Louisa Denly

product manager, degree apprentice graduate, open source advocate, bookworm, flautist, heavy-metal fan | views are my own

Author: Louisa

  • Creating Sustainable Strategy for Open Source Projects

    When I first started leading Galasa over two years ago, there was only one question that I kept asking myself – how do I make this project sustainable for the long-term?

    Open source is a unique way to develop software, predominantly because it is through the passion of developers, documentation writers, designers, architects, and leaders that volunteer their time to spend creating something they believe in. This can create something extraordinary and industry-changing like Kubernetes, Zowe, Linux, and the vast array of projects that are used across the IT industry to keep the world running. However, the downside is that unless you have a continuous stream of volunteers, these open source projects can suffer and find it difficult to continue. 

    There is often a passion and driving force behind those that maintain open source projects that keep the community alive, and that can be seen through webinars, blogs, conference presentations, awards, YouTube videos, and more. However, if this isn’t curated and thought through, especially when the project is small, it can be hard to gain the publicity and the extra support that you might need. For example, if someone new picked up the project to use it for the first time and they had nobody to contact for help when they got stuck, it’s unlikely they’ll continue using it.

    When I took on Galasa with the rest of the brilliant maintainers and committers, it was clear we needed some guiding principles with the activities we were going after as a group. What would help the project survive for the long term? What can the maintainers do to continue attracting new users and developers? What is the strategy?

    Firstly, strategy is a concept that has been poured over and written about over centuries. However, for this, I’ve used the definition that strategy is a plan of action designed to achieve a long-term or overall aim. So, the first thing for us to do was define the mission and vision – what was Galasa here to achieve?

    The mission was defined as the following: to allow customers to deliver software with confidence by simplifying and encouraging automated integration testing to help Mainframe modernisation within Hybrid Cloud environments and increase the reliability of repeatable software releases. Yes, it was long and wordy, but it best fit what the project was about, to make deploying software on the Mainframe easier and more reliable.

    Then, once we’d defined the overall aim of the project, it was time to consider what were the long-term goals that we were trying to achieve. The guiding principles by which when we are choosing to do something to benefit the project, did it fit into the following aims?

    1. Grow the number of users and companies utilising Galasa.
    2. Grow the number of individual contributors on GitHub.
    3. Deliver version 1, user requirements, and features for Galasa.

    These may seem far reaching and not very SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timebound), well, that was the point. If we created goals that were too difficult to obtain, everyone may lose interest and find it demotivating. On the other hand, if the goals were too specific, and everyone was volunteering time, then they may find the pressure of holding to those goals too much and they would not continue.

    In reality, it has been difficult to continue all three of these goals at the same time – sometimes it’s more important to prioritise the build pipeline and creation of a better documentation experience, than it is to blog and make videos about the project. However, they have provided a good steering guide for the maintainers to consider what they are focusing on.

    The most important thing about creating a good strategy is the ability to remain consistent and reliable in delivering in small steps towards the overall aim. The journey for Galasa remains bumpy as we enter our third year in the open, however it’s the love and passion for creating something that will be used to make software engineers and enterprise level applications more resilient for the long term keeps us motivated.

    How have you created strategy for open source projects? Do you agree with what I’ve laid out, or have you done things differently? I’d love to hear your experiences.

  • Skills for Life Campaign Launch

    As part of the Skills for Life Campaign run by the Department for Education in the UK Government, I was invited to the launch event at the Google offices in St Pancras, London. The event was 10.30am on a Monday morning, and I was excited to meet apprentices and employers from every industry that I could think of.

    I’d arrived and put my bags down, there were banners everywhere with many of the apprentice participants on the banners, the advert rolling around TV screens, breakfast, and photo opportunities with banners to advertise the campaign. I quickly settled in and met many people from the Department for Education, various employers including the IT and Rail industry, and two of the apprentices that I went to the advert shoot with back in October 2023.

