Side note: I’m out of spoons some weeks and don’t write an intro. I’m not going to apologize for that. Last week’s newsletter wasn’t my best, but I make up for it this week. It’s all about the long haul. Feel free to hit reply anytime.
One of the more useful things I created this week was with the help of fellow Amazonian, Tom “Spot” Calloway. Spot asked me, as a local, to suggest to him some great restaurants here in Detroit. I sat down with a list of the top 200 Detroit restaurants and pointed out all the ones I’d enjoyed over the years. Spot looked at that list and said, “We should make a doc about this.” I said, “We should make it publicly available and share it,” because people were DM’ing me asking the exact same questions. Spot put great care into curating most of the data.
Please feel free to reference the KubeCon Detroit Food and Drink Suggestions should you need to pick a place for dinner one night this week. It has been crowdsourced from locals and packed with all the necessary information to make a decision. If you’re looking for a party to go to, check out this unofficial list of KubeCon NA 2022 Parties
KubeCon North America 2022 is in Detroit this week. I would love to say I had a small part to play in that, but to be honest, it was probably more Bob, Jeff, and Jorge. But, after doing a Twitter Space with Justin Garrison yesterday, I realized it might be worthwhile to explain my journey to Detroit and my efforts over the years to get a tech conference to Detroit.
I first came to Detroit in 2010, the year my wife and I met. Her family lives in the Detroit Metro Area, as we do now. I remember my first Detroit Tigers game back then. The city was grappling with the outcomes of the Great Recession (the same recession that sent Julie to Raleigh, NC where we’d later meet). We had many, many more visits between 2010 and 2016. I enjoyed the trips, even the snowy ones. I spent time in Denver in the military, so Michigan weather wasn’t anything new to me. I loved Raleigh, but it wasn’t like Tampa or Denver, with sports teams and all the big city things I’d come to enjoy over the years.
Fast forward a few years, in 2016, my then boss, Josh Wyatt, convinced me I should get into public speaking. I was in a role identified as a mentor and leader within our DevOps practice. I made lifelong friends in that role. It was one of the best jobs I had in all the hopping around I had to do in Raleigh. As it turns out, you’re grossly underpaid coming from the military and as we all know, the best way to get a raise in tech is to change jobs.
As I submitted CFPs and got rejected, I started evolving my thinking about the proposals. I would always ask for feedback if any was available, and I would iterate on existing CFPs. But, I hit gold when I came to the realization that a lot of the things I was doing in 2016 were incredibly similar to what I did in 2000 when I was stationed in Virginia. I was a disabled veteran and actively working in a DevOps organization. I finally made a CFP worthy of acceptance at a strategically chosen DevOpsDays Detroit: What the Military Taught Me About DevOps
By that point, we were spending all our vacation time in Michigan. My parent’s made a series of terrible, backstabbing, subverting, and rude decisions and statements. I finally ended that toxic relationship thus relieving us of any attachment to North Carolina aside from our good friends. This cleared an opportunity for us.
I had free room and board here in the Detroit Metro Area, so we all drove up from Raleigh for the event. I came deep into downtown by myself for the first time ever. From walking around the conference venue, and looking out on the city from the venue, I saw a city planting seeds of awesomeness and generally cleaning things up. It was that week that the seed was planted. “We’re moving to Detroit,” and DevOpsDays was the springboard we needed.
I impressed a couple of companies with my talk. I came up to Detroit for a few interviews 2016/2017. I finally got a good offer with relocation from a company I knew nothing about but they were practicing DevOps as I learned from the senior engineers on the teams. That was good enough for me. I didn’t bother with a site visit. Lesson Learned: Always visit the office even if the office is on the other side of the globe. That was the worst office I ever worked in. It was cool to be downtown. But, in 2017, your senses were bombarded by construction sounds and vibrations constantly.
I went to KubeCon NA 2017 in Austin (where it snowed ❄️❄️❄️️), long story short, as someone looking for a job. I met Jorge Castro one night for a beer. We talked about tech, Michigan, the VA, etc. Right before he left, Jorge mentioned I should apply to be a CNCF Ambassador (which, through it all, I still am). DevOps’ish was a year old at that point, being in DevOps, and working in SIG ContribEx was apparently the right mix because in January 2018 I was named a CNCF Ambassador. That month I also got a new job reporting to a wonderful mentor and friend, John Willis.
