eat. And if we can just grow that locally, imagine the jobs, imagine the savings for local consumers, and imagine the security we have in the event of a disaster or hurricane. But on top of that, we're looking at converting our transportation sector, which now consumes two thirds of our fossil fuels here in the state to be renewable. And part of that is electric cars and all of that. Wouldn't that be great? Don't you think Hawaii would be the perfect place for electric cars? But the other thing it shows is that where you have jet fuel that you need, or fuel for ships, or even buses, you have the potential for biofuels that can be grown out of crops right here in our own ag sector. So there's enormous crossover, and that means a lot of jobs. Well, I tell you, we're going to take a short break. And in a few minutes, we're going to come back and talk more about what can, what are some of your ideas for increasing the economic viability of Hawaii, as well as the, you know, any issue.  So, you know, if you want to call me, the number we have here is<PHONE_NUMBER>.<PHONE_NUMBER>. You can call me and ask any question except for his phone number. Okay. So that is off limits. We'll be right back. Aloha. I'm Kaui Lucas, host of Hawaii is my mainland here on Think Tech, Hawaii every Friday afternoon at 3pm. Start your Paul Hanna weekend off with the show where I talk to people about issues pertinent to Hawaii. You can see my previous shows at my blog, kauilukas.com, and also on Think Tech's show. Sorry. Aloha. I'm Carl Campania, host of Think Tech, Hawaii's Movers, Shakers and Reformers. I hope you join us over the next several weeks as we take a deep dive into biofuels in Hawaii and explore the alternative fuels supply chain necessary for the local and global transition towards transportation fuel sustainability. Join us as we have good conversations with our farmers, our producers, our conversion technologies, our investors and our legislators as we try to achieve our transportation sustainability goals. See you soon. Welcome back, everyone. We are talking story with John Waihei, who has as his guest Chris Lee, state representative, one of the outstanding leaders of our state. And we were talking earlier about the environment, global warming. We had a chance to hear some of your ideas about what we can do about increasing agriculture as it's productive. But one of the problems of living in Hawaii is the cost of housing. That's right. I mean, it's perennial. It was a problem when I was in office and it's fortunately still a problem. What can we do about it? I mean, what's, you know, what can the state legislature do about this problem of affordable housing? You know, I speak, I have a lot of experience with this because I can't afford a house in the district I represent right now in Kailua where the median home price is north of a million dollars. And I think this is true of all my friends I grew up with who are attorneys and doctors and they do well for themselves. And I think we see a lot of reliance on, for example, in my case, you know, mom and dad have been great and they've let me pick it at home for a number of years and I wouldn't be able to make it otherwise. I hope my kids are saying the same thing.  I hope you get something good. But tell us, yeah, so what can we do about that? Because it's especially for your I don't, if you don't mind me saying, especially for your generation, but for all people in Hawaii. Yeah, it's a problem. Absolutely. And there is infinite demand from the outside where people coming in to move here to say we want to want to build these multi-billion dollar condos in Kakaako and yet, you know, our state representative from Kailua still needs his parents' help to find a home. Yeah, that's right. So I think there is a lot we can do and this is exciting because I think for the first time you're seeing constituencies from different groups that never really had a focus on housing before come together to try and push something big. And you got folks like Face, the faith action community equity groups, you've got the environmental groups, you've got social services folks, all in labor. And what we're looking at, I think, is a paradigm shift in the way that we look at how we build out housing. Okay. And instead of going through the regular rigmarole of the permitting process and the zoning process and then waiting in the ten years for a developer to come along and try and finance the project to build what ends up being like 20 units. What we said at the legislature this past year was, no, okay, we know the challenge we face and it's significant. Right. Band-aid approaches and fixes don't work anymore. So we said we want 20 plus thousand units to be built in a short amount of time and that sets the goal high. Now we got to come back this year and in a meaningful way try and streamline the process where it's appropriate to make sure that projects can move faster, don't end up in court, don't end up with the bottom dropping out. Don't end up being opposed by the very community that you want to help. Absolutely. And I think there's there's definitely room to compromise, especially on the urban core where you've already got development buildings and everything else. How do we fast-track more units down here that are affordable for folks like my friends and our kids and open it up and that way you don't have to sacrifice. And one of the problems in Hawaii, at least when I was in office seemed to be the existence of monopolies, that there were very few landowners, very few developers, very few people who were in the business. Is there any way to sort of bringing new energy and new people, maybe more community