Side Note: I have no doubt that Twitter is going to unban people that really shouldn’t be for national security reasons. With that in mind, I’ve consolidated my Mastodon presence on the Mastodon server hachyderm.io so please follow me there @ChrisShort!
Also, Happy birthday, Max! My youngest’s birthday is today. Stay awesome, buddy!
Let me be abundantly clear. I had a great KubeCon. It was rough physically, though, as I’ll explain. Seeing Ihor come on stage was the inspiration I needed FOR SURE. It was a negative in my “keynotes from the hotel room strategy,” though. I am truly sad I couldn’t say hello to more people and help folks more. Please DM me on the platform of your choosing. Let’s get you booked into the podcast schedule or a Zoom or phone call.
Every KubeCon, I tell myself, “Take Wednesday completely off, and you’ll make it through the whole thing.” Every time, I fail. This past Wednesday wound up being the busiest day. I also over-extend myself to do more during KubeCon than anyone else could; this habit dies now.
It was apparent that I’d bit off more than I could chew when I said I was bringing video gear this time. I got so many responses there was no way I was going to get everyone or even have time to get some process together. I needed a process to manage the deluge of responses. I ended up saying, “I’ll follow up next week.” The DevOps’ish Podcast could use y’alls voices.
I did notice this year, in particular, that Tuesday was relatively tranquil. Tuesday may be the key to my survival. I am at a point where I mentally and physically need a break to make it Sunday through Friday. As I said on Justin Garrison’s pre-KubeCon Twitter Space, “KubeCon is the equivalent to our Super Bowl.” Folks who work in the Kubernetes space prep all year for two events. Other folks at more prominent companies likely have their events to prep for as well. AWS employees get re:Invent after KubeCon (which adds another more substantial than-Super Bowl-like event). Two Super Bowls and Super Bowl++ a year can challenge anyone.
As promised, Max and I went downtown on Saturday. Due to logistics and timing, we didn’t meet with anyone, so it was an excellent Max and Daddy outing. He rather enjoyed the Van Gogh exhibit at the Detroit Institute of Arts. We found a print of the Detroit skyline with a Van Gogh-style Starry Night sky.
I spent Sunday frantically packing while taking care of Max. Julie was at a volleyball open house. My egress from the house was less than optimal due to tight windows around meeting people, badge pick-up, and family events. I only managed to forget one thing: my iPad Pro. A total mistake. The iPad Pro was going to be my computer for the trip, so I spent the first few days dragging my roller laptop bag around (I need a four-wheel version, which is what KubeCon Detroit showed me). As my friend, the illustrious Langdon White pointed out, Detroit has more enormous potholes than Boston. There’s also a lot of road construction to fix that. But I had Buddy’s and Prime and Proper that day, which was an outstanding experience with my boss and some friends.
Monday was the Kubernetes Contributor Summit. It was a little spicy to start. I’m not looking up stats, but this felt like the lightest year of my open source contributing of late. We’ve lost a lot of contributors due to folks’ shifting priorities during the pandemic. There is an acknowledgment from Kubernetes Steering that things must change. I feel our processes need simplification, onboarding programs need active owners, and we must commit to only what we can for our health. Regardless, it felt terrific seeing my friends and fellow contributors in Detroit. I had a busy but good Kubernetes Contributor Summit.
Tuesday was light. I cleared my schedule so I could get some work done while recuperating. I went to the AWS Partner reception and talked with a few folks. Then I retired for the evening to do light physical therapy before bed.
Icing the tennis elbow and heating the shoulder in the AM and PM plus massage gun usage was a HUGE part of my “get through KubeCon” strategy. It takes a minimum of 30 minutes, I have to do it at certain intervals, and it will give me a very valid reason to head back to the hotel in the 9 PM hour at the latest.
Wednesday started with a great start. I got to ride around and get interviewed by the, as mentioned earlier, Langdon White in a Ford Mustang Mach-E (the pictures are worth it) for Kube by Example. Then I met up with Aeva Black to discuss our upcoming The New Stack segment. That went wonderfully and focused on how SBOMs, as they are, are not actionable enough. I can’t wait to see those outputs. Then I did some hanging around the booth and hallway track. I went to a session about reforming the CNCF Ambassador program. I’m happy with how that meeting went and the changes that will make the program more open, effective, and hopefully more successful.
Excellent stuff, right?!? Here’s where the unplanned event derailed the rest of the conference much more than I imagined it could. It was a little before 4 PM, and I had a gap before the Slim.ai dinner. I decided to return to the hotel, lidocaine, ice, heat, and catch up on the news for this week’s newsletter. I ended up being locked away from all my medications, therapy tools, and a comfy place to sit for two hours. The battery in my door lock decided it needed a nap. By the time I got in, ice, heat, pain meds, and everything else, it was almost 8 PM. At that point, I had minimal feeling in my hand. I knew I would struggle with sleep and the arm the next day. I ended up going to bed.
This trip was by far the weirdest Marriott experience I’ve had. The location was practical but also had its quirks. Thursday, I woke up to no in-room coffee and an arm that was not working efficiently and needed to be iced ASAP. I asked them to send up some in-room coffee. First, they sent up a cup of coffee. Twenty minutes later, a bag of coffee for the week was delivered (brilliant). But, I never had my room serviced after Monday morning (due to staffing shortages).
I did everything possible to make myself right, which worked, but it took a lot of time. I went to ADHD: Understanding, Awareness, And Shared Experience - Bart Farrell, Data on Kubernetes Community; Heba elAyoty, Microsoft; Farrah Campbell, Amazon Web Services; Rich Burroughs, Loft Labs. It was one of those talks where every hand goes up in the room when it opens up for questions. It was a fantastic talk, and you should watch it. Videos are already showing up on CNCF YouTube.
