Blog

The 2020 election for the Open Source Initiative Board of Directors is rapidly approaching. Before going to IBM FastStart in Las Vegas last week, I nominated myself for a seat on the board as an Individual Member. I spoke with a few friends in the months prior to submitting my nomination. It sounds like OSI could use my help. “Open source software has done nothing but provide opportunity after opportunity in my life. It should be cared for and maintained so that everyone willing can benefit from it as much as I have (hopefully more).” —Chris Short ...

There are a lot of ways to get started with Kubernetes. But, I’ve long said there are two paths to getting started with Kubernetes: maintaining Kubernetes or consuming Kubernetes. They’re distinctly different but, you have to understand consuming Kubernetes before maintaining Kubernetes, in my opinion. Either way, as surprising as it may sound, I feel like these illustrated children’s guides are a good step towards understanding Kubernetes. From the original The Illustrated Children’s Guide to Kubernetes blog post: ...

A former co-worker and now friend has a tagline, “Every day is a school day.” I remind myself of this fact almost every time I learn something new. 2019 was the hardest year of my life. I’d like to share some things I picked up on this most recent journey around the sun we call 2019. I’ll make some predictions about 2020 in the process too. Kubernetes Last year, I said I thought Kubernetes would get easier. That didn’t happen. It’s not any easier to use Kubernetes. But, to be honest, I’m not sure if Kubernetes itself will ever get easier, it’ll be us getting more used to using it and building tools around it. I still think vendors need to focus on ease of use if they want to see their products getting adopted. But, the project in general, might not need to worry about ease of use. This seems like hair splitting, sure, but, it seems like Kubernetes did manage to penetrate every sector of tech in 2019. This is going to lend itself to a big ole ecosystem of people and orgs working on ease of use on behalf of the community. ...

In November, I went down to Raleigh to meet my team for planning meetings and team building. For a few of my teammates, this is our first face to face interaction with each other ever. My boss wisely gave us a relatively simple assignment. Create a slide sharing what we’ve done this year and want to do next year (which I’ll share to an extent in a later post). Create another slide listing three things that make us who we are (born in a unique place, grew up on a farm, etc.) and three things we’re professionally known for. The assignment seemed simple enough, but it turned out to be way better than I thought it would be. It fostered a shared knowledge amongst the group about each other that I think others could benefit from using potentially. ...

Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat, my views and opinions are solely mine though. I spoke, sponsored (as did Red Hat, my employer, thank you), and worked from the front row of DevOpsDays Detroit 2019 this week. The event sold out for the first time this year. The venue has been the College for Creative Studies in downtown Detroit for the past four years. The venue is awesome, in my opinion, because it puts systems thinkers in a venue space on top of an arts school overflowing with creative ideas. There is art around every corner. Attendees share the elevators with students going up to the event space. It’s both humbling and inspiring. Detroit is a real-life Phoenix Project. Instead of an auto parts manufacturer, it’s the 23rd most populous city in the US (and is ironically, The Motor City). But, the school is putting its students’ ideas to use to rebuild Detroit. Detroit vs. Everybody. ...