participation or something? Yeah, we actually launched into an effort last year looking at the kind of downtown Kapalama-Kalehi area and figuring out what can we do here to empower this community to provide for its next generation. Right? You're in a key area that's kind of underused for that purpose. And this is where we got this momentum built now, where you got landowners like Kamehameha Schools and Castle and Cook now working alongside community groups and folks who are stepping up saying, hey, we want our say too and let's create a plan together. And it's actually starting to move in a real way. And that's exciting. Well, it is exciting because it's also a paradigm shift because in the past the traditional method for a landowner would be to dribble projects out so that you can increase the pricing. Yeah. But what you're talking about is something a little bit more broad-based. Yeah. And it's actually, it's sort of good in a way that the timing works out this way because we've seen a glut of construction, right? And project costs have gone up in recent years as a result. But that's going to slow down in 18, 19, 2020. And so the question is can we line up now all these projects so that we fill that space when the time comes? And that creates an incentive for everybody from the construction companies to the developers, to the landowners, to the state and the recipients of affordable housing to get their ducks in a row so that we can get this stuff done in a few years. What can we do, or have you given any thought to the fact that we recently went through a great, a big recession, almost a depression? And there were a lot of foreclosures in the islands. And I've been told that most of that didn't come from the local banks. What happened was that apparently mainland banks were out slicing and dicing and syndicating loans and mortgages. And there was no the traditional relationship between the bank and the borough, which was let me keep you in your home so you can keep paying us off, was broken. I mean, how do we fix those kind of things?  Sure. You know, I think you've actually done a lot of work yourself right in this field, right? Looking at DHHL, Department of Hawaiian Homeland, and trying to get people into housing. And I think there's some lessons to be learned there that can apply much more broadly. Right now, there's a financing program that was created not long ago that is not only helping people buy into houses, but even years beforehand, set them up financially so they're able to do it. Right. And they can align things up so that they can qualify to begin with. That's the kind of thing that also they have somebody to relate to, you know? Oh yeah. Because, you know, we often sign a mortgage for 30 years, but none of us expect to have a problem free 30 years. Sure. Things change, you know, Donald Trump gets elected, I should say that. But things, you know, things like, and so there needs to be, by the way you mentioned it, you also represent Waimanawal. That's right. Where there's a Hawaiian homestead. What's happening with Hawaiian issues? I mean, where, where, you know, we and I do appreciate what people refer to as the whole host culture of Hawaii. At the same time, we want to do something that's inclusive with everybody in Hawaii. And what do you do? And how do you represent your homestead? Yeah, this is interesting because Waimanawal, you have Waimanawal right next door to Kailua. Right. Which in a lot of ways are polar opposite communities. Except when you hang out there and you find out they're all friends. Oh, absolutely. And they're going through each other's lives. Oh, yeah. Yeah.  You go down to the beach parks and ensure that, you know, homeless folks living down there, but they're, you know, cousins and family are the folks living in the homes down the street. Right, right. And they're actually welcome in the community in a lot of ways. Yeah. Which you don't see many other places. Well, I gotta tell you that because in Waimanawal, we, when I was in office, we built these homeless villages for homeless people. And the one that there's still is in existence is in Waimanawal. That's right. Waimburg Village. Waimburg Village. And it is a part of the community. Yeah, absolutely. And do you find yourself like, um, well, I felt that we should try to make, you know, to the extent that you can provide homes for on the homesteads for Native Hawaiians. You actually make available homes for everybody in terms of the total number of houses available. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we know, you know, the history of the waiting lists and DHHL, thousands of families waiting to get into homes. I think we're finally at a point where you can do things differently, right?  There are other kinds of cheaper units that can do multi-family approaches. In fact, that was one of the problems, was getting it so that we had other options besides single family units on, you know, very upgraded parcels. Yeah. And actually, this cuts to the core of not only this discussion about having the ability to afford housing up front, but ultimately being financially ready as a family to occupy the way we construct housing now. And we're working with DHHL right now on this. If you look at the operating costs, right, your power bill and your water bill, you can build homes differently today with solar panels and batteries and water reuse that immeasurably cut down on the cost for consumers to live there. And you can do that right up front for almost the same cost as you used to be able to build a regular house before. So these are things that can change that financial dynamic. Well, they've just changed the