 Good morning afternoon and evening everybody. My name is Jeff Rowe I was the community manager program manager and board chair for the Octo project for a little over seven years from early 2011 until mid 2018 and I want to welcome you all to the Octo projects 10th anniversary presentation We have a lot to cover today First I'd like to introduce Nico de Shane or rather. I'd like to let him introduce himself. Hi everyone I'm Nicolas de Shane. I work at Linaro and I'm the Octo project community manager I took this all over Jeff Rowe a little bit more than two years ago And I'm very happy to be here today to celebrate this very important milestone for the project We've prepared a special event to show I mean what our community has been and to talk about I mean the project and the last the last decade I Hope you will enjoy the event and I will be back in a few minutes talk to you about a few more things about the project Thanks and enjoy you. I Think it would be best to start out with some words from the founding parents of the Octo project Richard Purdy and Dirk Hondel as well as Dave Stewart first engineering manager and Tracy Irwe the first advocacy manager Okay, yeah, like I can't believe it's been 10 years since since the project was established It seems like just yesterday we were meeting in San Francisco all these companies sort of pulled together And I was told that you know the idea was kind of crazy But the companies you know did did pull together they did decide to sort of give the idea a go and Here we are 10 years later. Happy birthday. Yeah It's been quite a ride there's been some what I think some really great changes to the project You know to open embedded we took something that was one monolithic repository. We've created the layer model We've created all these different layers different maintainers. We sort of managed to spread the load around we've made it more stable There's been some great changes in technology over that time. So Things like recipe specific sys routes You know when work for build isolation more recently there was the hash equivalence work We've made great improvements with our testing and the way we built things on the auto builder. So it's it's been a great 10 years and I'm I think the thing for me is to see how that where the project's gone to see it being used in set-top boxes to to televisions to To data centers or you know the communications sort of All behind the scenes the BMC's on servers and data centers And I think that the crowning thing for me was hearing that we had a satellite going about orbiting Mars that was built these in the project so 10 years wow happy anniversary yok to project and Congratulations to everyone who's been involved here for the last 10 years. What an incredible ride Who would have thought 10 years ago when some of us came up with this idea and decided to push for a new Project in the Linux Foundation to bring together Embedded Linux developers across all parts of this industry who would have thought how much success this was have How broadly used it would be how much a core part of the embedded Open-source infrastructure the octa project would become I think none of us who were there at the beginning Would have believed that this really would have been such Success in such a short period of time. I am thrilled to have been part of the creation of the project I'm thrilled to see the project thrive today and Congratulations to everyone involved. You made it possible. I cannot end this video without thanking Richard Purdy for his tireless and critical involvement and and all the contributions that he's made Richard You're my hero. Thank you for all that you've done here and and keep going strong Hello, I am David Stewart calling in from my COVID cabin here in beautiful Beaverton, Oregon Calling in on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the Octo project or Yachto Linux as we originally called it. I Was the original engineering manager at Intel who started the Octo project and hired the original team of engineer Intel engineers who worked on the project and we set up teams here in California, Oregon, Romania, China and a variety of other places and So starting up Yachto project is really one of the career highs for me I'm really so grateful To Intel to have the opportunity and that they let me run it with minimal management oversight They also gave me a great opportunity to set up a Yachto project dev board for Intel called the minnow board an open source low cost Intel based embedded development board They gave me the opportunity to hire a great team And I'm so grateful to that team and and thanks to Intel for also sending me around the world to talk about the project and to work With other people. I'm extremely grateful to Richard Purdy and to Dirk Hondel for trusting me with their baby And so many others that I'm so grateful for So happy anniversary Yachto project You're looking good kid Happy birthday Yachto project. Happy 10th birthday. We are so proud of you What an amazing project to be part of What an amazing opportunity to change the world, frankly Thank you Dave Stewart for coming over to my desk and saying hey you want to work on something fun Because it has changed my life Yachto project. I have been the advocacy lead and on the advocacy team the whole time I launched the project and the project has had a ton of firsts. It's been