ELCE 2022 – Journey.

This is a tale of my trip to the Embedded Linux Europe conference in 2022. I promised I would share my experiences.

So, my employer ROHM Semiconductor was kind enough to pay my participation fee, hotel and the flights. The value of open source and the community collaboration is well understood by many in the company. I really want to thank ROHM for providing me with this opportunity.

My personal challenge in participating in such a conference

I feel like some wannabe developer who is just trying to join the circles he does not belong to

So, I was nervous. I am nervous of traveling and nervous of meeting new people. I won't say I suffer from the "impostor syndrome" - which I think is a pretty trendy word (and I am not trendy! I am anti trendy and proud of that). I have no diagnosis of any kind. (Can be because I never go to see a doctor unless it's absolutely a must. :] I need no one's help, I can survive just fine and I won't go whining little things to a doctor. I can take care of myself! This might be the twisted side of "Finnish Sisu". I may not be as extreme as past generations though... It was just a regular evening something like 20 years ago when my father had a heart attack. And what did he do? He stayed at home overnight just eating painkillers. Finally the next morning he gave up and drove by himself to see a doctor. The doctor sent my father to a hospital which was 70 kilometres away, and my father tried to argue he could drive there himself so that the ambulance crew would not need to bother... I think I would let the ambulance crew drive me without arguing at that point :] I am pretty sure this is not an uncommon way of thinking for my generation of Finnish people).

Instead of giving me a diagnosis, I will describe some of the symptoms. I have a hard time interacting with any skilled fellow kernel developers. I am always pretty damn sure I am an uninteresting attendant who has done nothing important when compared to others. When I am about to engage in a discussion I have this moment when I feel like some wannabe developer who is just trying to join the circles he does not belong to. Overcoming this feeling takes quite a bit of willpower. It does not matter that I have been working in the field for around 17 years – solving problems and developing device drivers as well as parts of kernel frameworks. I’ve spent some years estimating efforts when planning how existing mechanisms could be supported by the platform when new hardware generation is built. I have patches in-tree. I review and I discuss. I am right at times and I am wrong at other times. My brains tell me I am just as anyone. Still, for some reason I always feel that others do so much more and know things so much better.

Partially this can be because I easily compare myself to people that _are_ better than me in a specific area. When I look at what I know of PMIC hardware, I compare myself to the hardware designers in my company. Yep, they’re superior to me in their area. When I think about what I know of Linux kernel regulators, I may compare myself to Mark who maintains this area. Gpio – Linus W. MFD – Lee jones. Patch statistics – someone who is higher than me… I always notice the ones who are better than me. I think this leads to that I don’t feel I am good – if I am not the best. And being the best is difficult :) And yes, I realize how ridiculous it is – but I can’t help feeling I am not good enough.

The trip

My flight was scheduled to leave Monday morning around 6 AM. The website of Finavia maintaining the Oulu airport stated one should be there 2 hours prior to the take-off! I need to reserve something like 30 mins to get from home to the airport - and I am no early bird. Although the older I get, more of those feathers I seem to grow. I seem to be waking up earlier and easier these days. Old me would not have gone to bed before 4 AM. Anyways, I decided that leaving at home 2 hrs prior the take-off should suffice - Oulu airport is small and there is no way it could take 2 hours to get in the plane.

Before the flight I was nervous just as always. Whole Sunday I spent wondering if I had packed everything I would need. In the evening I finally pre-ordered a taxi to be at my home around 4 AM (by the way, ordering a taxi via phone was already an achievement as I absolutely hate making phone calls to unknown people) and then I set my phone to wake me up at 3.30 AM... That was really not needed.

Yep – I don’t think I slept too much that night. I did fall asleep a couple of times but immediately woke up sure I would be late from the flight. When the wake-up alarm started ringing I was already awake. Made a cup of coffee and a little later I was sitting in the taxi. Luckily the driver started the discussion so I didn’t have to push myself to start talking. And after a while I was having a nice chat with the driver. Considering how hard it is for me to start discussing with people, it is strange how much I actually enjoy talking with people. It’s like I am afraid to death of something I usually quite enjoy.