paradigm. Yeah. Well, look, you are known, and we'll put you on the spot here. You are known as one of the progressive leaders of Hawaii, okay. And recently, and I know that we recently had an election and Senator Sanders ran and Hillary Clinton, but we got stuck with Donald Trump. Now, some people may be happy, others of us may be a little leery, but I want to know what does a progressive leader do in a Trump era? What are your priorities? What do you think not only for Hawaii but for the nation? What do you think, where do you think we ought to be heading? Sure. You know, I don't look at myself so much as a progressive leader so much as someone who tries to really look out for everybody. And I think those two values align in a lot of ways. Looking out for the little guy, trying to make sure that all of us in Hawaii can make it. That's the bottom line. And I think whether it's the Trump administration or the Sanders administration, honestly, it makes a small difference to us here in Hawaii. But not as great a one I think as most people expect. Because I think in Hawaii we have our own way of doing things. We want to proactively decide our future and empower our communities to make those decisions. I think that's something that is irrelevant to who's in the White House. Well, I tell you what, though, it's not irrelevant to who's in the Congress. Oh, wow. And someday I hope to see you in Washington, you know, and maybe get a chance to even deal with on these issues on the broad scale. I think it's exciting. And I wish you well. Oh, thank you so much. I hope that there are more people like you in the state in the state capital. I know they are. And I hope that you're you know, you really look seriously at the scene whether you can help not only Hawaii, but the nation as a whole. Something to give serious thought about perhaps this year for the first time looking ahead. And yeah, there's an opportunity. You know, I think if there's a vacancy and so you are, you have you have ambitions in that direction. Well, I passed up a Senate seat running for that before I passed up running for Congress before because I was working on things here. But honestly, not that there's not more to work on, but I've achieved a lot of the things that I initially set out to do. And for me, you know, about five years ago when I was in office, I had a stroke. Oh, really? Which I didn't know that. Yeah, it was tough. But while I was laying there in the hospital, they kind of realized that, you know, if I want this to be worth it, the effort and the time we put into everything we're working on, we can't wait for the next generation of leaders. You need to take up and step up. You got to do it.  I would love to hear more about it. Unfortunately, we are out of time. Thank you so much for joining us. And I hope, you know, I hope you're the best.


All right, then, without further ado, I'll briefly introduce myself. My name is Stephen Gallagher. I have been at Red Hat for a baker's dozen of years. It has been a wonderful ride and I intend many further years with the company. I've worked on a number of different projects at Red Hat but most recently I've worked on the team that bootstraps Red Hat Enterprise Linux I was on the team that bootstrapped REL8. I was also on the team that produced Modularity for REL8 and coming around to REL9, we wanted to take a quick look at, well, I shouldn't say a quick look, we wanted to take a deep look at what it was that bootstrapping of Red Hat Enterprise Linux really meant because it's a long painful process that happens, let's call it very infrequently. With REL8, I think it was almost five years between REL7 and REL8, but prior to that, at some arbitrary point, what we would do is we would say, okay, this fedora just released, we like that one. We will take that and we will bootstrap it and we'll try to get something minimal that we can use to start building REL atop. And this, to call it painful would be generous. This was an extremely time-consuming and manual effort-driven process. And the problem was that it tended to burn people out and so between REL6, REL7 and REL8, I think there was very little continuity of personnel doing these bootstraps, which of course meant that every new team was going to have to learn it themselves. So that led to bootstraps tended to take six to 12 months after we forked from a fedora to actually get something that could boot at least as far as the installer, which is not good. And that was definitely something that now that we, at Red Hat have announced that there's going to be a three-year schedule for releases, so we're going to be releasing REL9 probably next year and then three years after that, we'll be releasing REL10, three years after that we'll be releasing REL11 and hopefully I'll be retired before we have to release for REL12. But there has to be a better way of building REL from the ground up and taking advantage more of the resources that we have available to us with fedora, not just physical resources like the build system and the infrastructure there, but also the people, the human resources that are excited to help us actually produce something that we can maintain, not just something that we can, something that we use as a hobby is where we start with fedora, but there are definitely a lot of interested parties who want to build something that will be able to last for 10 years and support their applications and we want to be able to do that much more in the public. And that was something I'd been fighting for at Red Hat for north of a decade. And this last couple of years, we've had some huge changes in how we build software at REL at Red Hat, sorry, with the advent