Velocity Conference and Chef Community Meetup '17 @ NYC
It took my a bit of time to write down the hat-trick of first times. It was the first time I attended Velocity, Chef Community Meetup and to be in New York City (where the big lights inspire you !!)
I went there earlier, before conference proper started because I signed up for a 2-day Kubernetes training . It was a good training and the best part was meeting up with Seb (our trainer - @sebgoa) who is working with Bitnami and the primary driver for Kubeless. Also had good conversations and exchanges with other participants. I learned a lot and serverless computing is something that I want to invest my time and look at ways my teamcan further dive in.
On conference proper, the reason I want to go for this is because there is a good history that ideas that are mainstream now were first shared during Velocity. So I would like to seek this opportunity to see if I can look into the tech ORB and make some bets on what our R&D center should invest in. There are some inspiring keynotes and breakout sessions. The videos and slides for the conference can be found online at Velocity website.
Among the topics that caught my eye on the technical front are Serverless Computing in particular Kubeless (I promise to spend a couple of weekends on this- forgive the repetition). Secondly, Software Tracing (no - it is beyond logging, check out opentracing.io). This really gives a great insights on how the performance of the applications and there are several vendors already shipping products around it. Lastly, I am also keen in this topic - "Research Advances on Automatic Bug Repairs." by Claire (CMU). This is one that I will get my QA to spend some time on because it will move our QA capabilities to the next level of automation.
For the non-technical but still with a technology perspective, I love the session on "The impact of design: How design influences outcome" by Cynthia (Shopify). "Government as a System" by (Matt - former Googler). He introduced Agile in Policy and that caught my eye; enough for me to spend my lunch with him and his team and talked about their experiences as I see it similar to the Singapore's SmartNation initiative. The best of the non-technical session was "Mentorship and Sponsorship" by Lara (Kickstarter). I thought mentorship is good but listening to her explain what is a sponsorship, it clicked; and dawned on me that this is what I need at this point of my life and career.
There are some outstanding breakout sessions with Kelsey Hightower on Kubernetes 1.8 taking the best session for me followed closely by Bryan Liles's - "Sysadmins and DevOps and SREs, oh my !!"
So in the nutshell these are the areas that I will need to put a strategy in place where my team and I can dive in a bit more and formulate better how we can use these to further advance Oracle business in JAPAC. Love the conference and looking forward to be there again in 2018 probably with more exposure.
Chef.io Community Meetup 2017 @ NYC
Following up from Velocity, I attended Chef.io Community Meetup @ a hackerspace in NYC. The key peeps from Chef including Adam (CTO) was there. I love the way we arranged the open-space sessions and got into discussions and pledging what we are commited to do on the 2nd day of the community summit. Besides technical, we had a discussion on making tech be accessible to the minority and the under-privilege and of course that got me going a lot. Second day was hacking day where folks from Chef did some bug fixes, others working on their recipes and cookbooks and me trying inspec but ended spending most of my time having to get the demo running for the big boss in his cloud-challenge using Oracle Container Cloud Services (OCCS).
It was a very fulfilling trip that inspired more ideas for what I think my team can work on and contribute back to Oracle but most importantly knowing that I still have more to learn.
But the best totally non technical activity was watching SEINFELD LIVE !!!!
