Cruising Through the Cloud-Native Space Across #100DaysOfKubernetes

Anais Urlichs
Site Reliability Engineer

In many of the talks that we hear from today, we get a snapshot of someone’s knowledge, a snapshot of someone’s experience and understanding within their field of expertise. This knowledge is built up over time, through reading, writing and sharing your insights.

When Anais got started in DevOps, she made it her mission to make her entire learning journey public on devops.anaisurl.com. With the goal to inspire others to get started in DevOps and to show how everyone has to begin somewhere, Anais started #100DaysOfKubernetes — 100daysofkubernetes.io.

In this talk, Anais will take you along her journey of discovering the vast number of resources available in the space, the challenges she faced, and ultimately, how rewarding it is to find new tools and learn to use a new framework.

Video Transcript

Hello, there and thank you for joining me at my lightning talk, Cruising Through the Cloud-Native Space Across #100DaysOfKubernetes. I really hope you’re enjoying your virtual experience so far here at SwampUP, and let’s get started. My name is Anais, I’m a site reliability engineer at Civo. Civo is a cloud computing company based on Kubernetes.

 I’m also doing currently a computer science degree that kind of plays into the different things that I’m learning about and into the shape of this talk as well. If you have any comments, suggestions, feedback, anything you want to share during this talk, or afterwards, I’m most active on Twitter @UrlichsAnais. If you’re at this conference, you’ve probably seen this cloud-native CN\CF landscape. If you’re just getting started with Kubernetes, or just… Also, if you already know about Kubernetes, this is really overwhelming, right?

 For newbies on the space, this is just a lot to take in. Now, I just got started with Kubernetes about eight months ago after working for several years on the blockchain space contributing to open source blockchain projects. And when I saw this landscape, I was like, hey, this looks kind of similar to the blockchain landscape. Well, in a different way. Maybe here in a few more companies and projects.

 However, I thought, hey, this is a great opportunity to share all of my learnings, me cruising through the space, right? Which I didn’t do when I got started in blockchain. So, what is the problem with any talk, anything that you see, anything that you read about? All of it, everything that you hear is just a knowledge snapshot, an instance in time where somebody shares their understanding about a specific subject, they don’t share with you how they got that understanding, they don’t share with you how they built everything up, what the understanding is based on, the books and papers and articles they read and the conversations they had, right?

How could they? So usually, you start with those empty knowledge baskets that you want to fill, right? So you read different articles, different media posts, tutorials, and follow along and try to understand and grasp what’s going on, then you dive deeper into specific subjects, and you read the books that have been written about it by all the smart people in this space, right? And in the end, you connect with different people across conferences, on social media, maybe through online talks, and you share your experience, you share your learning, you get to know what other people have been reading about and they are understanding and all of this ultimately builds up to your understanding of a specific subject.

 Now, what is the problem with this, right? When you see this, it’s not obvious for newbies, where do I start? When you share talk, it’s not obvious which book actually got you to that understanding, that level of understanding. So a lot of times I message people, I’m like, hey, how do you know that?

Where is that understanding coming from? And most people don’t know, most people won’t be able to remember, right? Or maybe they can suggest a similar resource that might get you to understand what I’ve been talking about, maybe. So I’ve made it my mission a few months ago, six months ago, something like that, to make all of my learning journey public on my YouTube channel, as well as on my public notion page. So everything that you’re seeing here really notes everything across 36 days right now. And you can see everything that I’m struggling with, all the articles that I’m reading, all the books that I’m reading, everything that I’m writing about.

It’s all right here. So if you want to get started with a specific topic, right? You can check it out and you can have a look at it, you can be like, oh, that’s how Anais learned about it. And it’s really empowering for so many people in this space. So lots of people actually getting started now with their 100 days of Kubernetes learning journey. Because of that, because I want this to be a shared experience, a community effort, I decided to… hey, let’s make my public notion notes public, like really public on a GitHub repository that other people can contribute to, get involved in and advanced those notes, because my notes are definitely nowhere near perfect. So let’s just iterate on the things that I’ve been talking about and my experience and what I would really recommend anybody getting started with a new topic, or just wanting to advance within a specific topic right now.

First of all, it’s really important that you work in public, especially if you’re new to an industry, right? When I got started in this space, I didn’t know anybody, I didn’t know who to follow, I didn’t know who to talk to. So making all of my learning public got public interest as well, right? People reached out to me giving me suggestions, comments, feedbacks, telling me, hey, why don’t you change that? Or, hey, this is actually such and such and that’s why you have to do this so that doesn’t happen. And this only happens when you work in public, when other people see what you’re working on, then they can contribute, but only then.

Next, once you have decided, okay, you’re making everything public or part of it public, you’re sharing some articles, you may be recording some videos, giving talks about what you’re learning about such as I’m doing right now, you can then reach out to different community members, or you naturally get to connect with different community members, and you get to have conversations.

There are lots of different Discord and Slack channels that you can get involved on where people share their learning, where they collaborate on different topics, subjects, projects, and so on. And it’s really inspiring, it will motivate you, and encourage you to keep going in the long term as well as advance you throughout your own learning journey. And then ultimately just go for it.

 A lot of it is scary, it’s scary to get started in this space. It’s scary to learn about a new topic, but ultimately just get started. If you don’t care about what anybody thinks because ultimately, there’s always going to be that negative comment, right? That’s going to get you for some months, but just ignore it, just go for it because there’s so much more positive feedback than any of the negative feedback that you are frightened about, really. And then ultimately iterate on your learning because only if you iterate on, that’s when it becomes… That’s when your knowledge manifests and that’s when those really amazing blog posts that I’m using right now for my own learning journey emerged from. So just iterate it, it doesn’t have to be perfect at the beginning.

 Now, I hope this talk was inspiring, I hope that your cruise about 100 days of Kubernetes, check it out at 100DaysOfKubernetes. io, I would love your contribution.

 Have a lovely day.

 Bye Bye.

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