There are lots of reasons I haven’t been blogging much lately. And lots of excuses. Definitely one of them is that I have been traveling a lot more.

I thought last year when I had my first intercontinental business trip was remarkable. I’m just a kid from a small town in Oregon, so getting to travel to Dublin for an OpenStack PTG was mind blowing. I got to see a real castle and eat local foods. And got stuck in a record snowstorm. #Snowpenstack

But since then I’ve been to Denver twice for PTGs, did a 2 week Agile training and cloud team gathering in Nuremberg, and have made several trips with my family. And in another week I’ll be in Nuremberg again.

I didn’t imagine myself being a world traveler when I was growing up, but I do like it.

What prompted this post is that recently one of the OpenStack PTLs and a long time contributor posted to the openstack-discuss mail list that he would not be traveling to Shanghai for the next conference. He made a bigger deal about it than necessary, and you could argue some of it was motivated by driving traffic to his blog. [UPDATE: I reread this and it sounded much more accusatory and harsh than I intended. Chris is not that kind of guy.  Sorry about that.] (He included a link in his email. Just Google for “Chris Dent remote maintainer”) You could also see it was politically motivated, as he listed out his environmental concerns with air travel and social concerns with China.

While Chris raised some valid concerns, I don’t totally agree with his conclusion. I have some ill-formed opinions about politicizing weather science and fear mongering, so I won’t go on about that. And I agree with his points about the conferences being exclusive parties. But I believe that there are still good reasons to travel.

If a country is misbehaving or worse, abusing its citizens, I think cutting it off from the rest of the world is going to make things worse, not better. I tend to take the attitude of Rick Steves that travel can be a political act. Yes, ther can be many negative things about tourism. But the simple fact that getting someone out of their small corner of the world so they can recognize there are other people in other countries is huge. Not everyone can be the head of a country, but if you get to know the people in a country (or many countries) it will influence your view and that spreads out to people around you and influences your voting. And when the people are engineers you are sharing code with, it makes your interaction with them so much more effective.

So if my presentations are accepted to the Shanghai summit are accepted, I will try to go. Of course I will be cautious about what I pack. But if I can help influence some engineers in China that Americans are not all just big jerks that should be taken advantage of, then I will try.