Last month, we spent two and a half days in Budapest with some of our best community friends. Let's catch up on Contributor Summit, what we learned, and more.
Last month, we spent two and a half days in Budapest with some of our best community friends. I think the summary of Contributor Summit was the one common complaint I heard:
"There was too much good content and it was really hard to decide between workshops!" said everybody.
That's a really good problem to have and is the hallmark of a great experience. The key was in how the event was organized. Rather than tightly control the messaging, we simply asked our facilitators to build workshops that spoke to them and to just bring their best selves to the table ready to collaborate.
This was part of our new focus on the community contributor experience. The whole Summit practically crackled with electricity and what felt like every attendee came up to tell me how productive it was for them.
What are we covering?
In this podcast, we talk about what made Contributor Summit special and some of the lessons we learned. We spoke with Tim Meusel, better known as bastelfreak, about the critical role that Vox Pupuli plays in our ecosystem. We even talked about marathon training, dispelled some misconceptions that Ben had about his mom's cooking, and established a clear winner in the German vs. Hungarian goulash rivalry.
What else? Well, you'll just have to listen to find out!
Learn more
• Have opinions about the best goulash recipes
• Help review Vox Pupuli pull requests
• Join the Portland Marathon training plan
• See Portland's premiere pinball venue
• Register for PuppetizePDX
• Puppet Open Source projects (including Litmus)
Andrew [00:00:19] Hello everyone. Thank you for joining us today on Pulling the Strings. Today's episode we'll be going over the Contributor Summit that just passed recently — what went on, what people did, what people learned. And we have a couple special guests in the house. Feel free to introduce yourselves.
Ben [00:00:36] Hey everybody my name is Ben Ford here at Puppet. I'm our developer advocate, community manager, something like that. I mean I just do cool stuff here and I talk to a lot of cool people like Tim who is our other guest on the line.
Tim [00:00:49] Hi, I'm Tim. I'm a DevOps engineer at GoDaddy in Cologne, Germany and in my free time I spend a lot of time working on the Vox Pupuli and managing the Puppet community.
Andrew [00:01:02] Huge thank you to you Tim for making the time to join our podcast today. I know it's late over there. Are you well caffeinated? Are you ready to do this?
Tim [00:01:09] I'm 100 percent ready. Yes.
Andrew [00:01:11] Awesome. Before we dive in to post-Contributor Summit details I need to know what was the goulash game like in Budapest? Tell me all the details.
Ben [00:01:23] That's right. I told you about like the bike tour that like toured across Budapest and like sampled all of the different goulashes everywhere. And I'm sad to report that I never did make it to the bike tour, but I did try a lot of goulash and...
Andrew [00:01:38] It's still a win.
Ben [00:01:39] Still a win, always a win. We just like evolve a little bit like we change a scope and that way we can still call it a win, right. So I learned something very important about my own heritage I think and that is that what I grew up knowing as goulash was not actually goulash. They just call it beef stew over there. So goulash is one kind of soup and beef stew is another kind of soup. But the thing that my mother called goulash was just beef stew.
Andrew [00:02:12] Which is different than 'Murican beef stew.
Ben [00:02:14] Well yes very different from American beef stew. There's a lot of paprika in it. And it was delicious. It was absolutely delicious. And I actually learned that goulash is maybe not my thing. I mean it was all right. But but beef stew, that's my jam.
Andrew [00:02:29] Right on, right on. What about you Tim? Did you get in on any goulash slash beef stew?
Tim [00:02:34] Yes I tried a lot of it in the old town. We have a lot of different goulash sorts in Germany. They are very very similar and not much different to learn. But it's always nice to get to a different country and enjoy the different ingredients that they put into and how they spice it. Can highly recommend a trip to it.
Andrew [00:02:57] Right on. So is there a goulash turf war, kind of like in America we have like New York style pizza versus Chicago deep dish. Is there like German goulash versus rest of world?
Tim [00:03:09] Oh that's that's a very good question. We have some German specialties. Yes it's true. They add a huge amount of wine into it and cook it for a very long long time.
Andrew [00:03:23] You've won me over.
Tim [00:03:24] People've told me that that's the German version.
Andrew [00:03:26] I'll take it. Sounds delicious.
Ben [00:03:28] You've already got the points in Andrew's book. I think we have declared a German goulash as the winner.
