Reflections on alexos.dev

Some Musings From KubeCon EU 2021 (Virtual Edition)

Wed, 12 May 2021 18:48:00 +0100

I’ve just finished binging on a whole host of talks from KubeCon EU 2021, and thought I’d scribble down some of my immediate thoughts - from the talks I “went” to, as well as more generally about virtual conferencing these days. Which is a bit of a change of pace, let’s be honest.

Photo by Jonas Jacobsson on Unsplash

I should caveat this post with the obvious - my experiences are heavily based around how I chose to take in the conference - the sessions I picked, the things I got involved with and the things I didn’t. Conferences for me tend to be focused on learning about or picking up tips on bits of technology or techniques that I already have some idea about in the first place, rather than totally new things that I don’t think I’m going to have any practical use for in my current line of work. I’m also not that great at the “networking” thing 😅

Things I Have Learnt After A Year As A Lead Engineer

Sun, 03 Jan 2021 19:00:00 -0100

It’s probably natural to get a bit contemplative as one year rolls into another. In this post I’m going to spend a little time writing about some of the things I’ve learnt after a year moving into a “Senior Engineer” position, and then onto some of the things I hope to change going forwards, based on what I’ve learnt.

As a result, this post is going to be a bit introspective and not very technical - hopefully it won’t come across as too self-indulgent! I personally think it’s sometimes interesting to read about things from this perspective, but feel free to turn back now if that doesn’t sound like your cup of tea! 🍵

KubeCon - Reflections

Fri, 24 May 2019 09:00:00 -0100

Barcelona night skyline - taken from Riot Games’ website

This blog post summarises my thoughts on a very entertaining and informative trip to KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Barcelona, May 2019. It was my first trip there and I picked up a variety of useful bits ’n’ pieces while I was there.

Any Stand-out Themes?

In trying to sum things up, I find myself struggling for any stand-out themes. Thinking about this a little more, I reckon this is probably a fairly natural thing to happen when comparing to “big vendor” conferences where they have large product & marketing teams driving their goals. Here, however, is a community event of largely open source software. Even the larger commercial vendors embrace the spirit of it all. It’s actually really refreshing.

KubeCon - Other Cool Things

Thu, 23 May 2019 23:00:00 -0100

Yes, this was a wall of donuts to celebrate Kubernetes 5th birthday!

I’m going to use this blog post to talk about a couple of other things I learnt about while at KubeCon 2019. These don’t slow neatly into my other posts from my time at the conference, but I still felt they were interesting enough to call out separately.

How Changing Kubernetes Itself Works

I went to a couple of talks focusing on some proposals for improving Kubernetes itself. As well as liking the content being proposed, it was interesting to learn a little bit about how the process of making changes to Kubernetes - what is a giant open source behemoth now - actually works.