Today is our 13th wedding anniversary! Unfortunately I'm spending the day getting ready for an outpatient procedure tomorrow morning. In sickness and in health, right? 😅 We'll celebrate properly when I'm feeling better.

It's great that kids are curious, I'd like to encourage that constantly, as much as possible. But I also don't want to answer questions about volcanoes at 3AM when they wake up with growing pains 🌋

"Cats don't take fall damage, right mom?" Our kids might be playing too much Minecraft 😅

Me: It's ok that I'm a little weird, my interests and my tendency to be aloof makes me thoughtful and good at what I do 😄 Also me, at any parent event: Don't be weird, don't be weird, don't be weird 😕

Happy #Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release day! 🦝 Check out the latest when it comes to #mainframes specifically by visiting this blog post from the great Frank Heimes: ubuntu-on-big-iron.blogspot.com/2026/04/blog...

I know it's not strictly my fault when my kid inherits a condition from me that's highly genetic, but it still doesn't feel good 🙁 (What, don't have kids? We all have something. C'mon.)

Time for the March 2026 Open Source on IBM Z & LinuxONE report! 🐧 The team tested new versions of nearly 3 dozen projects, including Apache Kafka, Erlang, & OCaml. The GitHub Actions service brought in 9 more repositories to test on s390x! 🎉 Full report here: community.ibm.com/community/us...

The last 26 days of the school year are theme days for my Transitional Kindergarten (TK) kiddo. I guess it's fun for kids, but now I have to get organized enough to make sure he's ready for Hat Day and Mismatch Day and Pajama Day and School Spirit Day and... 😭

We never had a voice activated "home assistant" so I realize I'm late to the party here, but it's eerie how naturally my kids just talk to computers (and TVs, watches...) with their voice all the time, and simply expect it to work.

The "it's raining, I think I'll stay home" California mood gets stronger every year 😅

Went to the Chabot Space & Science Center with the boys to check out the Artemis II splashdown activities & see the final hour of descent on the big screen with a bunch of other space fans And no joke, the laptop running the projection ran out of batter 30 seconds before splashdown 😱 Still had fun

On April 7th, 1964 the IBM System/360 was released, the grandfather of all our modern IBM Z systems 🤩 I observed this by reading a case study from CACM on IBM’s system/360-370 architecture from 1987 digging in to why the platform was still so successful 23 years later: cacm.acm.org/research/cas...

There's a stomach bug making its way through our house. I was sick on Monday evening, and then we were up last night at 2:30AM cleaning up a kiddo and his bed 🤮 It's no fun, but it's been a pretty mild one so far, and I'm grateful. And that it waited until we were home and done with flights.

Wow, Easter Sunday is a super chill day for air travel ✈️

My MAGA aunt is sadly descending into dementia and thought there were bombs from the war going off outside (in Florida), she's asked everyone to not engage her with "politics" and has left all the MAGA groups she was in. I'll respect her need to avoid triggers and for a safe space 😛

Packing up the vacation house and l feel like I'm playing gas futures with my car Do I fill up now, or see if it's cheaper in the summer? 1. It's rarely cheaper in the summer, even in the normal times 2. Hope is dead $3.99/gal regular just north of Philly, I'll report back when we return in June

Mixed feelings about paying to have a switch for the door replaced in our built-in microwave Economically, replacement may have been better. But I didn't have to deal with extraction, disposal, & remounting of a new one, and we don't have an otherwise perfectly working device dumped in a landfill.

Brought my own little Mario (or eldest, who is 7 years old) out to see the new Super Mario Galaxy movie 🍄 👑 ⭐ 🦊 He's been asking about it since he learned about it from another kid at school last YEAR and I'm happy to say we both really enjoyed it 🍿 🎬

Chag Pesach Sameach! Had a Seder at our place in Philly for the 1st time. The boys loved having Grandpa join us for it 😁 I'm glad I took the day off, even with the catered food I had plenty to do, especially once I decided to pull out the heirloom dishes and silver. I even made charoset! #passover

I wrote about our adventure out to Lancaster, PA on Saturday for #CPOSC ✨ princessleia.com/journal/2026...

My hobby, apparently: Buying clothes for the boys. Also, Target jeans just don't cut it. I had to switch to a real store 💰 (and brand names at thrift stores, but the pickings are increasingly slim)

Just gave a lightning talk at #CPOSC about using GitHub Actions to test your code across architectures! ✨ And my live demo worked! Slides here: princessleia.com/presentation... (140K pdf)

"A Brief History of Time Syncing" with @wmankowski.bsky.social at #CPOSC this afternoon! They boys are actually watching this talk, mostly 😁🕰️

The great @ewindisch.ontological.observer presenting on "The Vibe of Agentic Infrastructure" at #CPOSC

The boys are big fans of the retro game room they have at #cposc

Stephanie Schwartz did a survey of her community about AI to help have a firmer understanding of future curriculum development for compsci. She saw mixed trust, code review skills becoming more critical, and a continued need for education around software architecture #cposc

Made it to #cposc! "Where AI Meets Hardware: Designing and Building a 3D Satellite Tracker"

Brought the kiddos to see Hoppers last night. Reviews from them were mixed (it was a little too scary). But the previews made me realize it's going to be a big movie year for us. Mario! Mandalorian! Toy Story 5! Live Moana! The Cat in the Hat! A lot for a family that doesn't go much.