Andrew [00:03:33] All right. And if you want to contest that you know where to find us on social media. And oh yeah, by the way, I'm you're easily distracted host, Andrew Nhem, managing editor of puppet.com. So while my heart wants to spend 90 more minutes, 120 minutes, who knows the rest of the day - yeah, and stomach - we want to talk about goulash. Let's get back to the main topic here which is to break down what went on at Contributor Summit. So guys tell me a little bit about the event. I didn't go. I had to stay around in Portland, you know, look after the show, but I would love to hear from folks with the feet on the street.
Ben [00:04:07] You really missed out. It was an incredible event in an incredible place. We had practically a whole week of people who like shared a lot of ideas and had a lot of things to talk about all in the same space. Some of those ideas were shared, some of those things were talked about like on the floor at Contributor Summit itself, but we also we went out for dinner every night and we hung out for another day afterwards and we played pinball. Tim can probably talk about the pinball museum in a little bit. And we just we spent a lot of time just sort of bouncing ideas off of each other and just like that's one of the things that I feel like is just incredibly important to building a strong vibrant community.
Andrew [00:04:54] That sounds amazing. Tim, I'd heard you know back here at Portland headquarters, we were looking at snippets and pictures from the event, the theme seem to be lots of hands on keyboards, smiles on faces. Tell me a bit about that, Tim.
Tim [00:05:07] Yes. I really enjoyed the event. The venue wasn't too big but it wasn't too small. We had a big open space many small tables and everybody could sit together and discuss and actually work on your laptops and develop some new code. And also listen to great talks. So I think it was was a very successful event for me as an attendee. Yeah I'm looking for new events that are coming up in the future. Speaking about the pinball event in the beginning there was an on our first night and in Budapest. We visited the biggest museum in Europe with a lot of pinball machines. I think they have over 50 or 60 machines and we could even play on every of them all of them were working and we did a little tournament against each other. It was a great way to get in touch with all the different people from all the different countries that all speak a different language and having the pinball machines around helped us to break the barrier and to get in touch more easily I think
Andrew [00:06:26] Pinball's the Rosetta Stone of games.
Ben [00:06:29] Yeah, totally. And kind of like the tournament really gave people like impetus to go talk to somebody that they may or may not have talked to before because we sort of had to like you had a name and you had to go figure out who that name was and then you had to decide which game you were going to play and then you had to like run through and play the game and take your turns and everything. And there was a lot of conversation that ended up just kind of organically coming out of that that maybe wouldn't have if we hadn't run that pinball tournament to begin with.
Andrew [00:07:01] That is awesome. I'm also a little disappointed Vox Pupuli held a pinball tournament, basically the World Cup of pinball and it wasn't live streamed. Really guys, really.
Ben [00:07:15] Well that's a growth opportunity for next year.
Andrew [00:07:18] Right on. Speaking of which, you know Portland is also a great scene for smaller independent events much like Contributor Summit. There's something about it. It's charming. It's very interesting when you get like-minded people together to think through difficult challenges, solve new problems. What was it about the event this year that made it so different and unique?
Ben [00:07:41] So the big change about this event from the events in the past was that we used to be like kind of married to PuppetConf. And that gave us some benefits that you didn't really have to get approval to go to another event. All you needed to do would just kind of show up a day early to PuppetConf and go to this. But it also like sort of set the scene as to like expectations of what the event was gonna be like. It was people who were going to PuppetConf who also felt like I mean I can show up to Contributor Summit as well. I think that separating it pulling it out let us focus a lot more on just the technical aspects and the community aspects. It let us just kind of like we didn't talk about roadmaps. We didn't talk about timelines. We didn't talk about hey here's a new release coming up in the future. We talked about here are some technologies, here are some really cool things you can do with those technologies, and let's kind of work together and brainstorm. Like what are what are some great ideas that can come out of like the synergy of you and I sitting together hacking on this. And I think that that's something that we've kind of been missing out on for a little bit. So having a venue that was tight like Tim was saying but wasn't like too small. It was it was like kind of like that right size. It was the perfect size enough people to tip critical mass but not so many that it was overwhelming. And we just, we hacked. We did amazing things.
Tim [00:09:06] Yeah. I can only agree on that. It was very good. In previous conferences most of them had multiple tracks at the time and you never knew which talk you should attend to. But this was the case for the last Contributor Summit. So this was the single slot event which was very very good I think. You know it's, there wasn't any sales pitch in any talk which is something I don't like as a technical person. I don't want anybody pitching to me, it's just all software. I would like to understand how technology works and what's coming up next and Puppet delivered this in a perfect way.