of CentOS Stream for REL8, which admittedly had a rocky beginning. But I think people have started to come around to recognizing just how exciting it is to be able to actually publicly contribute directly to the work that we're doing. And similarly, it's beneficial for the Red Hatters because there's a lot more view, a lot more eyes, a lot more code review, a lot more just assistance in all sorts of ways, documentation and whatnot with being able to do their development in the public. So we sat down and we wanted to take stock of that and just figure out, okay, we still have that same problem with CentOS Stream 9 where we need to be able to bootstrap that in such a way that another team can continue to do that for CentOS Stream 10 and so on. So we began a new project and we gave that project the code name El Nino, which it is a pun, as any of you who have seen me give a talk before knows, I am very, very fond of puns. The name of course derives in part from L, the EL portion stands for Enterprise Linux just like it does in Apple or RHEL. The Nino portion is the Spanish word for male child, the implication being, of course, this project should always represent the immature version of what will grow up into Enterprise Linux. And then of course, collectively, El Nino is also the name of a type of weather pattern that occurs about every three to four years in the Northern Hemisphere and brings quite significant storms with it. So I feel like the metaphor there should be relatively obvious. So we embarked on El N and, sorry, what would eventually become El N as a more palatable public name as a mechanism of bootstrapping the next major version of RHEL continuously throughout the Fedora process rather than having them be two completely disjoint projects, we allow our engineers and our packages to be working towards the bootstrap of the next version of RHEL right from the moment that we fork off the current version of RHEL. So what exactly does that mean? What is it that El N does for us? It's an early preview of what RHEL N plus one will look like and it allows us to do some packaging and work and to maintain RHEL style changes upstream in Fedora and test them and prove out that they work well in advance of that moment when we break off in the next two years. We break off and start hardening RHEL. So what do those changes look like? Some of them are very straightforward. We've got things like compiler optimizations or compiler flags. Perhaps we know that the upcoming RHEL is going to drop support for really old hardware. So we wanna make sure that everything can still build if we have on the newer, higher baseline or on some new hardware that we may or may not have yet. Whether or not we wanna turn on some optional optimizations, things like LTO has been a very big topic over the last few years and I'm happy to say that we are nearing the middle of that process. So that's good. Some other things that are fairly common in RHEL but have traditionally not happened in Fedora is in RHEL, we try to minimize the number of packages that we have to maintain, particularly because we're maintaining it for a very, very long time. And that's a lot of work. Even for a relatively minor package, you have to worry about what happens when a CVE comes in, what happens when a major bug fix comes in. And for every package, we have to have somebody who's responsible for it. So naturally in RHEL, our goal is to try and find what is that minimum subset of packages that absolutely must be in the distribution in order for RHEL to be able to deliver on its promises of stability and its promises of being a platform for running stably whatever application you want to put on it. So one of the things that we've done a lot over the years is we've trimmed dependencies out where they may exist in Fedora, but we have, for example, many packages oftentimes have experimental or testing options that are enabled in Fedora because it's often usually built as a sub-package or otherwise made available in Fedora because that's what Fedora is. Fedora is exciting. Fedora is new. Fedora is features and we want our friends to have those features, but we have different needs in an enterprise distribution. So one of the things that Yelen allows us to do is to work further back in the timeline to trim out some of those things that probably aren't going to make it into RHEL, like an experimental feature that we know isn't ready for prime time or maybe we want to eliminate, not have to maintain a whole lot of build time dependencies. So maybe we allow the Yelen version of the package to not have to run its packaging time tests and instead we put those in a test suite that is allowed to pull packages from PyPy or Maven or any of the other packaging services instead of us having to maintain in the RHEL distribution the actual, the package for customers to use for arbitrary purposes for a decade. So in the past in RHEL eight, RHEL seven, RHEL six that tended to be the sort of thing that we started working on after that six to 12 month period of bootstrapping. Once we had a system that was working we then spent another six months generally pulling as many packages out of that as we could and sometimes more successfully than others and sometimes we would still end up with just cruft in the distro that we were now stuck with maintaining because we just couldn't find a way to stop that one package that was using it from pulling it in. With Yelen, we now have the opportunity and our packages especially our Red Hat people have that option now to make those changes add those conditionals or change those build flags six, 12, 18, 24 months before it's actually before we have to be cut