an amazing thing to be part of We were the first project ever to sponsor a conference we sponsored ELCE when we decided to launch our 0.9 Yachto project release Laverne bless you Laverne and We coined the phrase advocacy Nithya Ruff Lutah Andrea Whose name I can never say even though I've known her for 10 years We created that term and that term is now used to mean to advocate for a project in the industry And it's used by the Linux Foundation by corporations by other projects Marketing on the other hand to us is you as a corporation as part of a project you're marketing You're part of it, but for a project's point of view. We're advocating We've always been terrifically supportive of women in engineering. We've also Been very hardware agnostic so AMD and TI and Intel all work together on this project and very happily without Competing which is very interesting We have probably been the longest running sponsor of ELC or ELCE From a project point of view and we are it is our flagship event that we go to and it is such a fun event Both of them are thank you, Angela And what we realized by going to all these events We realized that engineers want to talk to engineers and our engineers have been our biggest Advocates for the project. So if you get a chance to go in person to another event For ELC or ELCE you look for the crowd around the booth and it will be the Octo project booth These first 10 years of the Octo project have been life-changing for many of us and Evolutionary for embedded Linux. I'd just like to walk through a brief history of the project with a few words from the Octo project luminaries along the way One thing to keep in mind is there's a lot of information here and these slides will be available So don't feel like you have to read everything This is an early timeline for the events leading up to the formation of the Octo project starting with the open embedded project OE started in 2003 when Chris Larson created the first repo as I remember the story much of the idea for OE Came from a small ragtag community who wanted to put Linux on a sharp Zoras After all these years, I don't know whether they ever succeeded But eventually the build system for this distro was developed based on Gentoo's portage system and the build system took on a life of Its own becoming popular in several communities including software-defined radio as well as early open development boards like the Beagle board Rather than go over all the details Let's hear from Jason Kreidner one of the early Octo project board members about his first experience with OE Hi, I'm Jason Kreidner I first got involved with open embedded in the Octo project actually before it was was Yachto Maybe about 13 years ago when we started this project called Beagle board and one of our community members Philip Ballester Was doing some software-defined radio stuff And at the time all we had was some pre-built Memo distribution You know pre-built binaries kind of up and running and I was in the process of trying to put Gentoo my favorite Linux distro on there and I got a message from Phillips and hey, you know This guy named Koon Koi. He in excuse me for butchering his name You know, he's got this this build. That's you know already Optimized for the architecture. You know Phillips said hey Koon Koi's got this this distro open embedded and you should try it out and you know, it was the angstrom distribution based on the open embedded and You know, so I you know gave it a quick shot and fired off an email back and you know pointed out a couple issues and Loan hold like within just minutes came back another distro build And I went ahead and it's like well, that was so fast. I got to go ahead and give this a try fired it up and It was so much further along that anything I'd been done It was already an optimized whole chain and he did it from spec He didn't even have it and and you know what I saw was just I was maybe up to about 30 Packages built and and he had hundreds and as efficiency was just so far beyond so it's like, okay Who is this guy and what is this open embedded thing? And kind of the rest came from there, right? So You know from the open embedded community came the Octo project and we were all on board. So Been a great ride Thanks very much for the Octo project and and thanks in particular to Koon Koi's Getting us on board. So thanks a lot Thank you, Jason So these are some early photos of the open embedded crowd including a few familiar faces You will notice as we all have over the years a strong preference for beer as a motivating factor to great great software This next slide shows the formation of the project as an organization as we move on to the next phase It's important to recognize Dirk Hondel who first discussed the project with Richard at a Linux conference in early 2010 That discussion grew into a small team a partnership with Wind River and a big meeting in San Francisco in September with the Linux foundation And a ton of stakeholders all of whom became early stakeholders in the project The Octo project was born with its first 0.9 release and a big launch at ELCE in Cambridge in October 2010 10 years ago with Dirk giving a great talk underneath Concorde at the Aviation Museum in Duxford The next spring the Octo project advisory board formed at the collab summit in San Francisco Thanks very much to Dave Stewart for some of these photographs