Andrew [00:09:44] That's awesome. You know when you go to an event like this it takes time. It takes energy. We live in an age where you can watch a lot of stuff on YouTube. You can take a training course for $9.99. But nothing really replaces an event like this where you get together and hack on projects together, solve problems together. Tell our newer listeners out there, perhaps folks who are wondering how do I learn more about DevOps practices, how do I learn more about config management, infrastructure automation, what is the value of getting together like this already and combining it with a curriculum that also includes you know stuff you learn on the interwebs?
Ben [00:10:28] That's a really really good question and I think what it what it comes down to especially as you're getting to know something, especially when you're starting out learning things, you don't always know what to ask. You don't always know what to look for, you don't know what to explore. And it's really easy to get caught up in the wrong thing or go down in the weeds in something that isn't quite as productive as it could be. And sitting in a room like in collaboration with other people that you're that you're working with, it lets you sort of like organically pick up on the things, the topics that are that are hot, the things that are of interest, like lets you sort of like learn from the conversations that other people are having and also gives you space to say "Wait, hang on. That's a thing I'm interested in. That's something that could solve this problem at my company that I didn't even really know that I had." And so it's just kind of like that organic growth of knowledge rather than prescriptive, here's a thing that you need to go like study ABC and D and then you're going to be an expert.
Andrew [00:11:30] I had the privilege of watching Ben, Kara Sowles and Anna Velasco basically coordinate an event on the other side of the world here from Portland. That is no easy task. I've heard many positive things coming out of Contributor Summit. There had to have been challenges along the way, right. I love to hear some of those from Ben, you know for an attendee like yourself Tim, to let people know out there about you know how these things are wildly complex things that need to be coordinated and what, you know, random things you may run into along the way.
Ben [00:12:00] Absolutely, totally. And in reality the thing is like no matter how big the event is that you're looking at no matter how well established it is, it's always a work in progress. It's always something that's growing and evolving. You go to a big AWS event, you go to Dreamforce or something, that's a thing that is growing and changing every single year. It's just that the changes are a lot more noticeable when when an event is smaller or when it's new. So one of the things that we honestly I think that we kind of miscalculated to begin with is how big of a change decoupling this from PuppetConf was going to be. In years past we sort of like had the privilege of being able to kind of coast along with PuppetConf and we didn't have to do like for example any of the promotion that goes into a new event or anything. And this year we had to start thinking about those things for the first time and we kind of misjudged how much that would carry over. And there were a couple of stumbling blocks along the way. And we had to learn a lot of hard lessons about what it means to build a new event what it means to take and stand something up brand new and pull something off. And I think that we had a couple of those sort of like humbling moments of "Hey, wait a minute. You know what, we had these grandiose dreams of what this was going to be. Let's kind of take that scope and pull it back down to the core and let's focus on what's important and not about what's grandiose." And I think that that's one of the things that let us pull off such a great event. At least I hope it was great, from my standpoint it felt like it was really good and I would love to hear like whether Tim felt that there were things that could have been done better at.
Tim [00:13:39] I don't think that there is anything that you could really improve without thinking about the event. Everything went fine. The venue was good. I think everything was properly organized. The food was good. We had huge luck with the weather, very very nice. And also the city that you choose, Budapest is pretty pretty cheap especially compared to San Francisco in 2017 for PuppetConf. One thing that I learned is, I live in Europe and we have a bunch of coins to pay with and paper money, but in Budapest I cannot pay with my Euros. They have a different currency, which is something that I learned while landing on their airport. So I wasn't as much prepared as I should have been. It's more something as my personal take away.
Ben [00:14:33] That's an interesting point actually because as an American traveling through like Europe and Asia and like other countries, I'm used to like having to change my currency into the local currency and then like that was an expected thing for me. So it's not often that I talk to a European and I have like I don't know what the leg up when it comes to currency.
Andrew [00:14:55] I have two recommendations for the event next year. Live stream the Vox Pupuli World Cup of Pinball. And also team jerseys by country. Thank you.
Tim [00:15:04] It's a nice idea, yeah.