down and this is it where at beta everything after this is a bug fix gives them that opportunity and in turn that means significantly less stress and more time spent on doing the things that engineers find interesting and customers love to see which is building features, fixing bugs, adding functionality and generally just making a better product for the user. So we do that and we'll be building that along in the way and Yelen has its own composes. We build every night we attempt to compose they've been broken on and off for the last month for a variety of different reasons generally related to dependencies turning up or disappearing that or changing names because we just branched off REL9 as everyone knows from Fedora 34 and now it's that churny period of Fedora's history where people tend to throw in all of the really big changes tend to go in right after that because they've been holding them back. So we're trying to get that back up and running but in general the goal is to have a preview of Yelen compose every day once a day. So I mentioned before a little bit about how we broke the inheritance in Fedora 34 and then sent to a stream then took over. We wanted to, at this point, all changes are now Yale only. At this point, this is really the point where we're finalizing the bootstrap we're trying to get to what we internally refer to as an alpha, we don't really have a public alpha release but that's the point at which that we used to describe as, okay, we've got a bootable installer. Now, nowadays we're doing that pretty much in sent to a stream, in this case, sent to a stream nine and it seems to, again, seems to be going really well and we've gotten quite a few non-Red Hat contributions which is absolutely delightful and exactly what we wanted to see. We learned a few things in this real nine process, Yale and to send to a stream nine process. First of all, when we initially designed the process we were going to follow, we had plans and we executed on these plans to branch from Fedora 34 at GA freeze, at final freeze. And the reason for that was because we wanted, we needed to have a hard date. We knew that the rail planning needed to know exactly when we could make that branch because there's a lot of moving parts that have to happen internally. And so what we did, so we reasoned that, okay, we wanna get it, pull in as much stuff from Fedora without having to have our packages maintaining, pulling things over manually as long as we can. So the latest fixed date we have is the GA freeze. So great, we broke at the final freeze for Fedora 34. What we discovered, however, was that this introduced a couple of, there's some confusion because there was that period of about a month and a half between the branch date when Fedora 34 became its own branch and the actual final freeze. And it turns out that month, month and a half really confused our packages because they didn't, they didn't, despite as much messaging as we tried to do, they couldn't follow that, okay, so committing it to Rawhide no longer gets it into what's going to be at EL, what's going to be rail nine. They had to, for a month, they had to commit to Fedora 34 and then all of a sudden now that closes off and they're committing to sent to a stream. So that was a bit of a struggle and that was a little confusing and people, and so what we're going to do next time around, which should be around Fedora 40 unless we skip, unless we change our numbering scheme or skip a release, we're gonna actually make that branch right at the Fedora 40 branching date instead of the final freeze date. And similarly, one of the other things that happened when we broke the inheritance at final freeze is, of course, that very moment, ELN suddenly stopped tracking rail nine and became, and started tracking rail 10. So anything that was going into Rawhide at that point, congratulations, that will be in the next version of rail as far as we know from now. And we have started already to bootstrap rail 10 and rail nine isn't even out yet in beta. That was the goal of this project and it's working and what we need from here is as much help as anyone's willing to give to help us get to that next rail 10. And if you have exciting things you wanna do there, you can already start doing that. It's not, you do it in Rawhide, Fedora gets, reaps the benefit and we automatically rebuild it with the ELN flags and compiler flags and optimizations and conditional macros. And we just try to keep that composed up and running and then somewhere down the line around Fedora 40. Rail 10 is spawned and that's how you get a rail. So I am going to move to questions and I'm on a different screen right now. All right, so I will go through the Q&A, Paul Flaherty. What is ELN and where do I get it as a test? Okay, so I hope that I've described what ELN is date and up to this point, but the compose for ELN is available at odcs.FedoraProject.org I believe and it's updated. Well, there's a compose attempted every night and the last successful one is always available under the latest sim link. So you can pull, you can pull an installer image or just install from the tree there anytime you wish. I don't see any other questions in the Q&A. Oh, sorry, can I have a link to the presentation? If you go to the schedule page on the Fedora Wiki for Nest, I put a link into the description on the schedule. It should be easy to find it's the only link on that page as the last I checked. Okay, I'm just scrolling past the back in the chat now because I don't see any, oh wait, this is going to sound silly. Is there any documentation on how to bootstrap something similar to RHEL? Well, not really, that's, again, that was