Everett Toews

I wanted to somehow contribute to the OpenStack Bug Squashing today but I wasn’t sure what bug to squash. I didn’t have much time to participate so it had to be something I could complete within a couple of hours from scratch. I personally know several members of the OpenStack doc team so I checked out the OpenStack Manuals bug list to see where I could help. Anne helpfully suggested taking a look at this bug.

Recently I was writing some code and ran into a problem. Same old story. It happens all the time to developers everywhere. I began decomposing the problem, tried to isolate it, Googled error messages, explored different approaches to do the same thing, etc. All of the usual stuff I do when I run up against a nasty bug. But the bug persisted and I began to run out of thing to try.

jclouds 1.5.3 was officially released over the weekend. Another solid release from the jclouds community. Among a number of new features was the support I added for OpenStack Cinder and Rackspace Cloud Block Storage.

I had to share a couple of shiny new tools that I’ve recently incorporated into my workflow.

I’ve written about deploying devstack before in Contributing OpenStack Support to jclouds. That post covered running devstack locally in VirtualBox. I’ve been using that method for a while now but with a devstack env in VirtualBox, a jclouds dev env, browser, chat client, mail client, etc. etc. etc. all running on the same laptop it gets bogged down. I’m pretty sure I heard gears grinding and smoke was pouring out of the laptop at one point. I just don’t have the cores, RAM, and RPMs to run everything smoothly and you need smoothly or development starts to suck.

The OpenStack Grizzly Summit has wrapped up and it was another huge success. The new format of having the Summit and Conference at the same time worked well. Good venue, the wifi held up, the organizers accommodated the overflow people (i.e. 200-300 unregistered attendees) with amazing aplomb, there were always healthy food choices, and coffee/water was present at all times. All in all, great organization by the OpenStack Foundation that allowed everyone to stay focused on the task at hand, improving OpenStack in every way possible.