I had a wonderful lunch with a container space CTO. I did more booth stop-ins, networking, and my toy runs for Max from the show floor (having done the CNCF Store shopping on Wednesday for myself, Max, and my nephews). I have a 2XL Notary shirt that I’ll ship to anyone in the lower 48 states of the US for free (DM me).
After that, things started to decline quickly physically. I have this issue on lousy pain days where meds don’t last as long and fall off faster the closer I get to the time for my afternoon dose. When I realized I was hurting, I was an hour late. Another mistake didn’t take me down but made things a smidge harder. I opted to have a quiet night of news reading, ice, and heat. I still bumped into people between the back way to dinner and taking it back to my room.
Friday morning, I was rough. I woke up, got hydrated, had a RxBar, and was lightly caffeinated. I decided to grab some Panera at 8:45 AM. Returning to my room, I hit my social interaction upper limit for the week as I bumped into multiple people. I set up my in-room keynote watching (MacBook Pro, Dongle for USB, power, and HDMI, HDMI cable to hotel TV).
I watched the keynotes with a special appreciation for Bob and Jeff’s talk. Notably absent, Ambassador of the Year awards. My boss checked in; I let him know I was done. I went home and did everything I could to make myself right for Max after school. We had a lot of catching up to do.
Now I need some time to relax.
The DevOps’ish Podcast
The DevOps’ish Podcast is back for its super spooky edition. No it won’t be scary unless you bring up Kubernetes Policies; then I’ll tell you not many people use them, like at all (take this survey if you want to try and help fix that).
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!
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
Welcome to hell, Elon
Nilay Patel, The Verge
“You break it, you buy it.”
Time is an illusion, Unix time doubly so…
Time is merely the understanding of how to use human constructs to measure it. And in the Unix Bible Genesis is epoch or 00:00:00 UTC on January 1st, 1970.
Google vets fix software supply-chain security at Chainguard
Kyle Aspach, Protocol
“Tools for securing the software supply chain have flooded into the market in the wake of the SolarWinds breach. Chainguard is taking a different approach from the rest.”
The Big Tech Hiring Slowdown Is Here and it will Hurt
Gergely Orosz, The Pragmatic Engineer
Snyk, Mindbody, and Zillow are telling us, if your business isn’t sound, you’re going to have a bad time.
Seagate to Cut 3,000 Jobs Amid Poor Quarter, Charges of Export Violations
Anton Shilov, Tom’s Hardware
“As demand for hard drive slumps, Seagate adjusts its workforce”
RIP: Kathleen Booth, the inventor of assembly language
Liam Proven, The Register
“As well as building the hardware for the first machines, she wrote all the software for the ARC2 and SEC machines, in the process inventing what she called “Contracted Notation” and would later be known as assembly language.”
Process
Howie: The Post-Incident Guide
Jeli
“The guide you’re about to read will provide you with an explanation of how to get the most out of your incidents. This process has been developed by a number of leading experts in the field and shows the steps to conduct an in-depth investigation.”
Fermyon raises $20M to build tools for cloud app dev
Kyle Wiggers, TechCrunch
Congrats to my friends at Fermyon!
Cloud native policy and governance usage 2022 Survey
Please take this survey. My friend, Kim McMahon at Nirmata, is trying to get her arms around how big managing policies are. This information will help drive initatives at Nirmata and in Kyverno.
Arm Changes Business Model – OEM Partners Must Directly License From Arm
Dylan Patel, SemiAnalysis
Qualcomm-Arm news results in potentially overhyped headline.
Fedora 37 Release Delayed To Mid-November Over Critical OpenSSL Vulnerability
Michael Larabel, Phoronix
As I said on Twitter, “I don’t know what OpenSSL 3’s adoption rate is,” but this vuln does not impact the 1.x branch.
Tools
Record-breaking chip can transmit entire internet’s traffic per second
Michael Irving, New Atlas
“Engineers have transmitted data at a blistering rate of 1.84 petabits per second (Pbit/s), almost twice the global internet traffic per second.”
Try markmap
“Markmap is a combination of Markdown and mindmap. It parses Markdown content and extracts its intrinsic hierarchical structure and renders an interactive mindmap, aka markmap.”
Workload Isolation with Aurae Cells
Kris Nóva, Aurae Runtime
“The API is synchronous, and is intended to serve as the lowest level building block for future subsystems in the project… The API introduces 5 workloads types of runtime isolation primitives, as well as a special function known as Spawn().”
50 Useful Vim Commands
Colin Bartlett, VimTricks
“Here are 50 useful Vim commands that work in normal mode.”
How DoorDash Governs Its Infrastructure with Open Policy Agent
Jessica Wachtel, The New Stack
“After a DoorDash engineer creates a GitHub pull request, Atlantis runs a Terraform plan and passes the plan file to conftest, which evaluates the OPA policy based on the Terraform plan, then comments the output to the PR.”
The State of Vault and Kubernetes, and Future Plans
Justin Weissig, Hashicorp
“This blog post will look at the core integrations and use cases for how people are using HashiCorp Vault and Kubernetes together. We’ll discuss things like how to get up and running, options for injecting secrets, and where use cases are going in the future.”
komodorio/helm-dashboard
“The missing UI for Helm - visualize your releases”
chainguard-images/static
“Base image with just enough files to run static binaries!”
vercel/turbo
“Turbo is an next-generation toolchain for frontend development, written in Rust.”
DevOps’ish Tweet of the Week
Notes
Notes from this week’s issue can be found on GitHub