Ben [00:15:08] But there are some really good ideas for things that we could do better next next year because I feel like where we are right now was it was kind of like on the lower end of the sweet spot of the size of the event. I'd love to grow it in size a little bit. I'd like to make it maybe maybe double the size that it was but I don't want to go to much bigger than that. But there are things that we could do that we to make that even I don't know make that work even better. I'd like to have like peripheral events so it's not just PuppetizePDX and Contributor Summit, but I'd like to also have like that like a sort of other events surrounding it and I'd like to get people more involved earlier so that when they when they come to the event they have some more expectations about like what we're going to be working on what we're gonna be talking about and we can present kind of like the culmination of some of these projects. So there are lots of things that we could do I think, and livestream. I think that's a given. The pinball, livestream the pinball.
Andrew [00:16:08] Let's talk a little bit about community. It is no joke. To be a part of a community like Puppet's. I mean, you're doing your day job and then you are spending your free time - this is time you could be using gardening, binge watching things on your favorite streaming...
Ben [00:16:22] Or if you're Tim, barbecuing.
Andrew [00:16:25] There you go. Always be barbecuing. But instead you are contributing back to modules, open source tools that help folks in their automation endeavor. I want to know a little more about Vox Pupuli, Tim. I mean you and the crew. This is a volunteer run organization that is a big part of the Puppet community.
Ben [00:16:44] I'd even go as far as to say that they're almost a pillar of the community.
Andrew [00:16:49] Just one pillar?
Ben [00:16:50] The foundation. There we go. They're the foundation of the community. Yeah. I don't know if we can overstate that.
Andrew [00:16:56] Titanium. Titanium foundation of the community, Vox Pupuli. Go for it, Tim.
Tim [00:17:02] Yeah sure. Just add more pressure on it. Yeah, Vox Pupuli. So I think it's pretty amazing how the community evolved in the past three or four years. We started as a very very small group with like 10 to 15 people contributing to Puppet modules from time to time. And if I check our current GitHub organization stats we have more than 120 modules, 160 GitHub modules in total and something around 170 people with merge access to all the repository stuff we own. Many of us are going to DevOps meetups or conferences and just speak about Vox Pupuli, how the community is organized, and what we do in our day to day work. Most of our people do this in their free time. They don't get paid to attend such conferences but it's a very nice feeling to work in a nice environment with friendly people that are open minded to new technology. And this gives us some power to to just keep working on it and makes a lot of fun.
[00:18:23] One thing that I think is a little bit interesting and to like make use of like one of those horrible buzzwords is that I kind of think that Vox Pupuli is one of those thought leaders in the DevOps world. People look up to Vox as being sort of like these are the people who know how this stuff works. I should pay attention to them and the people on the PMC or sort of like shepherding that. They're sort of like putting together those guardrails of late keeping this community going in a productive manner. I think it's amazing what they've been able to accomplish.
Andrew [00:18:57] And I agree. And Tim, if there are folks out there who are hearing what you're all about and wanting to get involved, how can they do so?
Tim [00:19:05] So we have a website voxpupuli.org that everybody can check out. It contains a lot of documentation about all the modules that we have and how people can contribute to the actual repositories, but also links to our IRC channel data we have on freenode and another link to a mailing list and also to our Slack channel. So there are many ways to get in touch with us. The community's spread around the globe and we almost cover every time zone, so whenever you have a question I would like to just reach out to us and chat. Somebody will be available in most cases.
Andrew [00:19:43] That's awesome. For those of you listening to the web site, we'll include links in the show notes.
Ben [00:19:50] Yeah and it's also worth pointing out that the friction for getting involved is actually very very low. If you happen to use one of Vox's modules or one of their tools and you find something that you want to add or fix or whatever, then you can just make a pull request. So you can just look at this and go "Huh, I could fix that thing" and make a pull request and that's sort of like your intro, your gateway into this organization. And maybe then next week you make another pull request and maybe down the road you'll start commenting on some of the issues and you just sort of like organically get welcomed into this group of people. It's not a very large barrier to entry.
Tim [00:20:35] I would like to add something to this. We have a bunch of open pull requests and many people think that to review such a request you need to be an actual member of GitHub organization, but that's not true. Like everybody can check out the open issues that we have and also the open pull requests and just see through the code, comment on it, or just click the approval button if you think the code is working, or if you've tested it. This makes it way easier for us to merge the code and to speed up the development process. And it's also a nice way to get in touch with the code base and the other developers that we have.
Ben [00:21:15] It's worth pointing out that if you go to the voxpupuli.org web page there's a link right in the header that will open up the pull request list and you can find those very easily and just list them out. Look at them, see what you think.