     After around an hour of networking, the event started by a speech from the VP of Marketing for Google UK, she spoke about apprenticeships, how upskilling is important and valued at Google, and their support of the Skills for Life campaign. Then, Gillian Keegan, the Secretary of State for Education made a speech about her time as an apprentice, her support for the campaign to upskill people across the country, and her enthusiasm for being there on the day. Lastly, Robert Halfon gave a quick speech about his experiences with apprenticeships and especially degree apprenticeships (given he’s also the universities minister), and then a panel. The panel consisted of people from all walks of life, it was particularly impressive because the panel included people that had learnt maths at a later stage in life, degree apprentices, participants of the Princes’ Trust, and employers that ran their own business. It really gave a good representation of the cohort of individuals they had invited, and I felt represented and heard.

    The event was absolutely brilliant, just seeing so many different apprentices from all walks of life was inspirational to see. I felt included and part of the event as there were only about 150 people that had turned up. I was really proud to attend and represent IBM, and I hope that in the future I can attend more events and become more of an advocate for apprenticeships and alternative paths for education.

  • First Six Months as TSC Chair for Galasa

    It’s coming to the end of 2023, and it has been a whirlwind year. I joined the Galasa team back in January to look at how we can gain adoption by the Linux Foundation and more specifically, the Open Mainframe Project (part of the LF) to gain better governance and, most importantly, find the right home for Galasa. Through research and some team conversations, we felt the Open Mainframe Project was the right place, as their mission is to enhance the quality, reliability andavailability of Mainframe systems, and the adoption of modern development methodologies, which Galasa supports. The process to gaining adoption by the Open Mainframe Project was to gain a sponsor from the Technical Advisory Committee (TAC), and present at one of their monthly meetings to gain approval from the voting members. With Joe Bostian as our sponsor, in April, Will Yates and I presented to the committee and got an overwhelming vote of approval – we had finally made the crucial step towards adoption! 

    The next step was to organise the Technical Steering Committee (TSC). We had our first meeting in June in the open and as we hadn’t been fully announced, it took a little bit of time for us to get up and running. I was elected as Chairperson and luckily, we have a great team – Mike presented the technical roadmap that had been created before being adopted, and we have Michelle, Dom, Venkat, and Petr to represent other organisations interested in steering the project in the right way; it felt like we were finding our feet. Having an open source project is like starting with a blank page and thinking,how do we start to gain attention and traction so that people know we exist? How do we make it as easy as possible for people to join us? 

    When we announced Galasa back in September (here), I was full of excitement. We gained sessions at the Open Mainframe Summit, part of the IBM TechXchange conference. I got the opportunity to present on the Keynote and a Galasa 101 talk as part of the agenda which was my first time attending a conference to speak, so I gained a lot of new experiences in a short space of time. By September, we had gotten into the flow of running TSC meetings in public, and we created the project structure: the iteration planning (fortnightly), scrum meetings (thrice weekly), and retrospectives (every 6 weeks) – for the calendar click here. For me, this felt like the opportunity to start thinking longer term, I had the opportunity to think less about how we fight the immediate fires of getting ready, and more about how we drive towards the future. 

    October and November seemed to pass by incredibly quickly, as we were moving the Galasa infrastructure, building more enhancements for the CLI capability, and helping publicise through videos, blogs, and conferences such as GSE UK. Watching Michelle and Jade present in person at GSE UK was phenomenal, because it felt like the open source project was gaining traction. Although they had done those presentations before, I was able to sit and watch the audience reaction, which made it even more real. Also, now we had been fully launched, it was time to submit the Galasa project to the DevOps Dozen Awards and plan for 2024. 

    Building up to the year full of achievements, Will and the team have put in years of effort, architecture, development, and thought into getting Galasa into the brilliant place where the project can now live under the right governance and home with the OMP. For now, there are three things we want to accomplish: gaining new contributors; attracting and looking after users; and building a version 1. This will allow us to be more sustainable as a project and continue to help automate testing and make developing on the mainframe a better experience for those that do it every day. 

    Come and join us! Our calendar is here, we meet on the #galasa-dev slack and you’re always welcome to download the project and have a go for yourself. Follow Mike for a step-by-step guide – link is here. 

  • Skills for Life Campaign Advert

    It all started in July 2023, when I sent off a video of myself speaking for 30 seconds and some information about my apprenticeship, company, and background. In September, I was contacted by the casting agency working on behalf of the Department for Education to be part of a filming shoot in mid-October. I was understandably really excited, what could this mean – they gave me an idea that it could be billboards, adverts, posters, and banners, but I didn’t know which part of that I’d be involved in.