Why bother?

it is meeting the people

One might ask why on earth someone who has such big difficulties in talking to strangers goes to a conference? What was my motivation, huh? I admit, I have seen much stranger questions too.

Yeah, feel free to call me an oddball but it is meeting the people. You read right. Not just left-to-right as we read, but also right. The main motivation for me to visit the ELCE at 2022 was meeting the people I have never met before. Still, I am really terrified of opening a discussion, horrified of making myself known. One of the biggest fears is that others will think I am not too clever... Another thing making live encounters hard for me is that I am slow at sorting things in my mind. I need time to consider. Email is a perfect tool for me as when I have some time I can connect the knowledge I have in my head to the matter we are discussing. In a live situation, having a chat with someone who answers your question only after 10 minutes might not be the nicest experience :) Nevertheless, after I manage to push myself over the limit of starting a chat – I do almost always enjoy speaking with people. I do like learning what others are like, their habits, likings and dislikings. Sure thing I also wanted to listen to some of the techy talks – I have a passion for learning more and often these talks contain at least some bits of information I have lacked. Reading this chapter now ... If I was efficient I could have just written: "I went there to listen to the technical presentations and to meet people".

Dublin day 1, Monday

My brain told me I should greet him and ask if he was Geert - but the other part of me pulled back.

We should fast-forward to Dublin before my fingertips start bleeding... On Monday I had no real talks to attend as I noticed the Monday talks did all require pre-registration. I had planned to walk to the conference place so I knew where to be On Tuesday morning. When I walked to the conference place I saw a glimpse of familiar looking faces. I was pretty sure it was Geert who walked past me. I had earlier seen presenting in some virtual conferences. My brain told me I should greet him and ask if he was Geert - but the other part of me pulled back. Before I had my guts gathered the man had walked to the crowd. I scouted the place and was returning back to the hotel when I saw him again at the traffic-lights. I was pretty sure it was Geert. Geert happens to be the person I had chatted most frequently with in the kernel IRC-channels. Person who has always been nice and helpful.

I really collected all of my courage and was able to spill out “Sorry, but do I know you. Are you Geert?”. Oh, little did I know how wrong I pronounced his name :) It was only later (maybe Wednesday) when Marek explained to me how Geert is pronounced ;) I guess we had some fun with the pronunciation back then as Marek's version was still somewhat different from Geert's ;) Anyways, Geert admitted it was him and recognized my name when I introduced myself. I was asking whether he planned to attend any sessions Today. I did also ask if he had plans for all the evenings, hoping that perhaps we could have a pint together and do some chatting. Unfortunately Geert was pretty busy – he was presenting his talk about fbdev => DRM conversion and there were special evening occasions for presenters. I felt a little bit stupid – how didn’t I think that in advance. It was quite rude to try to push myself into his company, right? I did back off thinking I’d better leave Geert alone, he probably was having things to do and I didn’t want to hold him longer…

Afterwards I was still quite delighted I had met Geert in person. Finally. I had had so many chats with him in IRC – and even if we had never really worked on the exact same corner of the kernel, he had still always helped me when I had asked questions. I went back to my hotel, took a quick nap just to somehow recover from the horrible night – and then started to work with the KX022A accelerometer driver. I had carried the sensor + a beaglebone black with me. (Wondering if the airport security would consider these devices as a threat). I tend to lose the sense of time when I start working with code. Same happened to me now. Suddenly I realized it was almost 8PM – it was time to think what to eat. At that moment I noticed Geert had messaged me in IRC, asking me to have dinner with him and Marek. Unfortunately I hadn’t noticed the invitation so I missed the dinner and chatter. It was really a bummer – still, it kind of made my day. I had been invited to have dinner with two experienced kernel developers. (Yet, the small voice in my head was telling me that maybe it was just because Geert felt a pity for me – poor sod who was all alone in the conference).

