I know I often say nice things about the guests on this podcast-because they routinely blow me away with their technical acumen and genuine enthusiasm-but really, there aren't enough nice words in the dictionary to adequately express my fondness for Anne Gentle. She's been an exceptional contributor to OpenStack as the project team lead for documentation, plus she serves as the OpenStack Documentation Technical Lead at Rackspace. And she's a mom. And she spends her spare moments helping both women and school-age children find a passion for technology and a pathway to a career in the industry.

Bam.

Can you see why I like her?

In last week's podcast we talked to Anne about a wide variety of OpenStack- and open source-related subjects, including:

• How quilting got her into technology
• How she gets elementary school kids (and their teachers) excited about network topology design
• Why she loves doing OpenStack documentation
• How a "book sprint" works
• Which audiences she'd like the foundation to write guides for next
• Why her team is transitioning from Docbooks to RST
• What the Night Scout Foundation is doing to help kids manage diabetes

You can follow Anne on Twitter at @annegentle and find her OpenStack sessions here.

Jeff and I are headed to Vancouver! Check out Jeff's sessions, my sessions, and follow @openstackpod to catch the Summit Minicasts of OSPod.

See past episodes, subscribe, or view the upcoming schedule on the OSPod website.

For a full transcript of this podcast, click "Read more," below

Niki Acosta:               And we are live! Good afternoon, good morning, goodnight, whenever you may be watching. I am Niki Acosta from Cisco and I am so, so, so, so happy, because we have Anne Gentle from Rackspace here with us today. Anne and I go way back from the early days of Rackspace, she has been a mentor to me, a great friend to me, we have had many a great lunches, and so I am just so thrilled to have you on the show today. Hi, Anne!

Anne Gentle:            Hi, Niki! Thanks for having me, I am super excited to get to chat with you.

Niki Acosta:               And you are currently also in Austin, right, today?

Anne Gentle:            Yes. Awesome Austin. I am actually right off of I-35, or 'Main Vein', and I hope that truck sound does not come through.

Niki Acosta:               If it does that is okay, at some point my dog will bark during this thing, it is like guaranteed.

Anne Gentle:            That will work.

Niki Acosta:               Yes, for sure. So, in addition to being a part of Rackspace, you are a technical contributor, documentation lead for OpenStack.

Anne Gentle:            Yes. I was one of the first hires specific to OpenStack, at Rackspace. Me and a community manager, yay! I have been around since just after it was announced at OSCON in 2010. I started about September 2010. I still remember going to this coffee shop in North Austin, so I could meet up with Jim Curry and Mark Collier, I had to make sure that I saw the Rackspace Austin office, I do not know why that was a big deal, but I wanted to see it because I could not find it in Google Maps. It was like some super secret place, that I just had to know.

Niki Acosta:               Uh-oh, we are dropping the broadcast a little bit.

Anne Gentle:            Okay. Okay.

Niki Acosta:               Thank you Rackspace WiFi, right?

Anne Gentle:            No, mine is on a wired hopefully it is okay.

Niki Acosta:               Okay, so we will start over. Take us back, how did you start in tech, tell us about that journey, and recap where you just were, because I do not think I caught the tail end of that.

Anne Gentle:            Okay. Basically, one of the first hires at Rackspace for OpenStack, after Open Sourcing it. The way I got into tech, I think is something that is common to a lot of women in tech that I have talked to; my dad is an engineer, and he brought home all kinds of interesting things, technology in our house was: computers. It was these large plotters with markers that drew things in our living room. Literally, my dad would bring it home to show us, and my mom is a writer and a quilter, they actually have a really fancy programmable sewing machine. In our house technology was just integral to a lot of things.

I think that a lot of people of my age, generation, would have you ... "Well, my first computer was a such-and-so." I find that a guy thing, like for women, I feel like sometimes they will start off with, "Oh yeah, I saw this great talk in Austin, where, um, this woman said that her first introduction to, um, the web and technology was making HTML and CSS for, like, NeoPets." I always feel there is this second story from women and tech, about how they got started, that may be more web-based or creativity-based; quilting, how odd is that, to be a way to get started with? I didn't hear that last one?