Let's hear from some of the early board members Greetings from California My name is Luta. I've been with the Octo project from inception until June of this year I initially served as the treasurer for the project then in 2018. I added the advisory board chair to my responsibilities I believe the reason why Octo project has been so successful is due to the involvement from all aspects of the community How everyone chips in during times of need had always astounded me Through my time with the project, I've seen how the community adhered to the motto of what's best for the Octo project The existence of this sentiment allowed the governing team to have trust in each other and agreed upon charters The sentiment permeates to the community resulting in overwhelming support for the project I've seen how the community jumps in to support the project from financial to setting up Boots at conferences To planning Octo project summits to running live coding It's the thankless contributions the tireless volunteering that built the strong camaraderie in the project I hope the project will never lose that aspect Congratulations Octo project on your 10th year anniversary Hi, this is Atul Bansal CEO of timesys corporation I want to wish happy 10th anniversary to the Octo project Timesys has been involved with the Octo project since its inception When the Octo was introduced it was promoted as a versatile build system for creating custom version of embedded Linux Its true value really became apparent as it was adopted by more and more platforms architectures and vendors Currently almost all semiconductor companies and many SOM and module vendors have adopted the Octo for their Linux BSPs Having developed an in-house build system for years that is focused on simplicity and minimalistic design Timesys recognized Octo's value in its early stages And explored ways in which it could benefit device manufacturers In fact, Timesys was the first commercial embedded Linux company to join the Octo project I still remember the very first meeting we were invited to outside the San Francisco airport back in 2010 I vividly remember having a call with Jim ready of Montavista And letting him know that Timesys was joining this new project at which point Jim said If Timesys is joining then Montavista will join as well Over the years Timesys helped companies take advantage of Octo's hardware agnostic architecture and powerful meta layer capabilities The Octo project is helping companies realize ultimate value Shorted time to market for their Linux based products that are built with the Octo once again Happy 10th anniversary to everyone involved with the Octo project It's been a great 10 years and here is to the continued success. See you all in 2030 Happy 10th anniversary Octo This is Natia Ruff. I'm with Comcast And I was involved in the Octo project in the early days in 2010 2011 Working with Luta with Tracy Irwe with Jeffro On the marketing and the advocacy of the project I think Tracy and I would say we were some of the first people to coin the term advocacy for marketing And we just love the early days of the project in Getting it off the ground and making it the project that it is today So what's the fondest memory I have of the Octo project? I would say some of the events like the embedded Linux summit in Barcelona And other events where we got to talk to developers who were using Octo And working with the community were some of the the best memories that I have I'm incredibly proud of the milestone of 10 years Continuing to have a vibrant community continuing to become a standard in the embedded Linux world And I look forward to Octo being All over the world and you know even more successful I'm very proud that my company Comcast Is a contributor to Octo and we use Octo in our own devices And It's something that we're very proud to be associated with So congratulations to the Octo community And very proud to be involved in Octo even today. Have a great 10th anniversary Throughout the 2010s the Octo project continued to grow and evolve along with its community Always maintaining a close tie with open embedded always with a heartbeat of releases Embedded Linux conferences and developer days Let's hear now from one of the developers from that time my friend Tim Orlan Octo project happy 10th anniversary Moto Timo here in my lair with all my gadgets and I thought I'd take this opportunity to go back to the beginning And in those days it was open embedded classic. It was a lot different than what we have now We didn't have the layers and other things like we have now Everything was just the kitchen sink all in one place So fast forward 2014 I had been starting to contribute to meta open embedded And I had heard about this oe dam meeting open embedded developers of america's meeting So I asked jeffro could I come and he said yeah, sure, you know go ahead Can I bring my dad? Yeah, absolutely go ahead So I took the day off of work brought my dad up in tow to san jose and Walking in this meeting having no idea what it's going to be like who's going to be there nothing There's 16 people around a table conference room table And we basically had this great day just talking about technical stuff and The project and where things were going and on that day I Along with paul eggleton decided we were going to create metapython and that summer I took my sabbatical and and