Hope to do a lightning talk at the Central Pennsylvania Open Source Conference this weekend on using GitHub Actions for multiarch builds. Am I ready? I am ready.

The annual CPOSC conference in Lancaster, PA is happening on Saturday, March 28th! It's a great regional conference and I'm bringing the whole family this time! 👨‍👩‍👦‍👦 My husband and I will swap off kiddo duty throughout the event, and maybe they'll learn a thing or two 🐧🧑‍💻

I've spent my whole life making things veeeery tiny on my desktop screen. I just increased the size of one of my panels. I just saw the eye doctor a couple months ago, I wonder what that means? 🤔 Anyway, I turn 45 this year.

My day started with an urgent care visit (I'll survive) but at least I wasn't this truck driver trying to get on the PA turnpike at Bensalem (351) 😱

Kiddo woke me up waaaay too early to ask me about how Kirby flies. "He sucks in a bunch of air and floats!" "That doesn't make sense, it would have to be helium." "..." Anyway, there are some YouTube videos about it we'll watch later 😅

Flying to Philly for spring break tomorrow. I'm going to miss my cat 😭 (She'll come with us for the big summer trip)

The Linux on IBM Z and LinuxONE Open Source Software Report for February 2026 is now available ✨ The team worked on over two dozen projects, including HAProxy, MySQL, & Keystone (OpenStack) ensuring latest versions are tested on s390x Report: community.ibm.com/community/us... 🐧

"Mom, did people in the 80s think they had a lot of technology?" "Yeah! We had color TVs, VCRs, walkmans, video games!" *skeptical* "Video games? I bet they were boring." SON.

3 more days to submit your proposals to the Xubuntu wallpaper contests for inclusion in the 26.04 LTS release! discourse.ubuntu.com/t/xubuntu-26... My envelopes and coins are ready, I just need some winners :🏆

Recently worked with @popey.me to get him set up on the IBM LinuxONE OSS Community Cloud and I was delighted to hear about his experience in the latest episode of Linux Matters! 🐧 Have an open source project you'd like to build for s390x on? Apply here: community.ibm.com/zsystems/for... #mainframe

From March 5-8th I had the pleasure of heading down to Pasadena, CA for the 23rd annual @socallinuxexpo.bsky.social Great people, great talks, I had a wonderful time which I've written about here: princessleia.com/journal/2026... #scale23x

All booked to attend the Open Source Summit North America in Minneapolis on May! 🥳 Going there directly from the Red Hat Summit in Atlanta. Busy month.

Our 7 year old wants to watch F1 this season, so we watched the Australian Grand Prix 30 minute recap last night and assembled a new Lego set!

Pro tip: When the chip in your credit card stops working reliably you can just request a new one instead of struggling with it for months.

Gorgeous day and outside with Mr. 5yo playing catch 😍⚾

"So, do you write with all the typewriters you have?" Sometimes. But listen. These are three separate hobbies: 1. Collecting (the hunt!) 2. Repairing 3. Writing I'm very into #2 right now, and #1 is a forever itch I'm trying to avoid scratching 😅 I mean, unless...

One of the projects on my plate at work has been The Open Mainframe Project's Mainframe Software Hub for Linux 🐧 We're only in the early stages, but I'm eager to bring on new contributors now to help shape direction. Details in the announcement 🎉 openmainframeproject.org/blog/welcome...

About to join a meeting where I get to say "I didn't get around to doing what I committed to a month ago, so we're all still stuck, sorry." Happy Tuesday.

With the upcoming #Xubuntu 26.04 release the distribution reaches 20 years as an official flavor in the #Ubuntu community 🥳 To celebrate, read about our 2 wallpaper contests here: discourse.ubuntu.com/t/xubuntu-26... And @geekygirldawn.bsky.social designed some coins for us for the winners! 🪙🪙🪙

There is, in fact, some crying in T-ball 😅⚾

Southern California is beautiful, but I especially love the tail end of "winter" right now when Burbank is flush with green 💚 Anyway, time to go home to Northern California ✈️ where it's also beautiful 😉

The computer history podcast I mentioned during a Q&A at #SCALE23x earlier was @adventofcomp.bsky.social Episode 60 is where he digs into the early days of COBOL development