Elizabeth K. Joseph
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pleia2.bsky.social
Elizabeth K. Joseph
@pleia2.bsky.social
I lead the Open Source Program Office for IBM Z (mainframes) at IBM. ❤️ Linux, open source, mainframes, typewriters, and trains. Wrote books on Ubuntu & OpenStack. KN6QGG. She/her. Opinions mine.

San Francisco Bay Area ✈️ Philadelphia
Pinned
I don't want to be here. It's another company that controls a platform that can ruin things at any time. Find me on Mastodon at pleia2@floss.social where I believe in the platform, consider joining me!

That said, I'm feeling the network effect, so here I am again 👋
I love California, but nothing beats the dessert counter in a New Jersey diner 😋

It's probably for the best that I don't live here 😅
January 3, 2026 at 8:22 PM
My poor husband, he married someone who notices when our internet connection no longer supports ipv6

(Long story, but we shuffled up our connections on this trip to Philly, blah blah cost, static ips)
January 3, 2026 at 3:02 PM
Some day I'll get used to seeing emojis in code.
December 30, 2025 at 12:46 AM
Happy to report that when I was in Barnes & Noble yesterday afternoon it was SWARMING with teenagers and their arms were full of books.

Hooray for young people embracing long-form content!
December 29, 2025 at 10:26 PM
Reposted by Elizabeth K. Joseph
Just watched the new Knives Out and I think it's really important you know that the scene in the Seminary's Gym is filmed in the same place Rick Astley filmed the music video for Never Gonna Give You Up.

I saw the window tracery and immediately made my friends pause the film so I could tell them.
December 29, 2025 at 1:11 PM
I'm at the point of a project where we change from cute code/skunkworks names to proper public names, which are boring and I can't remember them 😂
December 26, 2025 at 3:48 PM
Fellow technical, geeky types who have found themselves in positions of leadership: What books/courses helped you support a technical team?

I have a hard time taking corporate literature about team leadership skills seriously because I'm a cynical, technical IC. But surely it's not ALL junk.
December 24, 2025 at 4:50 PM
PSA: The Wednesday & Enid's Dorm Room LEGO set (76781) has a teeny tiny typewriter.

The set is on sale at Barnes & Noble (25% off, plus my member discount) and I said to myself, "I won't get it unless it has a little typewriter."

Behold.
December 23, 2025 at 3:51 PM
At IBM TechXchange 2025 back in October I saw David Frenzel present on how he was using #Gradle to build #COBOL applications (really!)

Thrilled to see that last month he open sourced his Gradle COBOL plugin! github.com/Living-Mainf...
GitHub - Living-Mainframe/gradle-cobol: gradle-cobol allows you to build COBOL applications using the Gradle build system directly from your IDE or inside a pipeline.
gradle-cobol allows you to build COBOL applications using the Gradle build system directly from your IDE or inside a pipeline. - Living-Mainframe/gradle-cobol
github.com
December 22, 2025 at 4:29 PM
We split Hanukkah celebrations between coasts this year, which brought some interesting challenges as far as kiddo gifts, but we made it!

We celebrated the 8th night last night, so our house beamed with candlelight and it was really nice to spend time with family here in Philadelphia 🩵
December 22, 2025 at 4:26 PM
Doing my best to get my shit together before my first meeting of the day. How about you? 😅
December 19, 2025 at 3:32 PM
Listen, I work in an industry where I have to learn new stuff constantly.

There's not enough room in my brain to call toll passes by their real names, they're all E-ZPass (the proper name of the one used on the east coast)
December 18, 2025 at 6:01 PM
I pack snacks for a cross-country flight like we're taking a wagon train.

But listen, kids are FINICKY and they will suddenly decide, at 35,000 feet, that they don't like something and so they will starve (and die of dysentery, probably).
December 17, 2025 at 6:25 PM
Here we are, the last report of the year from the #Linux on #IBMZ and #LinuxONE porting team and beyond 🚀

The list for November has nearly three dozen projects tested, including Apache Cassandra, fluentd, and neo4j + GnuCOBOL on our GitHub Actions for s390x 🧑‍💻

community.ibm.com/community/us...
Linux on IBM Z and LinuxONE Open Source Software Report: November 2025
community.ibm.com
December 17, 2025 at 4:25 PM
My favorite part of December is watching meetings fall off my calendar, leaving me free to tackle project work for HOURS 🥳
December 17, 2025 at 2:52 PM
Running on 5 hours of sleep and half a banana.
December 16, 2025 at 7:03 PM
Trying not to get offended in defense of my species when reading articles about AI.

"Humans are biased and computationally limited"

Hey! Ok, true.
December 15, 2025 at 5:22 PM
We were at the Great Train Show over the weekend because we like trains, and when we pulled out our Union Pacific set for Hanukkah the tender was making weird noises, and the engine ended up failing entirely 😞

Didn't solve our problems at the show, but we did come home with a new Hanukkah box car!
December 15, 2025 at 4:14 PM
On Saturday I spoke at the Ohio LinuxFest on porting open source software to various hardware architectures, and the (mostly free!) developer resources available.

All the resources are linked on the slides: princessleia.com/presentation... (1.2M pdf)
December 11, 2025 at 7:33 PM
Devonte' Hawkins and I published a blog post all about the giant IBM Telum II that was professionally designed, you can read the full post here: community.ibm.com/community/us...

But at the end there's a surprise: the instructions and parts list for building your own little dual-chip module! Enjoy!
Ride the Lego IBM Telum II
community.ibm.com
December 10, 2025 at 5:43 PM
When did veterinarian's offices get side hustles? We've seen several vets since adopting Zara (she's healing from some persistent wounds) and ALL of them now email us about pet supplies they're selling through subscription services, and non-health pet services they can connect us to.
December 10, 2025 at 4:02 PM
Fun fact: ThinkPads are call ThinkPads because there used to be actual IBM Think pads. Made out of paper.

(I found mine on eBay, they pop up from time to time)
December 9, 2025 at 5:56 PM
My middle-aged brain woke me up at 3am, as it does, and I'm glad it did this time. As I went to restart the podcast I was listening to I saw cancellation notifications for my flight. Mad dash to rebook and get to the airport for a flight a half hour earlier saved my day. But oof.

👋 Ohio Linuxfest 🐧
December 7, 2025 at 9:26 AM
In a great talk by Catherine Devlin at Ohio Linuxfest, and she's using scrapy in Python. But all I can think about is the fact that I've been web scraping for almost 30 years and it's only gotten a little better 😅
December 6, 2025 at 4:34 PM
I'm on my way ✈️ to the Ohio Linuxfest 2025! 🐧

Super thrilled to see a bunch of friends, but I'm also giving a talk, "Will Your Open Source Project Run on a Mainframe? Or a Watch?"

Near Columbus, Ohio? Join us tomorrow, Saturday Dec 6th!

olfconference.org
OLF Conference - Free and Open Software Conference and Expo
Welcoming All Free and Open Source Software Professionals, Enthusiasts, and Everyone Interested in Learning More About Free and Open Source Software.
olfconference.org
December 5, 2025 at 1:05 PM