Through the following years, I always made sure that any chance I got I would be Detroit’s hype man. I got to the point where a signature of any of my talks was a slide of recent pictures of downtown Detroit and a statement about how awesome the city had become.
Fast forward to 2019 when I get a rather special request from the Red Hat Events team. They asked if I could do a site survey of a hotel in downtown for a 2020 event. Yes, they knew I was quite biased. But, they also knew that I knew their style and could be objective about any site survey. I showed up early to eat in the hotel. When I met the manager, I told her I was impressed by the bar staff and my meal was good. She knew I wasn’t fucking around at that point. This wasn’t gonna be an easy one. With a Google Doc open on my phone I proceeded to thoroughly scour the hotel. I walked about a total of a mile and a half to get photos of the surrounding area and note amenities nearby. The site survey was accepted and the event was cleared to come to Detroit. I was so excited! A real tech event from Red Hat coming to Detroit. Then COVID happened.
Fast forward ahead an eternity and somehow the Ann Arbor Kubernetes crew was able to get some folks to fall through as they bounced from coast to coast. It was really awesome to see some of the friends I had so dearly missed during the pandemic actually here in Michigan.
Apparently, a helluva impression was made. At KubeCon L.A., I was in my hotel room watching the keynotes as I did a little work. When they announced that Detroit was going to be the next KubeCon NA location, I cried I was so happy. This KubeCon is very special to us in Detroit. It’s a MAJOR tech conference putting itself in the same space as the North American International Auto Show (the crown jewel of Detroit events).
Let’s make this the best KubeCon yet, y’all.
The DevOps’ish Podcast
The DevOps’ish Podcast is off this week for KubeCon (I’ll be at the Contributor Summit on Monday).
Join the Twitter Space to participate LIVE next Monday, October 31th, 10 AM ET/14:00 UTC (iCal and Google Calendar).
Bring some friends along too!
Subscribe to the DevOps’ish Podcast via your podcasting app of choice so you can listen on Mondays on your ride home or any ole time.
O’Reilly Book on Observability Engineering—Get Yours Free from Honeycomb!
Manage complex cloud-native systems, improve customer experiences, and build & run better software using Honeycomb. Get your FREE copy of our new O’Reilly book and register for our Authors’ Cut Series to discuss key concepts.
Events
Editor’s note: If your event would suit the DevOps’ish audience, please let me know!
Kubernetes Contributor Summit North American 2022
October 24, 2022 at KubeCon
The Summit will have a healthy mix of content tailored to active contributors. To conclude the summit, we’ll end with Contributor Social with games and refreshments.
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Detroit 2022
OCTOBER 24 – 28, 2022
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s flagship conference gathers adopters and technologists from leading open source and cloud native communities in Detroit, Michigan from October 24 – 28, 2022. Join containerd, CoreDNS, Envoy, etcd, Fluentd, Harbor, Helm, Jaeger, Kubernetes, Linkerd, Open Policy Agent, Prometheus, Rook, TiKV, TUF, Vitess, Argo, Buildpacks, Cilium, CloudEvents, CNI, Contour, Cortex, CRI-O, Crossplane, dapr, Dragonfly, Emissary Ingress, Falco, Flagger, Flux, gRPC, KEDA, KubeEdge, Litmus, Longhorn, NATS, Notary, OpenTelemetry, Operator Framework, SPIFFE, SPIRE, and Thanos as the community gathers for five days to further the education and advancement of cloud native computing. Use code KCNAIPV22MEET for a discount at registration.
FEBRUARY 4 - 5, 2023
FOSDEM is a free event for software developers to meet, share ideas and collaborate.
Every year, thousands of developers of free and open source software from all over the world gather at the event in Brussels.
People
Five hours’ sleep is tipping point for bad health
Michelle Roberts, BBC News
This really bites you in the ass in your 50s.
Google’s Jigsaw, with U.S. government money, is bringing a VPN to Iran
Joseph Menn and Yasmeen Abutaleb, The Washington Post
I used Jigsaw (Outline) for quite some time. It’s quite good and easy enough for non-tech saavy folks to manage.
Equifax surveilled 1,000 remote workers, fired 24 found juggling two jobs
Ashley Belanger, Ars Technica
I treat DevOps’ish like a second job. The separation of the two is very real though. I don’t need to go into great detail but there are clear boundaries where one job happens and another job happens. Everything was great until the “Allow Paste” bug showed up on iPadOS. I could work from separate devices even on the road.