created metapython and the rest is history That night we all went out to dinner and I was just really so pleased it just shows what this community is like that bill in and jeffro You know hung out and talked with my dad who has nothing to do with linux like we do And just made him feel right at home and that was really special to me So fast forward to the next year Uh, we went to oi dam again and after the conference we decided to have uh some cocktails and Realized that yakto sounded like mazeltov to me So somebody dropped something broke it behind the bar and I yelled out yakto Which we kept doing for the rest of the night. It was it was fun. Uh, we had good times Thanks, tim. Here's some more photographs of that time I remember every single one of these events and every single one of these people I'm sure you'll all recognize some familiar faces 2018 brought a host of changes to the project As chief architect richard left intel to work on the project as a neutral technical leader Niko took over for me as community manager and the advisory board reformed with lou is the chair for almost two years After spending some time getting its feet underneath it yakto is stronger now than ever with a much larger community As niko will show us A new board chair andy wafa from arm. Hi, andy And steve sakerman has rejoined the project as an lts maintainer Many folks from the project have shifted companies But the project still continues innovating and still has many of its prime developers in place And of course the dev days continue now with a two-day summit at the european event starting tomorrow I'll let andy talk about the latest iteration of the yakto project Hi, i'm andy wafa current chair of the yakto project. I'd just like to wish All yaktis a happy 10th anniversary It's been a phenomenal journey over the last decade and I think some of the achievements have been far reaching into the wider home source ecosystem the functionality provided by the tooling that yakto provides has enabled everything from vacuum cleaners to satellites orbiting mars which is a great achievement and here's to another 10 years of fast-paced innovation and wide-reaching collaboration Thank you andy That's quite a great group At this point I want to hand things up to niko for a community manager's view of the past as well as a glimpse into the future Hey everyone, this is nikola. I'm back with you again today um Wow, that was really good to see all these memories from all these people that's participating to the project Many thanks to all of you who've sent your pictures and video. That's that was a really good testimony for the project and for our community So while we're here today to talk Mostly and to celebrate mostly about the the first decade It's also true that this is the beginning of the next decade And I thought I would give some thoughts about what I think The next decade could be and why I think we are well equipped to start the next decade And hopefully we'll be able to do as good as what we've done for the last 10 years So if we look Today, uh, matter what we've built Um, it's obvious that what is uh, the biggest trends of our project is the community we build on the project and the The whole open source ecosystem that we build on the octo project So looking at just all numbers. These are the commits And numbers of developers and organizations that actually contribute to the project for the last 10 years Um, so I mean as you can see, I mean, we have close to 2000 people from almost 200 companies organizations that have contributed to the project If you look at the number of commits and if you do a little bit of map It is 40 patches that have been merged every single day For the last 10 years 40 patches every single day for the last 10 years It is quite a stunning number of contributions for our community If we look at the mailing list as well, I mean, we've been exchanged 100 emails every single day as well I mean, it's crazy numbers If you look at where the contributions are being done, what we can see is that a very well balanced Between the core of the project, which is what everybody relies on The layers which are contributed and maintained by the member company The company will make up the membership of the project and then obviously we have a large presence of layers Which are maintained by I mean our community. So It's a very well balanced Contributions over the last 10 years So another way of looking at this ecosystem and our community Is to look at this slide here. What we can see is that the number of contribution is very constant I think I mean most people like to see Curves that go exponentially and just rocket to the sky But I think one trends of the project and of our communities We are known to be stable and reliable So that's basically what we are and what we do. We basically build and give you all the bits and pieces that you need To build your own customized optimized Linux system. That's what we do and that's what we've been doing for the last 10 years So we've managed to actually upgrade all the recipes and all the content To the most recent upstream technologies, Linux technologies And we've managed to keep that into something we can actually Do ourselves. If you look at the number of recipes that we released 10 years ago and the number of recipes we released This month, it's basically very constant. So we are able to