Niki Acosta:               We are breaking up pretty bad here, let me ...

Anne Gentle:            Oh, I can hear you, no.

Niki Acosta:               You can hear me, your photo is getting a little grainy and you are dropping ... Mr. Porter DeLeon, you are watching live, if you could pop in the chat if you are seeing the same issue on your side that would be incredibly helpful. Just pop it into the Q&A, and let me know if you are seeing a drop on your end. If you are, we may be able to restart here.

Anne Gentle:            Okay. Let me know, I just ... [crosstalk 00:04:53]

Niki Acosta:               Oh, now you look at lot better.

Anne Gentle:            Is that better?

Niki Acosta:               Yes. You look a lot clearer and sound a lot clearer.

Anne Gentle:            Okay. I am going to do that, I am going to take over some big wires.

Niki Acosta:               Yes.

Anne Gentle:            Better?

Niki Acosta:               Yes, so far so good. Thank you technology, this is what we get for doing this live. Good times. I am sure all of my subscribers when they get this are going to be like, "What?"

Anne Gentle:            Hey man, live is the way.

Niki Acosta:               Okay. Programmable sewing machines, a lot of cool stuff. You do a lot for, I remember like every time I turned around it sounded like you were going to workshops to teach girls something, or you are doing something with your boys, that had to do with coding and programming. I do not know how you tend to make time for it all, but you have this really cool exercise that you do with kids to teach them. I want you to tell us about that, because I think Jessica Murillo, who has also been on the show, you just sent that idea to her, for her to do a workshop. Can you tell us about that exercise that you do?

Anne Gentle:            Yes, even in describing this I realized I have done this with school children from grade 3, so elementary, all the way up to college students. What we do is a cloud simulation and so you have a bunch of small objects, a squishy ball works well, and a bunch of buckets. You can actually do these iterations on 'design me a better cloud,' or 'design me a better network topology' is what it really ends up being. You ask the students questions and make it very inquiry-based, so that they are trying to figure out, well what is more efficient? The rules might be: it has to touch every person who is going to be a cloud server, they have to use five servers to begin. One of the rules is you have to pass it across instead of side-to-side in a circle, that they end up making a star topology, and you get into all of these things, like: what if packets are dropping, the balls are dropping, what can you do, can you error correct, can you add another server whose only job is to pick up the ones that fell?

These kids, the best part of presenting it out of my elementary school the other day was, the teachers were lining up to watch the kids do this. They really got into it. I also took, we were outside which is another great thing, you are standing up, you are active; the very last transport system you do is every kid in the room. I have done it with 60 kids, all in a row, and they form this shoelace train of moving these balls through this system, and it is amazing. The teachers wanted to see pictures of a data center, they wanted to see what the cables look like, I would show them cooling systems. It was really interactive and really fun.

Niki Acosta:               That has to be really fun for a kid, because they probably, by that point any kind of wheel training they conceptually grasp something ... it is weird. My son is almost 5, and he is into this game called "Blocksworld," which is kind of like Minecraft except you can kind of program all the pieces. I have never taught him anything about it, it was probably one of those commercials that popped up that said, "Oh, you'll love this game!" I was, "Okay, fine, buy the app, whatever". To see kids just naturally have a knack for figuring things out, before... I think it is maybe they are not programmed yet to shun things that they do not understand. It is intriguing to watch them, it is really cool that you do that.

Anne Gentle:            It is fun. They will dig in.

Niki Acosta:               Let us switch gears a little bit, because I know that there is a lot happening in docs world, currently, and we do have a question from Yadine, who is watching. First, before we get into that question, tell us about your role as the Doc Lead for OpenStack. What do you do, what are you responsible for, how do you work with folks, that kind of stuff.