Microsoft to Cut 1,000 More Jobs as Economic Conditions Bite
Ian Evenden, Tom’s Hardware
“New dark theme for MS employees” 👀 👀 👀
That’s ice cold.
Salesforce hit with layoffs and a new hiring freeze
Joe Williams, Protocol
“That’s a small fragment of Salesforce’s over 73,000 workers, but large tech companies have been loathe to undergo layoffs, most likely to avoid igniting fear among investors that their growth prospects have changed.”
Stripe Takes Steps To Prune Workforce
Jeff Kauflin and Alex Konrad, Forbes
“Forbes spoke to ten former and current Stripe employees for this story; all asked to remain anonymous. In interviews and in comments online, workers say Stripe’s recent moves have exacerbated a lack of “psychological safety” at the hard-charging private company, leaving some afraid to speak up or express dissenting opinions.”
Process
SBOMs: An Overhyped Concept That Won’t Secure Your Software Supply Chain
Peter Morgan, Dark Reading
🎶🎶🎶 Music to my ears 🎶🎶🎶
Come to the next GitBOM meeting (we’re renaming it soon because it’s neither Git nor BOM). It’s legit, y’all.
US might bail Musk out by blocking Twitter deal over national security
Ashley Belanger, Ars Technica
This would be some shit.
Docker quietly raises prices, limits Team accounts in favor of pricey Business subscriptions
Tim Anderson, DEVCLASS
Ouch. I feel sorry for every single startup past a certain size that uses containers. Why? Because they’re getting emails like these:
What are the four Golden Signals?
Andre Newman, Gremlin
The cornerstone of metrics at scale.
Linux, Windows and macOS Hit By New “Alchimist” Attack Framework
Deeba Ahmed, HackRead
“Alchimist is a single-file C2 framework discovered on a server hosting an active file listing on the root directory and a set of post-exploitation tools. It is implemented in Golang and implants the Insekt RAT on the compromised systems.”
Tools
Starlink signals can be reverse-engineered to work like GPS—whether SpaceX likes it or not
Mark Harrisarchive page, MIT Technology Review
This article sucked me in like it had Hoover written on the front of it as it went back and forth over me. Having helped maintain many a satellite link in my days, as well as being an avid GPS consumer, this was a fascinating article that made you think real hard what you could do with just the sync parts of an otherwise encrypted signal.
Canonical releases Ubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu
Ubuntu
“OpenSSH in Ubuntu 22.10 is configured by default to use systemd socket activation, meaning that sshd will not be started until an incoming connection request is received. This reduces the memory footprint of Ubuntu Server on smaller devices, VMs or LXD containers.” Among various and sundry things, the SSH bits are the most interesting to me.
Solving common problems with Kubernetes
Adam Chalmers
Thirteen differnt problems Kubernetes was made to solve right at your fingertips. Bookmark this one.
Automating my Homelab with Ansible (AnsibleFest 2022)
Jeff Geerling
“In the presentation, I gave a tour of my homelab, highlighting it’s growth from a modem and 5-port switch to a full 24U rack with a petabyte of storage and multiple 10 gigabit switches!” How well Jeff does things is truly impressive.
mirrord 3.0 is out!
Eyal Bukchin , MetalBear 🐻
“mirrord is the cornerstone of a new development workflow, one with dramatically shorter feedback loops.”
Linus Torvalds Announces First Linux Kernel 6.1 Release Candidate
Marius Nestor, 9to5Linux
Told y’all it was right around the corner.
EasyList is in trouble and so are many ad blockers
Subpar but widely used alternative web browsers are essentially DDoSing widely used ad blocking list.
Introducing Acorn Encrypted Secrets
Acorn Labs
Maybe when volleyball season is over I’ll have some time to kick tires on Acorn. This implementation feels right.
Release v1.0.0 · containerd/nerdctl
Congrats to the containerd community!
chainguard-images/static
“Base image with just enough files to run static binaries!”
fereidani/kanal
“The fast sync and async channel that Rust deserves”
sadaszewski/focker
“Focker is a FreeBSD image/jail orchestration tool in the vein of Docker.”
Resources · fossjobs/fossjobs Wiki
“All resources are related to paid FOSS work in some way.”
DevOps’ish Tweet of the Week
Me: I ❤️ GitHub Mobile app.
Steve: ShitOps.
Notes
Notes from this week’s issue can be found on GitHub