keep up with what happens in the Linux open source systems and to provide that to I mean all All the developers in our ecosystem The graph also that shows that we've been able to attract new developers over time Which is a really good thing for our ecosystem If we look at this graph Now so basically, I mean we started with the project started 10 years ago with eight organizations that come came together With the Linux foundation today Our organization our membership is made of 25 organizations so if we look at the Overall contributions the top 25 Organizations that contribute to the project what we see and which is actually very interesting Is that there is a very good match between the company that make up the membership and the company that contribute to the project So what what makes me think that we have a very strong and engaged Set of companies and that are basically our members So they not not only contribute to the project like financially. That's that's very much needed But they also contribute to the project by just sending Patches and their own engineers So they might contribute to the core the project that might contribute to layers that actually benefit their product But they basically overall contribute to our ecosystem. So Our membership is stronger than ever and that's very good to see that they are engaged and working Continuously with with everyone in our ecosystem So are we ready for the next decade? I believe we are So a few things happened behind maybe slightly behind the scenes over the last few years, but As most people might know, I mean the the Yachter project was the first collaborative project from the Linux Foundation 10 years ago. So the Structure of the project and the way We work together and the way all the members work together Had needed to be modernized Since the lock Yachter project was set up 10 years ago many different Many new projects have been managed and started by the Linux foundation So we learn from all the all of them and we've been able to modernize and revisit. I mean the governing structure of the project our Membership is as I just said before is stronger than ever We move from like eight or initial organization that founded the project to something like 25 organizations today, which makes us stronger and a much better financial situation as well what has been done Lately over the last two years and is that the the establishment of the Yachter project TSC the technical steering committee and the LTS I believe The TSC and LTS are going to be the two pillars of the next The success of our success for the next decade The TSC is very engaged in driving and defining the technical directions for the project and the LTS is What many of our users From our ecosystem have been asking for a need actually to For the product That's I mean the LTS is needed for people who make product But one thing also which we hope we are going to see is we are going to see less Diversity in what our users and members are actually using for the product So more contributions toward like a single LTS should actually drastically help the quality and the maintenance of our releases What we've done behind the scenes as well Is very much important in fast secure. We've added a lot of automation testing And that has a lot a lot us what should be very very close to upstream project So what we do I mean every twice a year we make a Yachter project release And what we give to our community is like the latest and greatest upstream software which has been integrated and tested so they can start I mean using into their product So that's that's been that's something we can do today thanks To all the improvement we've done in how we actually managed the project behind the scenes Last but not least I mean the community outreach and advocacy what I mean I've been around I mean Not since the beginning but for the last two years And what I can see is we are we are continuously seeing like a lot of new people that just come and join us and just They bring us like a full New set of ideas and and they came with like lots of energy into how they want to contribute and help us Basically go and spread the good world About the project. I mean we have seen new initiatives on social media on I mean on youtube And and I'm sure we are going to see how much more of that in the future So I'm very happy to see that we are able to attract new people also in this area of the project That's very important for us So finally, uh, yes, I mean Everything is well ready for the next decade and I'm sure you you want to know how you can come and help us That's a question. We very often have The first thing I mean we would like everybody to do is that you start using and testing the yachter project lts release We need more users. We need everybody not what you compare to the lts So we can actually improve the quality of the lts We want to hear and we want to get feedback and we want to get bug reports and obviously we want to get contributions back to the lts One thing which obviously would be very important for the project is to see more of the end users and From our ecosystem Maybe the people that we don't know. I mean the people may product I mean silently without telling us to just come back and contribute to the roadmap So basically we need to hear what use cases are I mean, so you are probably doing crazy things with the yachter project