I can’t say 2019 was great from a working point of view. I struggled a lot and I probably had a small and dirty burnout. I learned about myself along the way. A few folks that joined me at Influx left, I didn’t really enjoyed that time and the massive growth the company had didn’t help me. I had some difficulties finding my place and since there I didn’t really find the right motivation to be productive such the passion for this job forces me to be.
Luckily I am surrounded by friends and colleagues with an open mind, I just had to ask and to speak loud about my feelings, I always got back useful conversations. I am sure every situation is different but other people experienced similar situation and it is great to have them around. I think it is getting better, I work in a different team now, the amount of YAML I have to write decreases, I am back writing bugs and fixing them.
Open Source is about collaboration
Open Source is part of my daily job and the reasons about why are well explain in my first podcast ever! You can find it on The New Stack.
TLDR: I learned how to write code pinging people on IRC since day one. Different communities helped me to improve in my daily job as nobody ever did. That’s why open source is part of myself and I can’t stay without it. Even more now that I have something to get back.
This year I stopped to do small projects in my GitHub profile all alone. It was a natural decision that I didn’t took on purpose. Even more where I discovered that my shitty useless code is gonna destroy the Arctic because GitHub spams it there.
I had the opportunity to discover a community called testcontainers they do cool things but you know about them because I wrote “testcontainer library to programmatically provision integration tests in Go with containers”, I tweet a lot about it and I spoke at DockerCon about the same topic “Write Maintainable Integration Tests with Docker”.
Recently at Influx we was looking for a way to setup a continuous profiling infrastructure, some work is still ongoing but Vladimir wrote a nice open source project called profefe, we deployed it and I wrote a Kubernetes integration called kube-profefe. It is now part of the profefe organization and I am planning to write a series of posts about it, so stay toned!
Join ongoing community and projects that you LIKE and USE is way better than writing something alone that looks probably similar to something that already exists. It is not easy, you have read more code, you have to reach out to other people that will may be busy but I will keep doing it!
Meetups & Conferences
I run the CNCF Meetup in Turin, let me know if you would like to speak! I do it because I work from home for a company based in San Francisco. They are far away and I spend a lot of my working our by myself. My local community helps me to develop great connections with people close to me! Ordering pizza, finding locations, speakers, sponsors are unused tasks that I enjoy. All the videos are available on YouTube some of them are in English other are not.
This year the plan is to run a nomad meetup, we will move office by office in order to meet more people and to be cool companies or startups.
Would you like to sponsor, speak, host us?! Reach out ciao@gianarb.it (Turin only locations).
I made way too many talks during the first part of the year (counting 11), and the difficulties I had at work convinced me to take a break. I didn’t took any flight since June (almost), I feel recharged now but I will keep a low number of events this year. I would like to write more and to do more podcast. Do you host one? Let me know!
Write
I wrote 26 articles. I am impressed by the number now that I see it. My articles come from what I built I need to keep doing fun projects in order to have something useful to write. I will probably stay focused on Extending Kubernetes because I like how dynamic the code is, I would like to keep experimenting with reconciliations loops and reactive planning and to study Control Theory because “it is done”.
CherryServers is a cloud provider that I met at ContainerDays in Hamburg and since there we loved each other! I can ping them and have fun on their platform as much as I like and this is great. They do not have a Kubernetes story yet, let’s see if we can do something about it! If you need to write an operator or a CSI plugin (persistent storage), or who knows even a Cluster API implementation let me know!
My first collaboration with a publisher was good but not excellent. I wrote a report for O’Reilly called “Extending Kubernetes”. I didn’t get any information from there about how it is going but it is a normal practice for “a report” for what they told me. I defined it “not excellent” because it does not look like a collaboration, it is a one shot effort. I am happy to see it live because I like to write, but it is not my best skill. This collaboration helped me to raise the bar.
In 2019 as I did for open source I would like to collaborate with other people, maybe to write another book. Something is moving but let me know if you have any idea.
2020!
If I have to pick a word to describe 2019 I will use join. I joined a lot of
great people/teams embracing what they care or they were working on. I loved
that. I hope to keep doing it with the help of the communities I am part of like
Docker, observability, Kubernetes, CNCF, testcontainers. I hope to join more
people that shares my passions in order to improve and build something together.
In order to do that I need you all around! Reach out @gianarb.
Home sweet home!
We have a new project! The most important one! We bought a house and there is a lot of work to do! Look at how this wall is going down! Made in YAML.