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.
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.
This year, the focus for me and my teams remained on the four pillars of our role: speaking, publishing, socializing, and hands-on content generation.
While 2024 was about observability (o11y) taking center stage, 2025 was the year we put those theories into practice, accelerated our momentum, and stated to gain serious traction in the wild.
Read on to find out more!
As we ease into the last few days of 2024, I like to close out this one last task and that's reflecting back on all the fun, challenges, and travel over the past year.
While it takes a bit of research to gather all the facts and figures from the last year, it's not a hard one to write. I've been sharing on this site for almost 20 years now and without ads or trying to earn anything from it. It's been truly an open and honest effort to communicate with the world. Funny thing is, when I started out I never imagined that it would take off like it has, eclipsing over 3.8 million views at the time of this writing.
With that in mind, let's dive right into the main focus, where me and my teams are focusing on the four pillars of our role; speaking, publishing, socializing, and hands-on content generation. On top of that, collateral damage is traveling the globe to do it.
We saw how to integrate your visualizations as code, how easy it is to create beautiful dashboards, and I sent the attendees home with a free, online, self-paces workshop to get you started with your first Perses dashboards.
To complete the content sharing, below you will find the slides from my session.
This one day event will be hosted at the University of Amsterdam buildings in the Science Park at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica.
I'll be sharing an overview of the latest new kid in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Sandbox projects, Perses. The talk will cover its attempts at becoming an open specification for dashboards and the open dashboard tool for Prometheus and other data sources.
Join me for a fun session on how to integrate your visualizations as code, how easy it is to create beautiful dashboards, and head home with a free, online, self-paces workshop to get you started with your first Perses dashboards.
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Yesterday I was to be back to the Cloud Native London meetup, having been given the opportunity to present due to a speaker canceling at the last minute.
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."
There was instead an evacuation of the area due to expected riots in the UK. I am sorry to miss the chance to present this session but still wanted to share below the slides from my session and plan to post a personal recording of the talk when I get back home from Lon.
I'm heading back to the Cloud Native London meetup this week, having been given the opportunity to present due to a speaker canceling.
I am always happy to help out and the hop to London from the Netherlands is a short and easy trip.
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.
The sessions I've presented previously include one from January 2023 about the pitfalls everyone should avoid with cloud data and a recording is available online if you want to revisit. Another session I shared was in January of 2024 on the pitfalls in observability in the form of a choose your own adventure talk which you can also watch the recording online.
Tomorrow, on Wednesday, 7 August in London I'll be sharing some brand new content on taking back control of your telemetry data.
Exactly what I'm looking for in a meetup!
Attendees here are knowledgeable as they are often active in their daily jobs with the various technologies that a meetup covers. I shared a fun session on how to get started with Podman, a fully open source OCI compliant container tool for working with container images in a developer environment.
This was a talk my team has given previously, but we continue to perfect it by sharing with diverse audiences. Below are the slides and abstract from my talk.
I'm headed back to the Cloud Native + Kubernetes (K8S) Edinburgh meetup, joining them on 15 May 2024. Meetups are really essential to my job, as they are the grounds where 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 fun session of how to get started with Podman, a fully open source OCI compliant container tool for working with container images in a developer environment.
I wanted to share on this post the content from my Google partner booth lightning talk where I talked about checking the pulse of your cloud native architecture. While that sounds like a dry architecture type of talk, I promise you, I took it in a unique direction with the focus not on the technology as much as on the side-effects it has on your teams.
Getting the control and overview back into the hands of your developers and engineers with regard to the massive challenges around cloud native observability data is the number one challenge we are all facing. I hope my insights provided a few hand holds for you to start gaining ground on your own organization's challenges.
See below for the slides from my talk.
I was asked to share some insights into the link between Platform Engineers and the importance of providing cloud native observability tools and infrastructure as part of their developer experience from the start.
We had a movie theater as a venue with a nice group of experienced Platform Engineers that I presented the slides you'll find below before letting them choose from four different workshops that featured the CNCF observability technologies for monitoring, tracing, telemetry pipelines, and open visualization.