that we don't know So we want to hear that so we can actually contribute and improve the core of the of the projects that you can reuse and benefit from that We need to hear from bug reports and bug reports is very important for us because this is how we learn about the users And this is how we learn about what the users are doing with the project And of course, I mean, uh, if you are up for the job We would welcome you to join our developers community and contribute to mean patches and code reviews and Anything that's needed. I mean to just make the yachter project. I mean, uh, better than ever We have public Meetings weekly and monthly the weekly meetings are more like to deal about the day-to-day kind of things and I'm bugger I mean bug triage and Deciding the what the next release is going to be and the monthly meeting is more about longer discussions about old map and what the project should go I mean, obviously If you are willing to support the project and become a member, that's something which we would obviously be very happy with And finally, as I said, I mean something which is very important for us and it's uh, I mean our advocacy team We meet every two week and uh, we try to derive I mean strategies and Actions and how decide about what event we should attend and what how we should reach out to more people To help us just spread the good things about the yachter project So we always need more help in this area and you don't need to be a developer to help us so Yeah, that's basically what I wanted to share today I'm very very happy to be part of this community very proud to see what the community has done This is like a major milestone for the project. I mean this 10 years anniversary And this is the end of the first cycle. This is the beginning of a new cycle And I'm very happy to say today And to wish to say happy birthday to you our yachter project and to wish you the best for the next decade Thank you very much These are some words about the project from our community These videos and quotes from some of the many people for whom the yachter project touched their lives are very important to me Remember that these slides and videos will be all available afterwards So don't try to read it all at once and if you would like to contribute, please let us know Hi, I'm Darren Hart. I'm the senior director of the open source technology center at VMware Um, many of you know me from my time working in the Linux kernels maintainer of the x86 platform drivers Some the minnow minnow board work at intel and several years working on the yachter project Um, there's so many fond memories from working on the yachter project and it's pretty hard to call one out but I think perhaps a um The way that I think of it is just the community that We're present this this passion this excitement that So many of the people participating had um, I remember new folks joining and Helping them ramp up. I remember the folks that have been around a long time helping me ramp up uh, and so many of these dinners around the world and the Events that we held together, but mostly it was just working with other people that were super excited about what they were doing Um, and that was by far some of my fondest memories of working on the yachter project Paul Anderson was an early board member from wind river Scott Garmin was one of the early engineers from intel Jeremy Pullman was an engineer from monovista one of the first companies involved with the yachter project Hi, my name is Stefano, and I'm a technical program manager at the linux foundation I've been working on the yachter project for about seven years And there are two things that really stand out to me about the project The first one is how well it fits into the open source ecosystem around it I often describe the yachter project to folks who are new to it as the linux from scratch Of embedded and I think we can stand behind that claim. We've got a great set of engineers supporting and a really in-depth set of documentation And the other thing is the community of the yachter project I When I first joined the project I was amazed at the friendliness and the eclectic nature of the folks who work on it And I think that's really unique and it's really impressive. And so I just want to say happy birthday yachter project Mike Wooster, of course, is the VP of business development with the linux foundation Mike was instrumental in getting the yachter project off its feet and into the wide world And he always likes to give the developers all the credit Greetings and happy 10th anniversary to the yachter project My name is chris howlin in and I've been involved in the embedded linux community for almost 20 years now I joined the yachter project as a member of the advisory board during my employment at mentor graphics They were one of the largest commercial embedded linux providers at the time I was also very active on the yachter project advocacy board responsible for marketing and promotional materials for the yachter project As part of that role I was a frequent contributor to the various venues where the yachter project exhibited Both as a member of the exhibit staff and a trainer at the various educational events that have proven popular over the years While I'm no longer an active contributor in the community I'm still in contact with some of the many friends I made along the way By far some of my