WTF is SRE 2023 - Perses workshop and telling SRE tales

I'm getting ready for a raw and real experience at this new (for me) event called WTF is SRE 2023, to be hosted in London from 3-5 May 2023.

This is the fourth edition and they are putting on four tracks; Observability, Reliability, DevEx and DevSecOps. 

You must be asking the same thing I was when I got this invite to submit, what is WTF is SRE? Well they say, "It is a highly-rated, very-tweeted-about, ridiculously-fun, wildly-insightful two-day conference designed to improve the world of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)."

As you can tell from the tone and style, these have got to be some really fun people to hang out with for a few days, so I'm all in with the following submissions.

Edinburgh Tech Meetup - Getting Started with Perses Workshop

On 7 February 2023 I've been invited to speak at this years inaugural Edinburgh Tech Meetup. 

This is a monthly TechMeetup that they say is an "...excuse for developers and the tech community around Scotland to meet up and learn new stuff from each other. No name badges, no sales pitches, just informative presentations from your peers and a chance to meet some of the tech community around you. We're not centered around specific languages, technologies or disciplines; we believe there's stuff to learn from mixing everyone together."

With that in mind, I was looking to share a brand new workshop I've been rolling out, so this is my opportunity to get some first and feedback from a group of technical enthusiasts. 

Devoxx UK 2023 - Tracing Adventures, Observability Architecture, and Tales

Anyone that follows my events and speaking articles knows that I have always been a big fan of the Devoxx series. Across Europe I've spoken as several of these events over the years and one of my absolute favorites is the Devoxx UK hosted in London.

Last year I was in London in May for the 2022 edition talking about architecture and tooling. This year they are hosting it from 10-11 May 2023 and I am more than excited to bring some of the new topics I'm exploring within the cloud native observability world to share with her attendees.

In the spirit of continued support for Devoxx UK, I'm not only sending in papers for my own talks, but I've enticed a few new and old colleagues to submit papers with me.

The following are my thoughts and ideas that I'm hoping to share with you in London in the Spring.

Cloud Native London Meetup - 3 Pitfalls Everyone Should Avoid with Cloud Data (slides)

As mentioned previously, today I was able to join the Cloud Native London meetup and share my thoughts on cloud data. 

They hosted their January 2023 event and we were with a pretty good group for a Wednesday evening in London.

Below you can find the agenda for the evening, the slides I presented, and the original abstract for my talk. There are also links to the meetup homepage and other follow-on information like an eventual link to the recorded session.

Cloud Native London Meetup - 3 Pitfalls Everyone Should Avoid with Cloud Data

This week I got a late invite to speak at the Cloud Native London meetup and of course jumped at the chance. They are hosting their January 2023 event and lost one of their speakers, so I am more than happy to pop in for a chat.

They have +7,000 members and it is, "...the official Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Meetup group dedicated to building a strong, open, diverse developer community around the Cloud Native platform and technologies in London. "

You can also find them on their own slack channel, so feel free to drop in for a quick chat if you like.

Now, on to the event and the talk I'm going to share on Wednesday, 11 Jan 2022 in London.

Open Source 101 2023 - Visualization Workshop and Observability Treats

The team from All Things Open conference, a really fun event hosted every year in Raleigh, NC, has launched a new event venue early in 2023 that I'm going to give my best effort to attend. 

They call it the Open Source 101 series and are planning to host it in Charlotte, NC on 23 March 2023, so of course I have to jump in with both feet. The call-for-papers (CFP) for Open Source 101 closed this week and the 2023 event is looking for world-class speakers to deliver a variety of topics to attendees, so I put my best foot forward to submit. 

Here are my submissions and hope to see you there in Charlotte in March.

O11y Guide - Exploring Perses API and Tooling

Getting started with Perses

In this seventh installment of the series covering my journey into the world of cloud native observability, I'm continuing to explore 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. In my sixth and last article, I provided you with an introduction to a new open source dashboard and visualization project and shared how to install the project on your local developer machine. 

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 seventh article we'll be exploring Perses application programming interface (API) and tooling. This is a preview of the third lab developed for my hands-on workshop dedicated to exploring dashboards and visualization.

Installing or Upgrading to Fedora 37 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 36, so how about an update to Fedora 37?