    They sent me all the information running up to the event where I’d be off to shoot for a TV advert in Manchester in mid-October 2023. I took the 5 hour train up to Manchester one Wednesday afternoon, and stayed in a hotel overnight anxiously awaiting the call sheet they would send me later. The taxi call was 6am, and I went down to find 3 other apprentices and an actress waiting for the same mini-bus, and we were off to the set outside Manchester. We arrived at some trucks stationed outside in the car park of an old school being used as the set and got some breakfast from the truck outside. The truck had been converted into a canteen area, I had never seen that before, felt like I was on the set of something really exciting. I got taken to wardrobe to show them which clothes I was wearing and had to get changed into some new clothing as I was told the director didn’t agree with skinny jeans. The shoot was fascinating – so completely different to my life at IBM – watching the camera, lighting, and staging crew asking extras to walk up and down stairs multiple times took ages but was really interesting to see how this was all put together. I was featured in the classroom scene, along with Harrison and Bolu, and I was seated next to the main actress, and my job was to greet her as she sat down.

    I felt really excited coming out of the shoot, not knowing how it was going to be edited together and whether I was going to be part of the edit. As part of this, I was then asked lots of information from the PR company about my experience as an apprentice and my story. They absolutely loved that I had completed two apprenticeships at various stages of my career and it really gave me a boost to be recognised for the achievements that I’d made. Consequently, they’ve featured me in multiple places: CareerMag, the local radio lunchtime news, and 4 international news outlets.

  • GSE UK 2023

    In November, I spent time at the GSE UK conference in Whittlebury Hall, near Silverstone in the UK. It was my second conference, so I was full of anticipation and unsure what I was going into. My first thought was – how on earth am I going to navigate the mammoth agenda with an exceptional amount of content, and the second – are there going to be people I know?

    I spent time before the conference going through the agenda and selecting one or two sessions for each slot to make sure that I had a few things lined up to go to. On the Monday, they had put on a half-day set of sessions that were particularly interesting, I went to a session on Cyber Resiliency specifically looking at how customers can use a Cyber Vault to be particularly resilient against potential cyber-attacks. The vendor area with stands wasn’t open until the following day, so I wanted to make sure that I had acclimatised. Many friends from the previous conference (IBM TechXchange) were there, including Steven, Emma, Joe, Tony, Shari. When I saw them socialising in the bar, it really helped me find my feet in terms of understanding how to navigate the conference and using the new app they had started using.

     

    As I had settled, the next three days were far more entertaining. I spent time wandering around the stand with a Lego Mainframe, the Plexi (which is a see-through Mainframe), the formula one race car that sat out the front, the InterSkill stand, and really just absorbing the atmosphere that came with GSE UK. I went to some sessions around an introduction to CICS – this was highlighting the next features in the latest release 6.1, this also signposted the rest of the sessions at the conference which Tony highlighted particularly well. Michelle did a fantastic session about Macro 4’s use of Galasa and it was brilliant to see her advertise the way that they had taken many of their old tests and converted them to Galasa tests. Additionally, Broadcom did a great pitch about DevOps on the Mainframe, and how to modernise from the perspective of making changes to systems. One session was around OpenTelemetry too, it was brilliant to see the way that open-source and parity of technology across the distributed and on premise platforms were merging and they were becoming far more synonymous with each other. There’s a lot of work to be done in this area, but it’s growing in excitement due to the amount of information that is flowing between disparate systems struggling to talk to each other.

    A particularly proud moment was seeing Jade Carino give her talk on Galasa (How to Test the Mainframe Without Knowing the Mainframe). It was the first time that she’d given the talk to an audience, and it was brilliant to see her move around the room, give her demos smoothly and even if something went wrong, she was able to pick herself back up and figure out how to move on. She had a room full of interested users and hopefully we have one or two that went home to see if they could try it. It was a brilliant moment to see her present and I’m really proud of how far she’s come.

     Thank you to GSE for a brilliant event, and I’m excited to be part of the virtual event in April 2024.