Anne Gentle:            Yes, sure. This is actually a really exciting time because the Kilo release just went out last Thursday, and I actually did not run for the project team lead for documentation this round. Lana Brindley, a Racker out of Australia is taking over the role. I am not disappearing, or anything like that, but I am going to move into a lot more on the app developer API, STK, documentation work, that consumer of docs. Just to give a broad overview of focused-app documentation, I am glad you asked, documentation matters! We do community-sourced docs, we treat the docs like code. If you take nothing away, just treat the docs like code. We review each others patches, we have a style guide of conventions that everyone should follow, we use Launchpad to track issues, just like a bug, there are doc bugs as well.

Every single page of the doc site lets you log a bug. In that way, we are everybody who contributes to the docs is a technical contributor. We use Garrett, we use the same work flows for reviews and all of the things that you would do with code, we do that with the docs; including continuous integration and automated build. As soon as a patch is reviewed by two docs board members, it is pushed live to the doc site.

Niki Acosta:               How many people currently are contributing to docs in OpenStack?

Anne Gentle:            It is actually a really good question. I did deep dive study on who ... If you look at every doc everywhere, we had almost 200 contributors in the last six months, which is a record again. It just keeps growing. What I actually did a study on was, which documents are they contributing to? Because we have a library of documentation now, it is a really nice robust set of docs. The most contributed to document, in the last six months, was the security guide. They did a real push on updating it, getting more updates to that actual tooling that helps you secure an OpenStack cloud; here is what is exciting to me: the second most contributors where ... The definition I used was contributed more than two patches, we had the most for the API reference. API, developer.openstack.org/API/ref is where that is billed to.

It was really exciting to see, we have had 120 contributors all-time to that, but 50 of those were in the last six months, that is partially what we are trying to build up is ... We have a lot of operator docs, let us move into the "How do I consume OpenStack clouds doc-land"?

Niki Acosta:               You know what, Anne? I am getting reports that you are still breaking up a little, I am definitely seeing it on my side. Can you do my a quick favor and log out, and then rejoin?"

Anne Gentle:            Yes.

Niki Acosta:               Thanks. The beauty of live broadcast, Ladies and Gentlemen. And thank you, Yadine, for letting me harass you to see if you are seeing that on your side as well. I appreciate you.

Anne Gentle:            Okay. Any better?

Niki Acosta:               Maybe?

Anne Gentle:            Maybe?

Niki Acosta:               I am crossing my fingers. You said you are hard-wired in?

Anne Gentle:            Yes, I am. And it is sad, because I specifically turned WiFi off. I can try WiFi, should I try it?

Niki Acosta:               Yes, because you are still breaking up.

Anne Gentle:            Man. What is up. All right, let me try WiFi. Okay. Any better?

Niki Acosta:               So far so good.

Anne Gentle:            Fingers crossed.

Niki Acosta:               Fingers crossed. Goodnight. Thank you inter-webs.

Anne Gentle:            Yes.

Niki Acosta:               [inaudible 00:14:21] few most exciting packets with regards to the community and the technology.

Anne Gentle:            You asked what is making me most excited about the technology coming up?

Niki Acosta:               Uh-oh.

Anne Gentle:            Now you are jumping, now I am losing you.

Niki Acosta:               You might have been better hard-wired in.

Anne Gentle:            Yes, let me try it again.

Niki Acosta:               You log in early and ... Are you in on a different profile ...

Anne Gentle:            [inaudible 00:15:14] I guess?

Niki Acosta:               Weird.

Anne Gentle:            How is that, better?

Niki Acosta:               Yes. You look great, so far.

Anne Gentle:            I am hard-wired, and WiFi is off.

Niki Acosta:               Okay. We do troubleshoot this stuff, I do make sure, in the pre-show prep, that everything is working. It was working just fine.

Anne Gentle:            It was, I know.

Niki Acosta:               We are dropping packets. We had a question, "What makes you most excited about doing docs for OpenStack with regards to the community and the technology?"

Anne Gentle:            My favorite story of doing Open source documentation, is going to a training class that we were holding for Rackspace and I went to a dinner and I was like, "I am the OpenStack doc detail, do you have any questions," and someone came up to me and said, "Thank you for trying to do the impossible." I was like, that is why I do this, because it is such a challenge, it is so appreciated if you do it well and do it right, that it is just totally worth it. That is what makes me excited. It is innovative, it is ... You get to experiment a little, then if things fail, you are like, "Well, we'll do it differently next time." It is the fail early, fail fast, try and see, and move on. People are so appreciative.