the problem. One of the problems we were trying to solve with ELN was it's too, they were too separated and they were too far apart and the teams tended to change. So we didn't have a whole lot of institutional knowledge and by extension didn't have an easy way to transfer that knowledge and to store it. So at this point, what we're trying to do is we're not going to be just attempting to describe how to start an entirely new operating, an entirely new operating system or an entirely new distribution. That's, well, actually that's not entirely true. We are going to be discussing is how to create a new distribution using Fedora as its base and some of that's covered in material that's available to Fedora remixes, the documentation that we have for that and some of that is still needs to be written. If you are interested in learning how to do that and in turn helping write that documentation, we would love to have you. We have an ELN special interest group. It meets every other Friday, usually. I think we canceled this week or was it, I forget if it was supposed to be this week or next week on IRC. I hope that answers your question. If it doesn't please ask, feel free to ask another. How do we get features included into ELN? So in general, if you make changes to one of the packages that is currently on the ELN content list, those are gonna go in for the next, for well-ten unless the maintainers of that package rejected outright. If you have new features, new functionality, new packages that you really wanna get into ELN and Braille, that is a little trickier and that's going to involve a conversation with Red Hat because we do, again, try to keep the things very small, but if there's a good justification for it then File of Bugzilla, Ask for Inclusion, it will build it in Fedora proper first. File of Bugzilla against Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Ask for Included to be included. On top of that, we are also looking at, and this is gonna touch a little bit on Troy's question about what is ELN extras. We're going to be looking at building a, something like Apple that tracks ELN throughout its life cycle and eventually when ELN forks into a stream have that fork into the next version of Apple as well. I'm actually going to invite, if Troy wants to talk a little bit more about that, he's definitely the expert, so I'd invite him to join as a speaker if he wants to cover a little more. Going to admit I'm not entirely sure how I approve him doing that, or if I can. If Marie is still here, maybe she can help. She is not still here, is she? Okay, well, in that case, I hope that my current explanation serves and if not, please feel free to ask for additional questions or Troy, if you want to just type in the chat, you're completely wrong, that's also valid. Just scrolling back through the chat real quickly to see if there were any questions that didn't make it to the Q and A. Rachel, you always think of Rel as female. I actually tend to agree with you on this, but the Chris Farley joke didn't work, so otherwise it would have gone with La Nina, but then also the EL wouldn't have worked and then it's just all false part. Thank you for the comments about the memes. I was hoping that would go over well. Oh, and David Cavalca, and I apologize if I'm mispronouncing that, has mentioned that they also mirror ELN at mirror.facebook.net slash fedora ELN. And, oh, got one more question. Is there any way to find you guys in IRC? Yes, we are on libera.chat. We were formerly on FreeNode in the pound fedora-ELN channel. You can also find us on the regular fedora-devel channel as I think that is a proper super set of people that hang out in fedora-ELN. So please feel free to join us and we'd love to have you. Oh, I almost forgot. If you also, if you wanna find us by email, we use the regular fedora-devel list. We normally just add to the subject line brackets ELN to make sure that it calls attention to those of us working on ELN. One more question. Is there a matrix room for fedora-ELN? I think, well, I mean, we are, I believe we only just have libera-chat bouncing through matrix. So, ah, here we are. Welcome, Roy. Sorry about that. Three minutes, if you would be so kind. ELN extras for those packages that are not in the red hat set. So red hat says, we want all these packages in the next row, but you want to track it for some other reason. Currently, the only thing right in there right now is the KDE set, which I put in. The reason we are actually not planning on moving these over to ELN and Apple next time, but it is so that KDE wants to make sure that the packages will build properly in the rail setting in Apple. So we are gonna track it. So as in three years, as we make changes to the KDE packages, we know that they will build on rail without any of this. If fedora is greater than 40 problems. When we did rally, that was the biggest thing. If fedora is greater than 30, do this. And it's supposed to do rail. Anyway, the ELN extras, not gonna be part of rail, but isn't automatically moved into Apple next, but it can be. If you want to know about Apple next, see my talk tomorrow. Yes, absolutely. Please, anyone who is interested in Apple next or ELN next, Troy is giving a talk tomorrow at 2.30. Or it depends what time zone you're in. I'm sorry, Eastern, 11, okay. So yes, 2.30 Eastern time, which is the con standard time according to the wiki. But thank you very much. And with that, I believe we have come up to the end of our time. So if you have any further questions, I will be hanging around the events. I'll probably hang around in the social channel for a while. Feel free to come up and ask. Thank you very much, everyone.