This week, I went to the Next Generation Internet (NGI) breakout session
at OW2'con in Paris, and the NGI Forum in Brussels. NGI, the EU
initiative that has been funding Spectrum since the beginning, is ending
in 2027, so my main aim in attending these events was to learn about
what might replace it and what other funding opportunities are
available, to ensure that Spectrum can keep going. Having made a lot of
connections and learned a lot (even though nothing seems to be nailed
down yet, even at the EU level), I feel more positive about the future
outlook for Spectrum than I did before, so I think that was a success,
although a smooth transition will require a lot of work and good fortune
over the next couple of years. Aside from that, I've been continuing
planning work on what we'll be focusing on for the next year or so — now
that more people are working on Spectrum and things can go faster, and
because Spectrum still involves a lot of research questions whose
results can cause estimates to change or tasks to need to be swapped
out, this is now basically a continuous process of communication between
myself, the rest of the team, and NLnet to make sure things keep going
smoothly.
Aside from that, I worked a bit on a series I've had in the background
for a while that fixes some lifecycle bugs around networking in
Spectrum, but mostly after an intense several days of travel,
networking, and fact finding, I've been needing a fair bit of rest.
Demi has been getting familiar with the Cloud Hypervisor codebase by
finding and fixing various safety issues in it. We expect her to be
doing a lot more work on Cloud Hypervisor in future, and this is a good
on-ramp that's already resulting in upstream improvements. So far two
PRs have been accepted, and another is still in progress.
In a few minutes it's no longer Sunday anywhere on Earth, so that's it
for now. In the next week I expect to spend time following up on
connections I made at the conferences, making sure work and funding is
sorted for the rest of the year, and hopefully finishing my networking
lifecycle fixes.