Dublin day 2, Tuesday

I just turned around and walked back to the hotel. A Big disappointment.

The next morning I headed to a “first timer breakfast” – event. When I arrived at the fourth floor, all of the tables were pretty crowded and people were chatting together. There seemed to be no familiar names in the badges. I took a cup of coffee and walked through the room. More I looked at the people sitting and discussing, the less I felt like interrupting. It looked like each table consisted of a group of people who knew each-others. Jumping in would’ve felt like intruding. I end up just quickly drinking my coffee and then quietly leaving the breakfast.

Some of the Tuesday morning I spent just walking around the conference area trying to spot familiar names. I hoped to meet people I had been interacting with before. that would be mostly the Linux device-driver / subsystem folks from areas like regulators/regmap, GPIO, RTC, WDG, CLK, power-supply, IIO, V4L2... It was pretty hard. The OSS event covered quite a few areas of open source, so kernel/driver folks were in minority. Especially for the Tuesday when ELCE was not yet properly started and most of the talks concentrated on other topics. I did attend some talks about booting, tracing and debugging. I managed to have a nice chat with a fellow Finnish attendee working at Veikkaus, and I also had a nice chatter with Geert who happened again to be walking in the same direction with me. It was also a positive surprise that Kieran (who was rushing to lunch) recognized me from the ROHM logo in the jacket and the name badge as he was passing by.

The most puzzling part of Tuesday for me was the evening event in the Guinness storehouse. Schedule had it titled as “all attendee Party” – but the OSS website stated that attending required some special registration and paying a registration fee. To me this was pretty contradicting and I was pretty sure this event was not open for me because I didn't remember adding any special events during the registration. It was a pity as that would have been the perfect place for meeting the people. Well, as perfect as it can get with the OSS format where we have such a large amount of attendees with such a wide variety of fields of interest. I did some coding at the hotel and as the day went on I decided I might just as well walk to the Guinness storehouse to see what was going on there. I packed my badge and a hoodie in my backpack and walked to the place. When I arrived there maybe half an hour after the event had started, I saw a large group of people swarming on the doors. It seemed as if there was a lengthy queue… I really didn’t feel like staying in the queue for who knows how long just to be told that I was not allowed in – thus I just turned around and walked back to the hotel. A Big disappointment.

It was only couple of days later when I found an info-letter from my spam email folder. It seems I would have been allowed in after all.

Dublin day 3, Wednesday

I should not try to be a fortune teller who can predict the contents of the calendars of other people

Wednesday had much more topics targeted to Embedded Linux. I did attend some of the keynotes sessions. This was pretty much the only part of the conference I did not really enjoy. I won’t go into details but for me there was just too much BS covered with sugar and syrup. Yeah, I understand that companies are making things possible by funding – and I am grateful for that. I also do understand companies want something back from their investments – othervice the investment would be just a donation. Still, when grown up people are patting each other's backs on the stage, smiling and saying (in my opinion) nothing concrete… Okay, enough of this. I am sure there was a target audience for the keynotes as well. It’s just that I was not really capable of digesting it. Maybe it is just my fault ;)

I definitely ENJOYED Josef’s show about booting a processor. Maybe not such a technical deep-dive (although I am sure Joseph could also go into the technical details), but Joseph is just a tremendously skilled speaker. I definitely suggest you go see him live if you haven’t. I wish I had even 1% of that confidence – being able to interact with people like that would probably change my conference experiences for good :)

One of the talks I was really excited to see was about I2C in Linux by Luca Ceresoli. I had exchanged a few emails with Luca regarding modelling an I2C address translation feature in Linux kernel. Luca has done an excellent patch set tackling this issue and I had used his work in a video SerDes driver I was drafting. After the talk I gathered all of my courage and nervously went to talk with Luca. It was actually a really nice experience, I really enjoyed meeting him :) I just hope I didn’t seem arrogant when I discussed with him about his presentation as I did some suggestions. I really liked his talk and I am sure it helped many developers who are getting familiar with the Linux I2C devices. The talk was almost like a hands-on lesson about writing your driver. If you need to write your first Linux driver for an I2C device – go see his talk. (Oh, but on top of that - do quick googling on regmap as well ;])