Andrew [00:21:27] Thanks you guys. I've got an interesting question here for both of you. It's pretty clear that the community, Vox Pupuli, you all are doing a bunch of work, heroics in a fly by night manner. There's got to be a way to tap into my resources. I mean a question that immediately pops in my mind is if all this goodness is happening you know what else could Puppet the organization be doing to support these efforts. Outside of fun podcast episodes and pinball tournaments and events in Europe.
Ben [00:21:56] But one thing that we're doing already is that we're helping out kind of like helping with some of their infrastructure needs. We're giving them spots, like Travis slots for testing and all of that. I would love to be able to expand that and I would love to be able to give them more access to some of our resources and build some tools that help not only us, but Vox Pupuli. I'm working on, like myself I'm working on some tools that will provide some insights, like development insights, into what sort of problems people are running into and what sort of impact potential changes are going to make towards downstream modules, various things like that. And I want to make Vox Pupuli like an equal partner and working on those and using those metrics and using those tools. But I am really curious to hear what Tim has to think about that.
Tim [00:22:50] I think development gets easier if you have very good defined standards and if there is only one standard to follow. So Puppet has many many people that develop Puppet modules. The same is valid for the formal organization and also for Vox Pupuli, for the CERN organization from Europe, so there are many many groups with multiple developers that all do the same stuff basically and all of us define their own development guidelines and rules and guidelines for review and pull requests and stuff like this. And I think if we all could work closer together to have less standards, but better standards for reviewing code and for style guides. This would help many of us and it would also make contributions from new people way easier.
Ben [00:23:54] Yeah I think that I would really like that a lot. Earlier today we were even talking about building like a reference architecture that Vox Pupuli could publish. I would love it if we sort of like worked with them and then we promoted that as well as like this is the standard open source reference architecture. I think there is a lot of opportunity there for like collaboratively building good standards.
Tim [00:24:17] Yes true. I check the Puppet documentation from time to time, basically after every release. The docs are pretty great and a very good example. It's about the actual Puppet language, about the DSL, about stuff that you can do and stuff that you can't do, but there aren't really recommendations. Like there are many many ways to achieve the same thing. And it's not really documented which way is the best and there are always some edge cases that you can't cover in every document. And on Vox Pupuli we notice that we have so many people that review pull requests and they own different time zones and we would like to have a high quality of our code base across all repositories. But discussing such things in Slack or on an email list is very complicated and takes a lot of time. So we just started to write down everything that we agreed on on our website and it started as a very very short document with like five bullet points and at the moment it's like two pages long and has 30 or 40 different items on it, and this document is growing over time. If we could make this on a long point of view an unofficial standard or an official document I think that would help many many people.
Ben [00:25:38] Yeah, we should totally get Jean [Bond] working with you to turn that into some more official recommendations and let you more or less kind of like own that as a reference.
Andrew [00:25:48] So folks. As you heard, community work, it's hard work, it's beneficial work. It often goes unthanked. Let's take a quick moment and applaud all the community members out there, whether you're a Puppet community member or a member of any other technological community where you're wanting to mentor, share ideas, best practices, you go. You are a winner in our books. Speaking of winners, one of us here has won an MVP award. Ben, who won?
Ben [00:26:17] Well it wasn't me and it wasn't you. So that leaves it down to Tim, who's won our MVP award again. I think this year we've decided that maybe we'll put term limits on that, so maybe that we know that Tim's not going to win the award again next year. So that gives us more difficult choices because honestly Tim was kind of like the shoe-in. It wasn't a who should be MVP this year was like, "Well is there anybody who can even approach like the amount of contributions that Tim does? No? Well I guess Tim's MVP again." So, no surprise. Tim you're awesome and you do great things for our community and I am honestly a little bit overawed at how much you end up doing. I'm kind of fascinated with how you're able to put so much work into the community and how you're able to do that and also maintain your sanity.
Tim [00:27:15] Thank you. Thank you so much for the nice words. It started out pretty pretty low with just a few reviews and merges on modules that I used on my own like three and a half years ago, and it just got more and more. I think one of the key facts here is that getting positive feedback for the work that you do is always awesome and most companies aren't really able to deliver this and because like well they already pay you money so separate appreciation is rare. But this is different in an open source community. Like people just sending out emails and say that the work that you do is pretty awesome and that just gives you more power to keep working on it.