fondest memories of the yachter project community are the many friends I've made both here and around the world Tom Zanussi was another early developer with intel Tom was also responsible for the linux tiny the tiny effort And uh, tom was also kind enough to send me the picture of the submarine the very first yachter swag Which you'll find in one of the earlier slides if you look carefully Yachter project is certainly successful if you look at um projects like a gl Rdk, which are using yachter project as their baseline. It speaks volumes to that I will talk about two aspects of the project that I believe are behind its success First one is customization So every embedded linux distribution or embedded systems for that matter Is customized therefore You have to build every system differently unlike any standard distribution The yachter project tools and techniques Provide that baseline where you can effectively customize your systems And the second reason Is its horizontal scale where you can build a tiny system, which is a iot Um base system perhaps and a full server using the same infrastructure In the real world your products may consist of many of these Different so c's put together or if you could be building different products including different so c's from different vendors different architectures and Therefore building software for such systems becomes Quite complex yachter project addresses that really well By providing you a this horizontal scale where you can reuse your build system across your product lines And this goes along with the nice and welcoming community that yachter project has Nicole was one of the first advocacy people on the project and I still carry one of the very first pieces in swag that she created for us Brian Avery was a engineer at intel who was responsible for a large number of things and several people as I recall And so many others that i'm so grateful for I'm sure that if I listed them all out that I would i'm sure offend somebody by leaving them out But i'm gonna try so Thanks from the bottom of my heart to jeff Osier mix and tracier way josh willock ross burton paul eilton beth flanagan scott garmin darin heart nitton cambell Saul wold tom zanussi jessica jong steven jolly song lu paul anderson mark hatley bruce ashfield chris larsen koon kooie kevin tion Sean hudson john cherry steve sackamon jason creidner philip allister Cameraj denis alex debris luta nithya ref bill mills jim zemlin belin penna redo valentine nihay lorencio bogdan alex chain Renew john digilio lin comp and mod susu mark skirtness marie wailin michael hallstead angela brown mike wooster and one more scott reifenbark So I couldn't do this presentation without a nod in memorial to our friend scott reifenbark The octoproject's intrepid technical writer when we sadly lost earlier this year to cancer This is scott playing in the background and I thought I'd let some of our folks say a few words Scott was playing the lead guitar in the background music. Thanks to christie for the track Yeah, the sad news we got about scott reifenbark at the beginning of the year was A huge blow to the project scott was a significant, you know, a personality. I remember an interview and interviewing him to work on the project and uh, he He was definitely a character. He brought sort of an awful lot to that role I think we were always very surprised because he was hands on he wanted not just to document something But to be able to try it for himself Because he believed you know if he could figure it out then other people would be able to through the documentation And just as important To making this project a success has been our documentation That was written by scott reifenbark Who we lost and we missed terribly I originally hired scott at uh Intel he was already at intel and I hired him into the octo project to be our first tech writer He was probably one of the most Adult people. I think I have ever worked with in my career No drama great Worker very disciplined very open. I loved visiting his house in the woods in oregon He was a full-time intel employee and a part-time defensive coordinator for the bank's high school football team And for a time while he was working for me He split the year between Oregon Belize and finland All while delivering at a very high level in his job at intel. He told me one time Dave I've got an interesting life I would agree with that scott. You had an interesting life I have a lot of fond memories working with scott reifenbark. He was Just a a great human being Incredible stories that I think many of us envied from life experience As as a technical writer, I always appreciated scott's willingness to go ahead and work with the way the systems engineers wanted to work um One time he was talking to me about Uh, a customer of his at his bar and grilled down in belize you know into place down there and He talked about some of his customers Who would complain a lot? And he said to me some people will complain if you hang them with a new rope I have to say that's a phrase that I continue to use to this day scott I miss your friend And I will treasure our time together and consider it to be also a personal high as well as a career high one of my fondest memories of scott was Coming to him when I was just hitting my my feet wet trying to be a soccer coach for my young kids and uh, really struggling with some of