I was on the verge of asking Luca if he would like to have a pint later – but my inner “I may not be worthy”-voice kicked in and told me that Luca probably has more important meetings arranged already. This same voice prevented me from suggesting this to other people like Alexandre Belloni (who remembered me from a private email – which again was surprising to me) or Krzyzstof Kozlowski who I have also had some private discussions with in the past. By the way, listening to the talk by Krzyzstof about DT bindings probably helped me to avoid one re-iteration of my dt-binding patch for the Kionix KX022A accelerometer driver which I am writing. I was wrong and asked him a question. I felt a bit (a lot?) stupid as the answer was so obvious and I should’ve thought of it – but in the end of the day, I learned.

Later in the evening when I was at the hotel I did some messaging with my wife. She told me that I am a bit silly – I should not try to be a fortune teller who can predict the contents of the calendars of other people. She told me that I should allow others to reply on their own behalf. Yep. I do have a wise wife :) Oh, and by the way - we started discussing with her online meaning I had my time to consider what I say :] Perhaps this is the reason I have her by my side <3

Dublin day 4 and 5, Thursday + Wednesday

As the conference went on I slowly got my diesel started. It became easier for me to have a chat with people

I remembered my wife's words and during Thursday I agreed with Krzysztof to go and have a pint together. I also contacted Laurent who was participating in the Plumbers in Dublin, and we planned to go and have a coffee. It turned out the coffee was replaced by a quick chatter at the front door of the conference hall due to the scheduling issues – but I still managed to say “Hello” to him as well. I just hope I had suggested having a pint/dinner/lunch also to some other people during the event. It would have been great to know them better.

As the conference went on I slowly got my diesel started. It became easier for me to have a chat with people – although it still wasn’t exactly easy. I met briefly with Marek Vasut and had a short discussion about the bd718x7 clock gating problem on an i.MX8 SOC. I managed to say “Hello” to Stephen Boyd and also shortly chatted with Drew about using the beaglebones in driver development. The “climax of socializing” for me was having a pint and burger with Krzyzstof on Friday after the always so fun Tim Bird’s “closing game”. Talking with Krzyzstof was easy and cool. We really just chatted and had our dinner. It was nice covering topics like motorbikes and politics, technology and agriculture with him. I think I could have continued the chatter and maybe ordered a pint or two more - but I did have an early flight back home. Also Krzyzstof had other errands to run.

All in all, the week was successful yet tiring. It was great getting back home after staying awake the night (again) waiting for my flight to start…

What about the future?

I really am wondering if I should challenge my fear of social encounters and submit a talk proposal for the next time

I am eagerly waiting for the next time already. And I can tell you a secret - please don't let anyone know but I really am wondering if I should challenge my fear of social encounters and submit a talk proposal for the next time. Yes, I have been giving out some Linux training back when I worked at Nokia – and every time I did that I was horrified even if I personally knew most of the participants. Yet, it is somehow cool to see that I do survive from such extreme situations. I do have some initial ideas for a talk boiling in my head.

Perhaps the thing to take from this lengthy babbling is that You can really participate in conferences like this even if you are like me. Most of the people are friendly, and meeting them may just be one really cool experience.

Now it is time for me to go to the wilderness in northern Finland, Enonteki?. (Feel free to google the place and if you ever wish to experience something different - book a winter time trip to Hetta. This naturally assumes you do not live there - but I'd say it's quite a safe assumption ;] Just don't forget to wear enough clothes). In two weeks I will start walking through the swamps and forests. I will be sleeping under tarpaulin somewhere close to 10 kilometers away from the nearest road. There I can load my batteries (without annoying fuel-gauging issues or dropped capacity regardless of the weather) for the next set of social encounters ;)