Ben [00:28:05] That's something that I've seen quite a bit in Vox Pupuli. Like one of my earliest memories of working with Tim and Vox Pupuli is having a conversation about a brand new contributor, somebody who had just like stepped in and deciding what sort of gift that Tim was going to send this person to say thanks for contributing. And I was kind of blown away that he was willing to go to the effort of like even thinking of that. So I think that really says something about the kind of person that Tim is.
Andrew [00:28:34] You're a winner, Tim. You're a winner. So what are your hopes for the future of the org and for the community at large, Tim?
Tim [00:28:41] Tricky question. It would be nice to get more contributors. We have a bunch of open issues and it would be nice if we could clean up most of the backlog that we have. We're currently working on more optimization to make the work easier for all the people that we have, and that's looking good so far. And we just hope that the community keeps growing.
Ben [00:29:08] Yeah I think that that also that identifies another thing that we could collaborate with Vox Pupuli on, is that as far as I can tell one of the key things that keeps that organization working so effectively is how much they like ruthlessly and relentlessly automate as much as they can. And I think there is a large opportunity for all of us to sort of work together and build like standard automation for Puppet modules as a platform.
Andrew [00:29:35] So guys I got to know, what were your favorite projects coming out of Contributor Summit?
Ben [00:29:40] I think the thing that people were most excited about was Litmus, to be honest. Litmus is a testing tool that is sort of like the successor to some other tooling that we've had in the past. There's been a kind of a family of tools - there's Beaker and then a bunch of other tools around Beaker that just kind of we mishmash them together and use them for acceptance testing. Litmus is a new idea of saying, "Hey you know what. We have tooling in place to do a lot of the orchestration that we had to manually manage before. And we've got tooling that does really good unit testing and like integration acceptance testing. Why don't we just like take a fresh look at all of that. And then use this new simple glue layer to pull those together and make a very simple, very easy, very quick testing layer for Puppet modules?" And it's developed pretty quickly so it's brand new right now. And there was a little bit of interest a lot of people kind of like looking at it here and there but after Summit people came into that, looked at it, saw what it could do, kind of poked at it, got their fingers on it - like hands on keyboard time you were talking about - and like since then I don't think a single day has gone by without another pull request or a comment or an issue. It has turned into maybe our most like vibrant project in the Puppet ecosystem right now.
Andrew [00:31:09] You hear that, Bolt team? You got competition.
Ben [00:31:11] Well, Litus is using bolt on the back end. So they're also benefiting from this.
Andrew [00:31:16] True. So for folks out there, our module builders, our module makers, who are wanting a better means to test, where can they find Litmus, Ben?
Ben [00:31:26] That's a very good question because you can find it at its GitHub repository which is a simple github.com/puppetlabs/puppet_litmus but I believe that we also recently just pulled it up into our open source page which if you go to puppet.com/open-source.
Andrew [00:31:44] Awesome. What about you, Tim? What was your favorite project or thing coming out of the Contributor Summit?
Tim [00:31:50] I got two projects. One of them is Bolt. It's very very awesome to basically replace Ansible, and I'd say to run a masterless Puppet set up and it was nice that Lucy [Wyman] was there to chat with and also many many other people that are already using Bolt so I could get some actual hands-on experience from those people. And also I learned a lot of stuff about Puppet Debugger which was completely new to me. It's a nice interactive shell to really debug all your Puppet code to see which variables are available in your current scope and which values they have and to [identify] really complicated issues that you might experience from time to time.
Andrew [00:32:41] I want to acknowledge once again: Tim, you are a winner in my book. But you're not the only winner here. I want to acknowledge that producer Enya is wearing an awesome button-up shirt. She's showing up dressing for the role, outperforming us all. Enya you too are a winner. So Contributor Summit wasn't the only event going on this year. The community team at Puppet is also working on another one around the corner called PuppetizePDX. Ben, tell us a little bit about it.
Ben [00:33:12] Well I'm going to take a real short segue first. Coming back to a point you made earlier about pinball tournaments and about Portland and then relating it back to PuppetizePDX. Eric Sorenson or Eric0 as many people know him and I were talking about how well that tournament in Budapest went off and coincidentally we also have a pinball arcade. I don't know if I would go as far as to call them a museum, they're more like a bar. They don't have quite the same sort of like appeal of being down in the basement with like the dungeon arching over you and everything the Budapest Pinball Museum has, but there's still pretty good. We were talking about also running a pinball tournament here before PuppetizePDX. And by the look on your face I think that's like a vote in your book is to say yes we should do that.