We kicked it off at 11:00 on Tuesday, March 19th and had a lot of fun. See below for the details.
As previously posted, I made it a priority to attend Incontro DevOps Italia 2024 in Bologna, Italy. I felt it was important to come back this year and share my thoughts on cloud native data and some of the challenges that organizations are facing.
The event was in Bologna, the lively, historic capital of the Emilia-Romagna region, in northern Italy. Its Piazza Maggiore is a sprawling plaza lined with arched colonnades, cafes and medieval and Renaissance structures such as City Hall, the Fountain of Neptune and the Basilica di San Petronio. Among the city’s many medieval towers are the Two Towers, leaning Asinelli and Garisenda.
I really enjoyed exploring the culinary offerings that Bologna offered and hope to be invited back again next time!
Below you will find the outline of my talk along with the slides and a recording as promised.
There are so many things going on there, from the pre-event Cloud Native Rejects from 17-18 March at ESpot in Paris. You will find an array of talks that, in theory, didn't make the selection for KubeCon and yet are so good we have two days of enjoying them.
This is followed by a day of co-located events, which are single day conferences targeting specific areas of technology and CNCF communities. This all happens on 19 March and see the website listing for exact locations of the event that interests you.
Finally, we get to spend 20-22 March in the Paris Expo Porte De Versailles with thousands of our favorite community members sharing information, workshops, talks, lightning talks, and a huge booth pavilion.
Below you'll find all the fun and adventures that I have planned throughout the week in Paris.
This year's priority was for Incontro DevOps Italia 2024 on the 15th of March in Bologna, Italy. I'm grateful they selected my talk this year and for being part of a select group of speakers.
The city of Bologna is the lively, historic capital of the Emilia-Romagna region, in northern Italy. Its Piazza Maggiore is a sprawling plaza lined with arched colonnades, cafes and medieval and Renaissance structures such as City Hall, the Fountain of Neptune and the Basilica di San Petronio. Among the city’s many medieval towers are the Two Towers, leaning Asinelli and Garisenda. I'm personally looking forward to a bit of exploring the culinary offerings that Bologna has to offer!
Below you will find the outline of my talk.
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.
There were over 85 attendees that braved the cold London evening to join us for pizza, drinks, and a bit of fun with my session having a special design this time around. I went out on a limb and tried something I've never seen before, a sort of choose-your-own-adventure presentation. Below I've included a description of how I think it went, the feedback I got, and where you can find both the slides and recording online if you missed it.
I'm heading back to the Cloud Native London meetup this week, having been given the opportunity to present due to a speaker canceling at the last minute.
I am always happy to help out and the hop to London from the Netherlands is a short and easy trip.
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.
That session I presented last time in January of 2023 was about the pitfalls everyone should avoid with cloud data and they live streamed it with a recording available online if you want to revisit.
Tomorrow, on Wednesday, 10 January in London I'll be sharing some brand new content on the pitfalls of cloud native observability.
This is also always one of the easiest articles to write, going back now since this blog started, meaning I've been doing them over 18 years now. Who would have imagined back in 2005 when I started publishing articles for this blog that I'd be at it 18 years later and have garnered almost 2.6 million views?
It takes a bit of research every year to get this article done, as I've been traveling, speaking, publishing, socializing, and generating so much content throughout the year. It's always fun to see all the code, writing, and travel adventures passing the review as I sit here in contemplation of what is coming for the new year.
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.
That session I presented in January was about the pitfalls everyone should avoid with cloud data and they live streamed it with a recording available online if you want to revisit.
Now let's take a look at what this meetup looks like on Wednesday, 4 Oct in London.
Last month I was in Edinburgh speaking at the Open Source Edinburgh Meetup about how to get started with Prometheus.
I shared my getting started with Prometheus workshop, which I've been working on for months now, and with a good turnout this group was perfect to test how the workshop lands with new observability engineers.
We were in the offices of Scott Logic (just down the hill from Edinburgh Castle) and below you'll find the agenda, the abstract, and the video recording of my session.