> TLDR: I really enjoyed Kubecon. It was overwhelming, but great. I saw a lot of cool projects and my favorite talk was on accessibility. Kubecon ended on Thursday. Not going to lie I was super ready to come back home, but the trip was sooo worth it. Why did I go? Last step in my quest to be a Kubernetes (K8s) SME this year. It was a lot going on from demos to talks to swag. As an introvert I just did what I do best...fake it during conference hours and then go shutdown at the hotel. > Want to take a side note to say that I missed Maroon 5 in ATL and I'm really sad about it. Anyway Kubecon was almost as big as a NSBE conference. I didn't really know what I wanted to do so I thought maybe I can just walk around and see what's going on. The problem? It was just so much stuff. As I went to different booths I realized that everything was about AI. Nothing wrong with that, but I didn't know most of these companies for AI things. I was trying to learn more about their product overall. I find value in AI, but it's not my core focus. Over time I realized that the coolest thing to me is still observability. I just really like data and a way to show it. I'm working on dashboards for my life so why not get into it more at work. While there were a lot of cool tools, everything under the hood seemed to have started with open telemetry. I was reading up about it at the airport. I think this is worth doing some projects on not just in terms of k8s, but servers and app code overall. Another specific demo that stuck out was Octopus Deploy. I have a few post on ArgoCD and Octopus Deploy is like one step up. It allows you to see the different environments, separate them visually, and create rules before a deployment is triggered. The last point is a big one since ArgoCD just polls against the changes of a repo, but what if you wanted to see this can't go to production if it hasn't soaked in staging for 2 weeks? Game changer right?! It takes the job of remembering small checks for deployment off the plate of a team and allows them to manage it with rules that you can keep stored somewhere for everyone to see and talk about (\*cough\* git). Last things to talk about is the panel I went to on accessibility. I can admit, I was thinking "what do you mean accessibility in this space. This isn't heavy on code." That is where I went wrong ladies and gents. After listening to a panel of blind and deaf professionals I realize I'm part of the problem. Two great pain points with solutions I got are the following: - We have these tools for alerts. All these visual color changes and such. That's cute and all, but what if your blind? Have you considered how your team would handle those work arounds? I know I haven't. The biggest take away here was to listen to what your team members need to be successful and make it happen. - Communication for deaf team members. They have interpreters and will use all the tools that they can, but how do we help keep context and maybe even lessen their fatigue? Some suggestions I herd here were to again listen to team member needs, have everything (context, ask, mtg notes, ect) in writing within 24 hours in a central repository, and record meetings. The recordings and documentation pieces especially were very interesting because I work on teams were we kinda do this thing, but usually only when asked. I'm usually a mindlessly listen to music while people talk type of person, but once this talk started and I realized I know nothing about nothing I took out my headphones and really started listening. I've always known there were different types of disabilities, but I think I've been around the ones you can't see for so long (including being in this group myself) that I forgot about the ones in your face. I honestly left the talk thinking "they gotta be working on cool stuff in this space" similar to how I felt the first time I met a diabetic hacking a glucose monitor to be of more help. Anyway all this to say that I'm really glad I went to the panel to see where my blinders were on this topic and I hope it was recorded. Well that's really all I got for the conference. OH! I want to end this saying that I never considered using homebrew on linux until setting things up to help contribute to ArgoCD. Why did I never consider this before? It makes everything sooooooooooo much easier for my switching between mac and linux so much. ## Favorite talk or demo The most surprising demos were on chiseled images. It was something I'm just now hearing about and very interested in since I build a lot of custom images. Having slimmer images that are also secure is super important for what I do in my day to day and I would also like to explore it more for person projects too (Protect all the things!). My favorite talk was on accessibility as you can see from above. ## Would you go back? I think so. I'd be really interested in going to a conference overseas. I probably won't pack my schedule like I did ever again, and I'd like to have a track to focus on. I was a bit scattered on this one.