Finding reason, finding belonging
Posted: Sep 28, 2025, 15:49I’ve been around in the Free and Open Source world for over 20 years now, initially as a user but largely as a hacker. Since I started making money using (and growing) my technical skills, it never once occurred to me that I’d be doing anything other than writing FOS software. Which is why over the years as I grew up the Engineer Value Stack* in my career, I started shedding some things that once used to give my joy. With that train of thought, I almost did not go to the 2025 GNU Tools Cauldron that just concluded in Porto today.
Dear reader, if you’re expecting a review of all of the technically awesome things that happened at Cauldron this weekend, stop reading and wait a couple of days. Jonathan Corbett was there so I assume he will have something interesting to write in that space. Go watch the LWN feed and maybe even buy a subscription if you haven’t already.
So yeah, I almost decided to not go to Porto for Cauldron, because for the past year or so, I didn’t feel like I did anything of consequence in the GNU toolchain community. Sitting alone in my basement in Waterloo, I had already concluded to myself that nobody would miss that I wasn’t there. Things would go on as usual. I had already forgotten whatever work I had done over the last years; they didn’t feel valuable enough. I had concluded that I was mostly a glorified Jira wrangler (the modern equivalent of the “paper pusher” slur one could use to denigrate anybody who doesn’t do Real Work™) and I wasn’t needed.
I did fly in the end, and arrived at a hot (OK, 24C, but I’m practically Canadian now so forgive me) Porto, still unsure why I was there. To try and brush off the fatigue, I walked with Carlos (there’s nothing like a loud, always driven Argentinian man to lift your spirits) to FEUP, ending our day downtown meeting many of the attendees, many friends.
That seemed like a great day, and a great evening. But still, was it worth flying the 7 hours? I wasn’t sure. Anyway, that’s one down, 3 more days to go.
Cut to Sunday night, I’m now wondering where those 3 days went in a blur, and wondering what washed away those doubts I had coming in.
Maybe it was the wonderful Belgian beer we had on Friday night. Or was it because I was with old friends and new, talking about everything under the sun?
Maybe it was the chilled Londrina house beer that stayed ice cold to the last drop. Or was it the joy of finding a shared love for working with wood with a colleague who I had only occasionally chatted over the intertubes all these years?
Maybe it was the Francesinha, a sinfully tasty but likely just as unhealthy Portuguese dish. Or was it the colleague who suggested the dish, who also had welcomed me earlier, genuinely and warmly, saying “here comes the great Sid!” instantly making me feel like I matter?
Maybe it was the wonderful port wine and fancy 3 course meal we had at Taylor’s. Or was it the intimate conversations I had with some new friends and old about our failures and insecurities, and how they shaped us?
Maybe it is the wonderful catering Cupertino and folks arranged for our lunches at Cauldron. Or was it the new connections I made with people I looked at with admiration across the hall all these years but never had the courage to walk across and introduce myself?
Was it the fact that all of the most amazing leaders in the GNU tools ecosystem were there? Or was it the relief at seeing an old friend and mentor (I don’t know if he knows how much my interactions with him meant to me) safe and doing well? Or, in fact, was it the realization of how much I owe it to pretty much every person who has been coming to Cauldron regularly, probably with their own personal reasons, but leaving their own, indelible impression on me as a person? Or, of course, the annual JL (if you know you know) therapy session?
Maybe it was the fantastic surprise musical performance by a group of school kids, which reminded me of my kiddo back home. OK maybe that one actually had me longing to return home soon.
Anyway, the material experiences tend to get washed away days after I return from these experiences, but the personal and emotional ones are not permanent either. They’ve shaped me and made me the person I am, but months later, I know I will have forgotten why I loved being here, with my friends, people with whom I share my commitment to Free and Open Source Software. I’m writing this with the hope that I’ll come back here to remind myself of why it matters, to remind myself that I belong, to be grateful to all of those people who made me feel like I belong.
If you were here the first time, note that I’ve been here for over 13 years now, and you belong, just as I do.
* Engineer Value Stack: A hierarchy that companies tend to have in their engineering organizations based on an engineer’s ability to effectively communicate their ideas and work with their peers, as opposed to the superiority of their technical skills, which in itself is also a nebulous concept that only serves to promote a deep impostor syndrome among most competent developers.
