DevOpsDays PDX: Choose Your Own CNCF Observability Project Adventure (workshops)

I'm headed to the Pacific Northwest for the DevOpsDays PDX conference from 8-10 September.

I really like the vibe of this conference with the local scene full of really engaged developers and observability enthusiasts. I submitted a few ideas around my own personal open source interests and they came back asking me to facilitate a hands-on workshop. 

The workshop is the sum of all my personal explorations of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) projects over the last four years. For this event they will be expanded into the option of running and exploring all the projects on a lightweight Kubernetes for your personal machine (k3s).

Read on for more details

RAISE Summit AI - Mentoring and Judging the Hackathon in Paris

There's a particular kind of energy in a room full of people who have a weekend, a pile of GPUs, and something to prove. 

That was Paris this month, and I got to spend it as a mentor and judge at the RAISE Summit AI Hackathon.

Let me back up a bit, because this was my first hackathon wearing a SUSE hat, and it turned into exactly the kind of hands-on event I signed up for when I joined as Technical Advocacy Lead.

Let's look at how the attendees kicked this weekend off.

Mastering Fluent Bit: Beginners Guide for Contributing to our CNCF Project Docs

This series is a general purpose getting started guide for those of us wanting to learn about the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project Fluent Bit.

Each article in this series addresses a single topic by providing insights into what the topic is, why we are interested in exploring that topic, where to get started with the topic, and how to get hands-on with learning about the topic as it relates to the Fluent Bit project.

The idea is that each article can stand on its own, but that they also lead down a path that slowly increases our abilities to implement solutions with Fluent Bit telemetry pipelines.

Let's take a look at the topic of this article, contributing to the Fluent Bit docs project. This is a follow-up to our previous article on contributing to the Fluent Bit project website, and this time we go a step further by tackling documentation contributions. If we can find something undocumented, clarify something confusing, or fix a gap between what the code does and what the docs say — that is a genuine contribution that the community notices.

Mastering Fluent Bit: Beginners Guide for Contributing to our CNCF Project Website

This series is a general purpose getting started guide for those of us wanting to learn about the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project Fluent Bit.

Each article in this series addresses a single topic by providing insights into what the topic is, why we are interested in exploring that topic, where to get started with the topic, and how to get hands-on with learning about the topic as it relates to the Fluent Bit project.

The idea is that each article can stand on its own, but that they also lead down a path that slowly increases our abilities to implement solutions with Fluent Bit telemetry pipelines.

Let's take a look at the topic of this article, contributing to the Fluent Bit project website. This article will be a hands-on exploration of how to get started contributing blog articles to the Fluent Bit project website, something that is very accessible to newcomers and a great way to become part of the community.

A New Chapter: Joining SUSE as Technical Advocacy Lead

There are moments in your career where the path forward becomes surprisingly clear. After years of building, shipping, and advocating in the open source and cloud native ecosystem, I find myself at one of those moments. 

Today I'm excited to share that I've joined SUSE as Technical Advocacy Lead — and I couldn't be more energized about what lies ahead.

Let me back up a bit, because getting here is a story worth telling.

Installing openSUSE Tumbleweed on MacBook Pro 13 inch (late 2011)

It's been awhile since I looked at my old Macbook Pro 13 inch from late 2011, with 125GB SSD and 8GB RAM. I've been on occasion posting articles about how to install Linux distributions on it and thought I'd give openSUSE a try this time.

This is a machine I've taken on trips around the world and back in the day ran many sessions, workshops, and demos sharing all that developer goodness.

Below are the steps and adjustments needed to get openSUSE working on these laptops in no time.

The first step is to pick between the two options that are available to us for the desktop. I've chosen openSUSE Tumbleweed, which has the promise of "You install it once and enjoy it forever. No longer do you have to worry every six months about massive system upgrades that risk bricking your system."

The second step is to get an USB stick big enough to hold the openSUSE Tumbleweed iso image. Note we are not worried about version numbers, as you "...get frequent updates that not only address vulnerabilities or squash bugs, but reflect latest features and developments, such as fresh kernels, fresh drivers and recent desktop environment versions."

OpenSearchCon EU - Fluent Bit & OpenSearch: The Power Couple of Open Source Observability

After my adventures with the OpenSearch maintainers and developers in their booth at KubeCon NA this year, I was excited to share the results of our adventures at their OpenSearchCon EU event.

So with full enthusiasm I submitted a session about the observability power couple that is Fluent Bit and OpenSearch when used together. This would provide the attendees with a good overview of what the CNCF graduated project Fluent Bit, an end-to-end observability pipeline, can do for them. 

To complement and visualize your pipeline telemetry data, OpenSearch was added to the mix and we worked hard to provide a streamlined demo project providing the hands-on experience of setting up the entire integration. 

Let's look at the session and supporting hands-on learning content we are providing.

KubeCon EU 2026 - From Hallucinations to Hardware: Diagnosing LLM Failures

I'm excited to share that a talk I submitted, with my good friend Ryan Peirce, was accepted to Cloud Native AI & Kubeflow Day! 

In case you were still unaware, KubeCon + CloudNativeCon is the flagship conference of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), gathering adopters and technologists from leading open source and cloud native communities. The event brings together the entire cloud native ecosystem for education, collaboration, and networking opportunities.

Every year this event features multiple co-located events, and we're excited to be presenting at Cloud Native AI & Kubeflow Day, which focuses on the intersection of cloud native technologies and artificial intelligence workloads.

Below are all the details of our session at the time of this writing.