Andrew [00:34:06] Yeah. Will there be jerseys? With teams? World Cup?
Ben [00:34:09] I'll leave that up to you.
Andrew [00:34:12] Oh, alright. Yeah that sounds like a great idea.
Ben [00:34:15] So PuppetizePDX is sort of like the other... we talked about how Summit was split off from PuppetConf. PuppetizePDX is the other half of that. So it is the spiritual successor of PuppetConf. So it'll have all the same sort of things. There will be of course like the roadmap talks and the new product announcements and a few of the sales-y things that Tim doesn't like, but it's also got all of the technical content that we've always had in PuppetConf. There'll be people presenting about solutions that they're working on, there'll be people presenting about problems that they've they've struggled with, about ideas that they have about tools that they've built, and there will be lots of time for collaboration. We'll be having a hackathon the day before sort of like free time in the office with subject matter experts freely available to help you solve problems that you're working on. You can use that time to contribute to Puppet, contribute to a module, or build a tool of your own and call on the expertise of people here who know the technologies inside and out. And we'll also be doing sort of bird of the feather conversations that are a little bit reminiscent of some of the things that we did at that Summit but more in the context of hey here's a lot of new tools that we've been talking about. There's a lot of roadmapping here. There's also this great big ecosystem, this DevOps ecosystem that is out beyond what what Puppet currently addresses. What are some things that we can do? Like how are we as community members addressing all the problems that we see here? How are we what what processes are we building what tools are we building. How are we using puppet to integrate and solve some of these problems? What are some things that Puppet could do in the future that it doesn't do yet? What are some other tools that Puppet could build to help answer some of these problems? And also all of the same product announcements and everything we've been talking about. Sorry, I know I'm a little bit excited about this. This is totally, this is a thing that we've been spending a lot of time in and it's something that I'm super super excited about.
Andrew [00:36:16] Yeah me too. PuppetizePDX it'll be October 9th through 10th 2019 this year. We've got events, trainings and whatnot tacking on to the days before. I'm not quite sure about the days after. You can learn a lot more though on puppet.com/puppetize. So everyone we've covered Contributor Summit, we've covered what it means to be a part of the community Vox Pupuli, Tim winning MVP once again, we gave you a preview of PuppetizePDX. Everyone, did we miss anything? Did we cover everything here? It's been amazing.
Ben [00:36:51] Oh that's a really open question. There is a lot of stuff out there to cover but I think we did cover everything that was in scope for this conversation.
Andrew [00:36:58] Right on.
Ben [00:36:58] But I mean there's always next time, right.
Andrew [00:37:01] Yeah, always next time. So I want to leave everyone with a bit of food for thought. During this awesome episode I pulled up Paula Dean's goulash recipe. So what I want to know is knowing the heritage, the deep heritage of goulash, how does a popular American chef pull it off. You think she does it? You think she doesn't? Maybe we should try it. Maybe we should report back in if you're interested. The show notes too. Need to bring it full circle everyone.
Ben [00:37:28] I think we should hashtag that.
Andrew [00:37:30] Hashtag goulash, powered by goulash.
Ben [00:37:32] Powered by goulash, I like that.
Andrew [00:37:36] That was a promise Ben made, Tim. I'm looking at the show notes from the previous episode. And he said he was going to run that whole marathon fueled by goulash. He is quoted on the air. It didn't happen. Maybe it needs to happen this year. There is a thing in Portland called the Portland Marathon that you are running, correct?
Ben [00:37:49] This is true. I'm actually even, I'm running a virtual training plan for it right now too so if you are interested in joining up with us and running the Portland Marathon or half marathon then you are absolutely 100 percent welcome. I haven't announced this yet but I just got approval to get team jerseys so we can get a team Bolt running shirt and you are invited to come run with us. If you go to pup.pt/pdxmarathon there's information there on how to get involved. Basically just sign up for the marathon. Join Team Bolt and show up.
Andrew [00:38:28] Let's do it, people. All right, and with that, thank you so much Tim for guest starring on our podcast here. Thank you so much, Ben. Always. Thank you, producer Anya in the awesome button-up shirt. You are rocking it today. And a big thank you to everyone listening. We really appreciate it, always. And with that catch y'all later.