Across the Charles Bridge - GNU Tools Cauldron 2017
Posted: Sep 11, 2017, 23:16Since I joined Linaro back in 2015 around this time, my travel has gone up 3x with 2 Linaro Connects a year added to the one GNU Tools Cauldron. This year I went to FOSSAsia too, so it’s been a busy traveling year. The special thing about Cauldron though is that it is one of those conferences where I ‘work’ as well as have a lot of fun. The fun bit is because I get to meet all of the people that I work with almost every day in person and a lot of them have become great friends over the years.
I still remember the first Cauldron I went to in 2013 at Mountain View where I felt dwarfed by all of the giants I was sitting with. It was exaggerated because it was the first time I met the likes of Jeff Law, Richard Henderson, etc. in personal meetings since I had joined the Red Hat toolchain team just months before; it was intimidating and exciting all at once. That was also the first time I met Roland McGrath (I still hadn’t met Carlos, he had just had a baby and couldn’t come), someone I was terrified of back then because his patch reviews would be quite sharp and incisive. I had imagined him to be a grim old man hammering out those words from a stern laptop, so it was a surprise to see him use the same kinds of words but with a sarcastic smile, completely changing the context and tone. That was the first time I truly realized how emails often lack context. Years later, I still try to visualize people when I read their emails.
Skip to 4 years later and I was at my 5th Cauldron last week and despite my assumptions on how it would go, it was a completely new experience. A lot of it had to do with my time at Linaro and very little to do with technical growth. I felt like an equal to Linaro folks all over the world and I seemed to carry that forward here, where I felt like an equal with all of the people present, I felt like I belonged. I did not feel insecure about my capabilities (I still am intimately aware of my limitations), nor did I feel the need to constantly prove that I belonged. I was out there seeking toolchain developers (we are hiring btw, email me if you’re a fit), comfortable with the idea of leading a team. The fact that I managed to not screw up the two glibc releases I managed may also have helped :)
Oh, and one wonderful surprise was that an old friend decided to drop in an Cauldron and spend a couple of days.
This year’s Cauldron had the most technical talks submitted in recent years. We had 5 talks in the glibc area, possibly also the highest for us; just as well because we went over time in almost all of them. I won’t say that it’s a surprise since that has happened in every single year that I attended. The first glibc talk was about tunables where I briefly recapped what we have done in tunables so far and talked about the future a bit more at length. Pedro Alves suggested putting pretty printers for tunables for introspection and maybe also for runtime tuning in the coming future. There was a significant amount of interest in the idea of auto-tuning, i.e. collecting profiling data about tunable use and coming up with optimal default values and possibly even eliminating such tunables in future if we find that we have a pretty good default. We also talked about tuning at runtime and the various kinds of support that would be required to make it happen. Finally there were discussions on tuning profiles and ideas around creating performance-enhanced routines for workloads instead of CPUs. The video recording of the talk will hopefully be out soon and I’ll link the video here when it is available.
Florian then talked about glibc 3.0, a notional concept (i.e. won’t be a soname bump) where we rewrite sections of code that have been rotting due to having to support some legacy platforms. The most prominent among them is libio, the module in glibc that implements stdio. When libio was written, it was designed to be compatible with libstdc++ so that FILE streams could be compatible with C++ stdio streams. The only version of gcc that really supports that is 2.95 since libstdc++ has since moved on. However because of the way we do things in glibc, we cannot get rid of them even if there is just one user that needs that ABI. We toyed with the concept of a separate compatibility library that becomes a graveyard for such legacy interfaces so that they don’t hold up progress in the library. It remains to be seen how this pans out, but I would definitely be happy to see this progress; libio was one of my backlog projects for years. I had to miss Raji’s talk on powerpc glibc improvements since I had to be in another meeting, so I’ll have to catch it when the video comes out.
The two BoFs for glibc dealt with a number of administrative and development issues, details of which Carlos will post on the mailing list soon. The highlights for me were the malloc instrumented benchmarks that Carlos wants to add to benchtests and build and review tools. Once I clear up my work backlog a bit, I’ll attempt to set up something like phabricator or gerrit and see how that works out or the community instead of patchwork. I am convinced that all of the issues that we want to solve like crediting reviewers, ensuring good git commit logs, running automated builds and tests, etc. can only be effectively solved with a proper review tool in place to review patches.
There was also a discussion on redoing the makefiles in glibc so that it doesn’t spend so much time doing dependecy resolution, but I am going to pretend that it didn’t happen because it is an ugly ugly task :/
I’m back home now, recovering from the cold that worsened while I was in Prague before I head out again in a couple of weeks to SFO for Linaro Connect. I’ve booked tickets for whale watching tours there, so hopefully I’ll be posting some pictures again after a long break.