Two weeks before KubeCon EU and the work is ramping up quickly. If you haven’t gotten your tickets yet, grab yours today. As always, if you are underrepresented in tech and still need a ticket, let me know. I will be busy next week prepping for a flip to Central European Summer Time with a lot going on. On May 3rd, I will be mc’ing GitOps Con. It’s going to be awesome. On May 4th, the first anniversary of OpenShift.tv (yeah, it’s been a year, y’all), I’ll be live streaming OpenShift Commons Gathering hosted by Red Hat (Complimentary Registration Required). I’ll be in the Red Hat booth for a little bit on May 5th. We’ll also be streaming open source project Office Hours throughout KubeCon EU. Finally, on Friday, I’ll be doing my first ever, actual KubeCon talk (I know, weird, right?), How You Can Tell Your Kubernetes Contributor Story with These Tips - Matt Broberg & Chris Short, Red Hat; Kaslin Fields, Google; Peeyush Gupta, DigitalOcean. To say the prep for all this is coming to a head this week is an understatement. The pressure is on. Let’s get it! ...

We’ve had another rough week in the Short household. The adults, at least, are exhausted. Max is fully energized. Sunny is getting nursed back to health. I always try to provide some value in the intro but, I have to say, I almost skipped this week due to everything. Some valuable nuggets live on a few other sites I run. New and old subscribers alike can get some benefit from these: DevOps README.md: What books 📚 to read to learn more about DevOps. DevOps Newsletters intends to be a one stop shop for the best DevOps content from around the world. Kubernetes README: What books 📚 to read to learn more about Kubernetes. Kubernetes News intends to be a resource to help keep up with the wide ranging and rapidly evolving world of Kubernetes. I’m speaking as part of a group talk about non-code contributions, specifically the work we’ve been doing on the Kubernetes Upstream Marketing Team. Please add it to your KubeConEU schedule. ...

I’ve had a rough week, please forgive me for not laboring over an intro. Event Call for Papers The GitOps Working Group is putting together a KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Day 0 event! Come share your experiences, practices, and challenges with us at #GitOpsConEU2021! Call for papers open through April 16, 2021. People The woman who took on Google and won “Google signed a document saying its employees ‘have the right to discuss wage rates, bonuses, and working conditions.’” Never wait for a staging environment again 👩‍💻🧑‍💻👨‍💻👩‍💻 Do you find that your engineers spend too much time creating and maintaining staging environments and yet, there never seems to be enough environments to go around? A shortage of environments is a top driver of low developer productivity and often impacts an engineering team’s ability to ship features on time. With Release, you can get a full instance of your app with all of its services with every pull request. You’ll never have to wait around for staging environments again. 💡 Get started now 💡 SPONSORED ...

An old headline rears its ugly head again this week. The company that now owns the remnants of The SCO Group (whose claim to fame was going bankrupt in suing Linux distro makers until their dying breath), Xinuos, has decided to try this strategy out for itself in hopes of a different outcome. Xinuos is suing IBM and Red Hat for using Linux. Talk about bringing back ancient memories of trying to keep up with a new and essential thing to me back in the early 2000s: Linux. Back then, getting your hands on Linux was a challenge, and Linux users were easy marks, according to SCO. Back in those days, SCO even said it would go after individual end-users. While it made Linux seem a little untrustworthy at the time to the outsider, insiders knew this was all bullshit. IBM was doubling and tripling down on Linux, and Red Hat was a public company. Yes, there felt like a potential disaster could happen with one lousy court ruling. But that day never came. It was a wilder world back then. ...

Well, what’s it like living in the last throes of the Free Software Foundation (FSF)? Many companies came out against the FSF’s recent decision to re-add he who was mentioned in DevOps’ish 145. Red Hat probably gave the most scathing repudiation. I can think of no worse strategy than bringing back someone who for so long abused, criticized, belittled, harassed, and bullied the people (especially women) around them. I used to support FSF and only did so after he who was mentioned in DevOps’ish 145 (droves of others are denouncing the decision too). It’s truly rare that I reassess my automated donations and think about where I’m donating money. I’m glad this utterly insane event sparked this reevaluation for me. Now that he who was mentioned in DevOps’ish 145 is back at the FSF, I put out a call on Twitter for suggested charities or foundations I could support. Folks came through. I’ve not only found a better place to send money than FSF, but I also added more causes in the process. I try to live life as transparently as possible. I do list what Causes I support on my website. I’m happy to say that I added the Software Freedom Conservancy, Outreachy, and /dev/color this week. I probably should have been supporting Outreachy long ago but, it’s better late than never. There are probably many other places I could be putting money to foster a more inclusive tech sector. If you, dear reader, have suggestions about which non-profits I should be engaged with, please hit reply and let me know. ...