2022 Year in Review - Big Changes

As I wind down the year 2022, it's time to reflect and take stock of my activities to put it all in perspective. 

I find this to be one of the more enjoyable articles to research, as I was part of all events and content statistics that I collect. It's nice to see my hard work, code, writing, and travels all tied up in a single article with a pretty bow on it.

This year was one marked with a lot of change for me and for the world if we are honest. We all came out of a few years of pandemic lock downs, lack of mobility, lack of freedom to interact face to face, and wondering if the world would ever be the same again. On top of that, I decided it was time to move on to new adventures this year. This was not pandemic driven, but more about the changes to the company I was working for due to an acquisition. 

On 15 July, after +13 years at Red Hat, I decided to jump into the exciting challenges of cloud native observability (o11y) at scale with a wonderful company called Chronosphere.

All of these things meant that I was going to get back into the world of interactions with people, being on a stage, sharing knowledge, learning new things, and taking you all on the journey with me. Let's review some of my activities from 2022 as things started to get back to the new normal.

Installing Fedora 36 on Macbook Pro 13 inch (late 2011)

This weekend I decided to update my old Macbook Pro 13 inch from late 2011, with 125GB SSD and 8GB RAM. 

It's a machine I've taken on trips around the world and back in the day ran many a session, workshop, or demo on sharing all that developer goodness.

Last time we checked, this was installed using Fedora 35, so how about an update to Fedora 36?

O11y Guide - Getting started with Perses

Getting started with Perses

In this sixth installment of the series covering my journey into the world of cloud native observability, I'm going to start diving into an open source project called Perses. If you missed any of the previous articles, head on back to the introduction for a quick update.

After laying out the groundwork for this series in the initial article, I spent some time in the second article sharing who the observability players are. I also discussed the teams that these players are on in this world of cloud native o11y. For the third article I looked at the ongoing discussion around monitoring pillars versus phases. In the fourth article I talked about keeping your options open with open source standards. My last installment, the fifth article in this series, I talked about bringing monolithic applications into the cloud native o11y world.

Being a developer from my early days in IT, it's been very interesting to explore the complexities of cloud native o11y. Monitoring applications goes way beyond just writing and deploying code, especially in the cloud native world. One thing remains the same, maintaining your organization's architecture always requires both a vigilant outlook and an understanding of available open standards.

In this sixth article I'm going to provide you with an introduction to an up and coming open source metrics dashboard project I'm getting involved in. Not only the introduction to the project, but I'm going to get you started hands-on with a workshop I'm developing to get started with dashboards and visualization.

Gumbo Podcast - Your First Steps in Cloud Native Observability

Last week, on 6 Dec 2022, I was invited to share my experiences on the Data Protection Gumbo podcast with its host Demetrius Malbrough and we had a nice chat about my journey into cloud native observability (o11y) since joining Chronosphere. 

The title of episode 171 is, Your First Steps in Cloud Native Observability and  we covered a bunch of questions around the series of articles I've been writing called the O11y Guide. It's taking you along for the journey in my learnings as I go from an application development background into the world of cloud native o11y.

Below is a list of the topics we covered in the 20+ minutes of the podcast, which you can find on all major platforms to listen / subscribe to.

Cloud Native + Kubernetes Edinburgh Meetup - 3 Pitfalls Everyone Should Avoid with Cloud Data

My new year will be kicking off just right with my first trip heading back to Edinburgh, Scotland! 

I've been invited to speak at the Cloud Native + Kubernetes (K8S) Edinburgh meetup and I'm really excited to join them on 25 Jan 2023. Meetups are really essential to my job, as they are the grounds were I can test out both ideas and hands-on content. 

Attendees are knowledgeable as they are often active in their daily jobs with the various technologies that a meetup covers. They are the perfect candidates to provide feedback on new ideas or help with crafting existing ones towards perfection.

I'll be sharing a very interesting story I've been working on for some time now around the massive amount of unexpected cloud native data that we are encountering in our daily work lives, and how we can survive it all.

DZone Webinar - Shift Left Observability (slides)

Exciting things are happening at DZone this week! 

Today George Hamilton and I gave a webinar talking about how to use cloud native observability to do more “Dev” and less “Ops” while dramatically improving developer and engineer workflows and productivity.

Soon the recording will be available on demand at the DZone events page.

Whether you’re an enterprise migrating to cloud-native or born in the cloud, most of today’s APM and Observability tools don’t support how your engineers and DevOps teams need to develop, deploy, and support their software. Observability needs to shift left and reflect the modern way companies organize their development teams and their vital interdependencies.

George and I shared how the unique requirements for observability in a cloud-native world can be addressed. 

Below you will find the slides from our session.

LeadDev New York 2023 - Burning DevOps and Shifting Left O11y

In the Spring of 2023 there will be a new conference on my calendar called LeadDev New York. It's a conference about all things around engineering leadership and I thought I might have a few things to share so I'm submitting a few talks.

Get ready for behind-the-scenes case studies from top engineering organizations, practical advice and frameworks, and community networking with leaders from around the globe.

It's a bit outside of my normal event type, but I have been in this business long enough to start sharing some of the insights based on that experience. 

Below are the talks I'm putting forth as my contribution to LeadDev and hope to see you in March 2023.