Rejected talk proposal: Design at scale: OpenStack versus Kubernetes

This proposal was submitted for pyconau 2018. It wasn’t accepted, but given I’d put the effort into writing up the proposal I’ll post it here in case its useful some other time. The oblique references to OpensStack are because pycon had an “anonymous” review system in 2018, and I was avoiding saying things which directly identified me as the author.


OpenStack and Kubernetes solve very similar problems. Yet they approach those problems in very different ways. What can we learn from the different approaches taken? The differences aren’t just technical though, there are some interesting social differences too. Continue reading “Rejected talk proposal: Design at scale: OpenStack versus Kubernetes”

Accepted talk proposal: Learning from the mistakes that even big projects make

This proposal was submitted for pyconau 2018. It was accepted, but hasn’t been presented yet. The oblique references to OpensStack are because pycon had an “anonymous” review system in 2018, and I was avoiding saying things which directly identified me as the author.


Since 2011, I’ve worked on a large Open Source project in python. It kind of got out of hand – 1000s of developers and millions of lines of code. Yet despite being well resourced, we made the same mistakes that those tiny scripts you whip up to solve a small problem make. Come learn from our fail.

Continue reading “Accepted talk proposal: Learning from the mistakes that even big projects make”

pyconau 2018 call for proposals now open

The pyconau call for proposals is now open, and runs until 28 May. I took my teenagers to pyconau last year and they greatly enjoyed it. I hadn’t been to a pyconau in ages, and ended up really enjoying thinking about things from topic areas I don’t normally need to think about. I think expanding one’s horizons is generally a good idea.

Should I propose something for this year? I am unsure. Some random ideas that immediately spring to mind:

  • something about privsep: I think a generalised way to make privileged calls in unprivileged code is quite interesting, especially in a language which is often used for systems management and integration tasks. That said, perhaps its too OpenStacky given how disinterested in OpenStack talks most python people seem to be.
  • nova-warts: for a long time my hobby has been cleaning up historical mistakes made in OpenStack Nova that wont ever rate as a major feature change. What lessons can other projects learn from a well funded and heavily staffed project that still thought that exec() was a great way to do important work? There’s definitely an overlap with the privsep talk above, but this would be more general.
  • a talk about how I had to manage some code which only worked in python2, and some other code that only worked in python3 and in the end gave up on venvs and decided that Docker containers are like the ultimate venvs. That said, I suspect this is old hat and was obvious to everyone except me.
  • something else I haven’t though of.

Anyways, I’m undecided. Comments welcome.

Also, here’s an image for this post. Its the stone henge we found at Guerilla Bay last weekend. I assume its in frequent use for tiny tiny druids.