Due to prior commitments at University (blasted presentations and assignments!), unfortunately I missed the first day of Monki Gras. Having missed day 1 of the first conference I would attend in 2017, I was feeling mildly anxious. I was anxious about meeting new people. I was anxious about not being able to engage in thoughtful conversations following the topics speakers had spoken about the previous day. I was anxious about being the least tech-savvy guy attending the conference. Yet, as I arrived at 9:50am I was warmly welcomed and introduced to Bryan Boreham, Director of Engineer at Weaveworks (a tech startup making OpenSource tools for cloud computing). We had a brief chat, after which he introduced me to the other Diversity Scholars. Regrettably, there was not enough time to talk to each scholar; the first talk was about to start.
In what looked like an excellently tailor-made grey suit, James began the day with a number of witty jokes and comments before introducing the first speaker of day 2, Gergely Imreh of Resin.io. Gregely’s talk on high-level projects vs low-level projects was accompanied by hand-drawn slides which was quite unusual but very effective (a style I can definitely see myself adopting in the future). The question that remained with me from his talk was: how do we create frustration-free packaging? Will it be possible to create a product that does not have a ‘customer-benefits-first’ approach, nor a ‘business-benefits-first’ approach? His parting words, “treat your code as a luxury product” was the perfect summary of his talk.
Gregely’s talk was shortly followed by a panel discussion on which sat Tracy Miranda (Kichwa Coders), Abby Kearns (Executive Director at Cloud Foundry Foundation), Erica Brescia (COO of Bitnami), and Alexis Richardson (CEO of Weaveworks). Discussing problems others have with open source, the advantages of open source, and the difficulty of building a business around open source, with some businesses having a relatively successful model and others failing miserably, the panel discussion enabled the others who attended the conference to participate.
If you have ever wondered how important the environment is, look no further than MobiCycle, a company by Roslyn Scott which leverages technology for social impact by creating technical solutions to address the barriers for consumers who want to reuse, repair or recycle their electronic and electrical waste. Roslyn discussed the three duelling dichotomies: (1) Clean vs. dirty: rather than focusing on reducing the amount of waste produced, we follow the philosophy of ‘out of sight, out of mind’ by dumping waste where it does not disturb our conscience. (2) Good vs. bad: the penalisation of non-conformists. (3) Recyclers vs. non-recyclers. The issues with these dichotomies, as Roslyn concluded, is that they are jointly exhaustive and are seen as mutually exclusive. On a side note: as a diversity scholar, it was inspiring to see a black woman give a talk at such an event, and I hope there is more to come!
We (or at least I) often wonder how important language is and its effects on us. Deriving from the book Metaphors We Live By (written by George Lackoff), Alvaro Videla’s book Metaphors We Compute By was the foundation of his talk on the importance metaphors have in our code quality and products we ship. Metaphors dictate how we think, how we behave, how we perceive, and how the conceptual system is built. We understand argument is war (i.e. “his criticisms were right on target”). But what if we changed this? What if we understood argument as dance? Rather than being confrontational at all moments and viewing life as a cycle of winners and losers, what would happen if we changed this?
Possibly my favourite talk of the day, the Cofounder of Styk, Guy Podjarny, gave a talk on packaging in relation to physical products, commercial software and open source. Products are never perfect, so what happens when something goes wrong? They (typically) get recalled. However: (1) what warrants a recall? (2) How are owners notified? (3) Who’s responsible? With regards to physical products we know that safety recalls and quality recalls are most common. We are usually notified about these in the news (as with the Volkswagen scandal) or informed by the vendor with responsibility being placed on the vendor. Commercial software is quite similar, with safety and quality issues warranting recalls. However, the noticeable difference between physical products and commercial software is that we refer to recalls as ‘updates’ and this often causes confusion since there is no distinction between software that is simply being updated and software that is being recalled. Updates in open source tend to be due to security issues or flaws, and are recognised as versioning (which is essentially a form of updates). With open source, the ownership for recalls is on the consumer; however, a crucial point on which Guy ended his talk was that, we need to find a way to make tracking and fixing recalls easy on open source.
Austin Collins talk on the story of the serverless framework, and Gordon Haff’s short history of packaging were both insightful as well as engaging. The calibre of speakers at The Monki Gras was nothing short of excellent.
I would like to give a massive thank you to James Governor and the whole team! Thank you for the opportunity and thank you for holding such a great conference. Thank you to the speakers for providing such insightful talks. And finally, thank you to Eclipse Foundation for the scholarship!
You can follow us on twitter:
Rodney Gold D @rodneygoldd
Gergley Imreh @imrehg
Alvaro Videla @old_sound
Guy Podjarny @guypod
Austin Collins @austincollins
Monki Gras @monkigras
Eclipse Foundation @EclipseFdn