the interactions with just other parents and the community expectations for this volunteer role and um, I remember a lunch with scott where We talked for probably an hour about this and he He introduced me to the concept of the parent gene If I was to pick the top five things that made the octa project fix success um, the work that scott did on documentation is jeff getley within that top five Incredibly sad that he's no longer around He's a huge loss. Um, but I am glad his memory lives on in the form of the documentation Yeah, he was a great. He was a great guy. I miss him a lot As we come to the close of this presentation I wanted to share a great community story from beth flanagan that are known as pidge and john holly about the race of the decade I know i'm gonna have to talk about this because i'm sure john holly talked about this Um, let's talk about blimp and the dog and the race in edinburgh the people that are working on on yachto are Some of the the craziest but most interesting people you can imagine and So tracy erdway and I decided that we needed a demo and for some reason I thought let's do a blimp Um flying things flying things are awesome, right? um, I had started building this little robot dog um called, you know replica dog called k9 and um Pidge was uh, uh working with an intern on this blimp What is his name kevin? He was the intern at the time and kevin. I'm sorry. I forgot your last name. Um, kevin wrote a lot of that code initially um He did like this really clever, you know pure wireless connection Just sending packets back and forth and that controlled the blimp and I can control the blimp from my laptop That was great for whatever reason we decided to create this ridiculous rivalry um Mostly completely faked up internet rivalry One of the things if you know us, you know part of john's friendship and my friendship is we take the piss out of each other Where we we trash talked to the you know, I trash talked to blimp and she trashed off the dog And we kind of had this bet thing going on where you know, if the blimp won this race I would give her the head of k9 and I don't remember what I was What I'd gone out of the whole thing And in order to gin up some interests on this We were going to talk absolute smack towards each other on will plus Oh, and we supposedly um Agreed on there was only bragging rights for a year Um about whoever won Months of this go by and you know, john builds this k9 unit and we bring it to edinborough and bring the blimp to edinborough and You know, uh, john's k9 unit can't turn on carpet because it's a tracked vehicle And we're doing this this ridiculous, you know staged race between this robot dog That's using tank treads and has four feet of rubberized tank tread And you know barely can move on carpet because the motors aren't big enough And this this blimp that's using a helium to stay afloat and everything and we go to start this race The thing neither kevin or I actually thought about was what what does that look like at a conference when the entire wireless bandwidth goes Pidge was using a point-to-point wireless system to control this This blimp and of course everybody pulls the phone out to take video or take some some some pictures And of course all of these devices all suddenly decide to connect to the wi-fi And of course the entire 2.4 gigahertz spectrum just becomes this cacophony Of noise and the the point-to-point wireless that was being used by pidge Um, just just bailed it dropped off because there was no way to get the signal through One of the other interesting things about edinborough is we didn't think about that wireless thing So every now and then you know the the hall would be empty and people would show up And then more people would show up and then the wireless connection would drop And the balloon would rear into crowds of people which was never a good And the the air conditioning or the heating system because this is in Like in october He's on And you know that he's big massive Our conference undergrade Air vents are blowing everywhere and this thing's lighter than air so it's getting like blown all over the place And this blimp was basically like just randomly careening out of control Um So he's lucky that this race was not a in the circle race or I'll see what lost So yeah, unsurprisingly the the dog because it weighed 10 000 pounds or something. Um You know was able to get to the one end of the the course and come back and then it was such a lark That we ended up tying like a string around the the dog's neck and had it drag the uh the blimp around a little bit I still maintain that he did lose because you know While he did get from point A to point B. I flew and flying's a lot harder And so this blimp, you know, we're trying to have this race and this blimp is like careening off In all kinds of random direction You know, and I still maintain that I won that because you know, well while I did not get from point A to point B My project didn't burn to the ground. I'm like someone's project Sorry john your project burned you lost the reality is I'm never gonna let this go So I'm gonna brag about it forever Thank you to everyone who contributed to this walk down memory lane Keep an eye out on the aqua project website for photos and memories of the last 10 years and keep contributing and participating Everyone stay safe and we hope to see you all soon