Niki Acosta:               They are like, "Ah! Thank goodness, there's docs that can actually do stuff now!"

Anne Gentle:            Yes!

Niki Acosta:               What about the books? I know you have been involved in a few books grants, is that something that you just decided to do just for fun, because it was ...

Anne Gentle:            No, that is a pretty well-known Open source technique, and people use it for code a lot. You take focused time out, and do a focused effort that is scoped narrowly enough that you can get it done. I had participated in a book sprint for ... Do you remember the little XO computer, for kids? I had participated in a book sprint for that in 2008, and then Google hosted four sprints at once and had freelance writers go and help with those. I had participated in three, probably, book sprints before we tried our own with operations guide; hired a facilitator to come in and honestly, I think that is the real success factor was having an outside person who could take that moderator role ...

People get really excited about their opinions, but you still have to get it down on paper as an opinion, as a stated resource. We did that with operations guide, we funded and ran one for the security guide. They were in a bunker, in Maryland. That one was a big success. We are tempering the sprint idea with the cost for travel, and what books we actually need next. What is happening with all of the projects coming in, is, honestly the docs cannot take on much more maintenance. That is one of the pitfalls of a sprint, that it adds a new body of work, but the sprinters ... The original authors may or may not have the time or inclination to come back to it and maintain it, over time. That has been the struggle, we have this gloriously edited operations guide, but we are not seeing a lot of maintenance on it by the original authors. They are off doing other things, or running their own clouds. It is an interesting space, and gosh, that is 7-8 years I have been looking at that as a technique, now.

Niki Acosta:               How do you get people to participate, you put a call out, all these people fly in, and then what? You sit in a room for how long?

Anne Gentle:            We literally sat in a room for five days, and you write for three and a half, and edit for a day and a half. Day 1 is Post-it notes, Post-it notes, topics, shape of the book, you really try to start on Day 1 with a pretty good idea. It was a discussion point: do you come in with an outline already decided on? Do you actually make sure that the people who are in the room can write what you need written? It is hard, man. You have to invite, carefully, I want to say. There are people ... There was someone at one of the sprints I went to who was a support coordinator, and he could not take the time away from his support cue to write, and the facilitator had to pull him aside and say, "You're not ... You're not writing like we need you to,". That is what else can happen, that is why it is so critical to bring the right people in the room, who really can laser focus. Sitting your butt in a seat and writing 4000 -6000 words in a day, is no small feat. It is disciplined.

Niki Acosta:               You dropped again, I am sorry, Anne. When you guys get together and you do this, is it like you are writing an Etherpad to come back, editing, all that stuff?

Anne Gentle:            Yes. The tool has evolved over the years. We used a tool, it is hosted, OpenSource software, it is called 'bookie', it is like wiki for books. It is also sort of opinionated in itself, because instead of, you know how wikia you can merge anything as long as you do the re-base and bring everything together? With this bookie tool, it locks somebody else out of whatever was being written, so you would never have merges, you never have conflicts. When you are all sitting in a room, you can say across the room, "I'm working on the messaging chapter, when I'm done, I will hand it over to you,". It is better for the end-person, the tool is specifically for that end-person across the table interaction.

Niki Acosta:               Looking at those books ... Operations' guide and security guide, for that matter, at least the previous ones, the first ones have been out for a long time. Do you look back at those and just marvel at how much things have changed at this point?

Anne Gentle:            It is interesting, I read through the operations guide and we did very light touches for Kilo. We said, "Oh yeah, CERN, they've got a lot more cores now." It was just a real light touch, because we are only sticking to infrastructure in there. Now, I know it could use a big scrub, but honestly from an operations standpoint ... Especially since we ... Now, the big update we have had to do, for the O'Reilly edit, was to add Neutron Networking. We could do a scrub for features, at a sense, but honestly with two reference architectures in that book, it is still pretty solid. Now you are paused.

