Organizing KubeTrain, attending Cloud Native Rejekts and KubeCon EU, meeting a ton of KCD people in Paris last week, has been an amazing experience. So many (community) things to do and so little time!
Before we start, I would like to take a moment of your time to reflect about D&I, Diversity and Inclusion. For some companies, entities and people it’s just slogans and filling some report saying that an event had x% of non-male, non-white, non-something attendees.
To me D&I means respect.
Respecting boundaries, respecting silence, respecting individual needs, respecting the environment you place yourself in when attending a conference, working, being on public transport or wherever. This, I think, is the key for people, especially the underrepresented, to feel safe and included. It would be much easier to have anyone join events if you could give these guarantees.
Sad to say but unfortunately, there has been an incident during KubeCon, to learn a bit more about it I suggest you read this piece from my friend Steve. Please report when someone violates the CoC, makes you feel uncomfortable, doesn’t respect your space or if you see something wrong happening. Code of Conduct is there for the 0.01% of people that cannot behave like decent human beings and as absurd as it may sound to most of us — it could literally be summarized in “be nice, don’t be an ass*ole”, it will be there until we ALL learn and, most importantly, until everyone feels safe and included.
Now, let’s start from the beginning…
After the last KCD in Utrecht in December 2023 — check out this CNCF blog for more info — I was asked by William and Andrea to join forces and organize a train from Amsterdam to Paris in time for KubeCon EU 2024. I had no idea where to start, no clue about organizing a train ride for a group of over 30 people and definitely expected it to be way easier — yep, I’m looking at you Eurostar support! Bad. Disappointing. Insufficient at best.
Anyway, some weeks and sweat sessions later, me and the KubeTrain NL team — including Sevi and Lian — managed to bring our crew to the event and to have a blast of a party as well. YAY!
Stay tuned for KubeTrain 2025, it will be even better, pinky promise.
Aside from KubeTrain, since I started public speaking a while ago, I’ve submitted a couple of talks to KubeCon for the first time, one with a very special co-speaker, Alessandro, but unfortunately they haven’t made it to the final schedule. Competition is fierce and I had little track record as a speaker, whoops. No offense taken (ok maybe a little lol), I’ll try again next year, for sure.
Anyway, after hearing the bad news I was a bit disappointed so I tried to submit immediately the same CFP to Cloud Native Rejekts EU. I totally forgot about it, I assumed they wouldn’t want me either but then… Boom! I got accepted. Alessandro was accepted as well, along with many of my rejekted friends.
Some weeks later, here I am, explaining Kubernetes to my grandma on stage:
Amazing speaking in an eSport arena, I really loved it.
Cloud Native Rejekts EU 24 | Arena | Day 2
The talk has been sooo successful they even asked me to translate it in Brazilian Portuguese, it went way better than I could ever imagine. I even got people recognizing me at KubeCon as the “grandma guy” which out of context could be misleading, but funny as heck nonetheless.
By the way in case you are interested, here are the slides, they get published, as any talk I have, on GitHub — https://github.com/mbianchidev/mbianchidev/blob/master/public-speaking/Talks/2024-Cloud-Native-Rejekts.md
You remember that I didn’t speak at KubeCon, right? Well, I was happy to contribute as part of the committee for the very first OpenTofu day co-located event and at the Community Hosted Event kiosk though.
KCDs are amazing events and I’m glad I got the chance to meet so many people from different countries and cities organizing our counterpart for their local community. See this wonderful video to really understand the spirit of KCD and Cloud Native.
KCDs by CNCF on Twitter: "A great #KubeConEU in Paris! We were so excited to see over 50 community event organizers from KCDs to European community groups across the globe. And we are proud of the representation on the keynote stage and the project pavilion.👏🏻💪🏾🤟#BetterTogether at @KubeCon_ 🌍📷💛 pic.twitter.com/myjUBxqIk7 / Twitter"
A great #KubeConEU in Paris! We were so excited to see over 50 community event organizers from KCDs to European community groups across the globe. And we are proud of the representation on the keynote stage and the project pavilion.👏🏻💪🏾🤟#BetterTogether at @KubeCon_ 🌍📷💛 pic.twitter.com/myjUBxqIk7
You got it, both KubeCon and Cloud Native Rejekts has been great — a Parisian week full of tech, networking and not-so-exceptional-food (sorry French friends but Italians do it way better).
A feature request for KubeCon… Can we ditch Sched and adopt/build a better mobile/web app? I’m sure we can. Right? Pleeeeeease.
I’m done complaining, I swear.
Thinking about it, attending two conferences so different from each other but so much complementary at the same time has been refreshing. I couldn’t choose which one I liked the most and I would love to attend more of both in the future. Yeah, I know that KubeCon is pretty expensive, especially when you are not 100% reimbursed by a company… for that reason CNCF has a beautiful scholarship program, in memory of Dan Kohn, sponsored by Isovalent and Apple. You can check more info about it here, how it works, how to apply and everything you need to know.
Phew, this flow of thoughts is way longer than I expected, lol.
Attending a tech conference means meeting people, exchanging ideas, attending interesting talks, contributing to panels, asking questions, speaking with sponsors, grab swag (socks! plushies!!), joining a jam sesh organized by KubeShop, meeting old friends and colleagues, fostering partnerships and synergies in a selfless way and sharing so many different stories.
Community at its very peak. oming together for the stuff we love: cloud native tech or just tech in general, aside from (gen) AI. We don’t wanna see another wrapper around OpenAI’s APIs or another boring “chat with your data” feature, please.
What we do want is more support for GPU workloads — yep AI related I know — on K8s. That has been, with WASM, my favorite topic discussed during the conference. Possibilities are infinite and we can enable companies to really do wonders with real AI — MLOps, training, inference (at the edge), data orchestration, refitting the models… Cool stuff.
Back to the main quest, I attended and loved the after-hours parties as well, like the Hive Mind from Isovalent or the Kuberoke — where I also volunteered because I cannot resist the community call! Lots of hands shaken, some hugs, lots of songs and a ton of hidden talent there.
At the end of the day, on top of having fun, I learnt a ton last week and I will now take some time to reflect about my future and my journey in tech.
In the meantime, I wanna thank from the bottom of my heart all the people I’ve met and had wonderful conversations with. I will not mention each of you but please reach out if I forgot to do so at the end of the conference, you are way too many and I’m so sorry but I’m really terrible at remembering names.
Now some more photos just because I have them.
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That’s all for now, from your favorite Developer Avocado🥑 Find all my links 👉 here.
See you around, ciao!
Originally published on blog.mb-consulting.dev