Niki Acosta:               Anne, I just completely lost all of that.

Anne Gentle:            Oh no, it is like when you freeze, then I can probably say that I am not getting through.

Niki Acosta:               Are you using Chrome, by chance?

Anne Gentle:            Yes.

Niki Acosta:               You are using Chrome.

Anne Gentle:            Yes.

Niki Acosta:               Do you want to try rejoining with Firefox?

Anne Gentle:            I could, okay.

Niki Acosta:               Okay.

Anne Gentle:            See you in a minute.

Niki Acosta:               I am really bummed that this keeps dropping, because Anne is so awesome. We may have to reschedule this one, if this keeps happening. That is my commitment to you, viewers/listeners. Well, viewers, watched ... Guys I am really sorry, and gals.

Anne Gentle:            I could not get it to work on Firefox.

Niki Acosta:               Uh-oh.

Anne Gentle:            Yes, it was was, "Plug-in was not going to be allowed,".

Niki Acosta:               I am so bummed, if we keep having problems, I think we should reschedule, Anne, because you are way too important for us to be dropping.

Anne Gentle:            Aww.

Niki Acosta:               You have so much good stuff to say, and I want to ...

Anne Gentle:            I wonder if I turn the camera off, if that would let the bandwidth get through. What do you think, is that any better?

Niki Acosta:               You sound great, to me. Yes, for sure. Okay, we can run it like that, that works.

Anne Gentle:            We can also reschedule so you and I sit together, I mean, geeze.

Niki Acosta:               We will be at the Summit, doing podcast from the Summit in ... You are probably incredibly, incredibly busy at the Summit because who is not. We are going to do mini podcasts about 20 -25 minutes long, on Monday and Thursday.

Anne Gentle:            Is there certain production where they will glue this back together?

Niki Acosta:               Yes, no we are not that sophisticated. It is all automated, we just ... Jeff has to call me, and then I just log in as him, then it automatically exports to everything. I do have to review the transcripts for past podcasts which is always, always a treat. I think they are sent, I do not even know where. Potentially to places where English is not the primary language, and so you get, especially technical terms, you get stuff back and you are like, "What? What was that?" And have to re-watch that again.

Anne Gentle:            You have some doozies in OpenStack.

Niki Acosta:               Totally.

Anne Gentle:            It is true.

Niki Acosta:               One of the things that Yadine wants to know is, "How have the expectations for documentation changed, with the community since you started working on OpenStack?"

Anne Gentle:            Oh. Okay that is a good question. How have the expectations for documentation changed? We have had plenty of discussions around maintaining quality, while keeping up with fast-moving code. I have never lowered my expectations, let me lead with that. We have great writers, we have great communicators in the community, we still do not need to write to a standard, and write to conventions. Honestly, what my expectations, I have always done, are the segmentation of audience. You need to write to an operator when you want to convey something. You need to write to an end-user if you are working on an end-user guide. I think that audience analysis has helped immensely with the quality of the doc, I think it is great for contributor developers to write for each other; they know the audience and they can talk to each other. Now I, last year ... Are you still there?

Niki Acosta:               Yes. I am still here, I actually turned my camera off, too.

Anne Gentle:            Awesome, that will work. I think that has not changed over the years. It has ... We have never added ... There are audiences we have not addressed yet. What about a DevOps audience? We have not really written a guide for them. What about an SDK developer? We have not written a specific guide for them. I think that with the expansion of OpenStack projects, we should also expand the docs, but boy, that is hard with scarce resources, right? As the leader, you have to make the decisions about what gets written next, and be pretty overly pragmatic. Honestly, you have to look at data, you have to look at stats; who ... Where can you find actual contributors, and time for them to carve off, to write what you need written? That kind of thing.

Niki Acosta:               You have been pretty successful in recruiting interns and through the GNOME Outreach Program, and other things, haven't you?

Anne Gentle:            Yes. When I was going to the OpenStack Summits and still not seeing a ton of women there, I started looking into the other open source communities about what they are doing to get more women in their communities. The Python community is an excellent job of this, as i