What a year ladies and gentlemen, what a year.
I’d like to spend some time wrapping up everything that happened to me this year, I’ll try to bring personal and professional spheres and I hope you enjoy the reading, as well as I enjoy writing it.
I can’t do it chronologically but let’s get to it.
A Newly Deployed Baby#
We’ve started the year already expecting our 1st baby (and I’ll already state here, 1 and only). Oh, we were prepared for that, it took us a while to make it work, but it was finally happening. The pregnancy was a pure joy ride and we spent time exercising, reading parenting books, making the apartment baby-proof, and everything that you would expect for 1st time parents.
Our boy arrived in May and everything was great with him and my wife, which was a relief to me. I was worried as hell about the labor and everything. Our lives turned upside down from one day to another. Even though we have spent a lot of time preparing, I can ASSURE you NOTHING can prepare you for parenthood. NOTHING.
We are both Brazilians, but we live in Austria, where we do not have the biggest support network, so it was (and is still) a challenge to juggle everything that needs to be done, between the 2 of us.
I have to say though, now it is getting easier. It is still a lot of work, but it is way more enjoyable and rewarding to see his development day after day.
CNCF Ambassador#
Before the arrival of the little one, in March, after some time running the Cloud Native Linz Meetup and contributing to the OpenTelemetry Demo, I got accepted as a CNCF Ambassador, which encouraged me to keep doing what I was doing, and even try to put more time and effort to it.
First Talk About OpenTelemetry Demo#
In April I had the opportunity to give a talk at the Cloud Native Salzburg Community Group, and it was my first time presenting the OpenTelemetry Demo. The proposal was to give an introduction to OpenTelemetry, and then show how users could take advantage of the Demo to see how to use OTel with different languages.
The talk is available on YouTube:
Getting Started with OpenTelemetry: OTel Demo to the Rescue
If you watch it, I’d love to have any feedback from you.
Cloud Native Linz#
The Cloud Native Community Group is organized by Jürgen Etzlstorfer and I, and everything has been done exclusively in our free time, till now. This year we have reached more than 500 members on our Meetup page and we ran 9 events throughout the year with an average of 35 attendees per event.
18 different speakers jumped in and shared what they were working on and cloud-related topics with the community. All community-driven. We had a couple of first-time speakers, which was awesome, and seeing those speakers sharing their knowledge and engaging with the community was just a joy.
What was even more rewarding, was seeing some of those speakers sharing more content after the meetup, in other groups and even at conferences. I like to believe that our community has helped them to unlock their voice, and encourage them to go and share what they know.
It was a great year for the Cloud Native Linz Community Group, and we already have our next 4 events lined up, which is an awesome way to start the year.
OpenTelemtry Demo#
The OpenTelemtry Demo had its first PR opened in April 2022, so we have turned 1 year old. I’ve been part of the project from the beginning, and I have to say, I’m learning a lot from it.
Besides Traces that were already covered since the start, we have added Metrics, and at last Logs. Not all services have all the 3 signals, but we are adding them as they mature in each language.
To close the year in a clean state, we have just released version 1.7
which mainly updates dependencies and fixes some minor bugs.
Kubernetes Community Days Austria#
While expecting the baby at any time and during my paternity leave, the community started to plan a KCD Austria, hosted in Vienna. I wanted to be part of the organizers, but with all of that going on, I wasn’t able to help and invest the time the event required.
I stayed in touch with them and got the chance to help as a volunteer during the event days. It was also a great experience and had the chance to watch some fantastic talks, like Liz Rice nailing in presentation skills, content, and timing. It was just perfect, I strongly recommend taking a look at her talk.
The event had a super cool atmosphere, as it was hosted in a cinema, so you could sit and relax in the chairs to watch the talks. This was a bit tricky to manage after a lasagna that we had for lunch on one of the days, but that’s just a detail 😅.
I also want to highlight two other fascinating talks at the KCD:
Sonja talked about API observability, why we need it, and how they have implemented that at Tyk. The talk has a great story and it is awesome knowing that the OTel demo has helped them during their implementation phase.
Not at KCD, but Sonja shared some lessons learned with the Cloud Native Linz in our January 2023 event. So it was great watching her talk.
I think this talk is important to everyone who works with software. She has focused on users and contributors of Open Source Software, but the idea can be expanded to everything. If you have a product, or if you are shipping a new feature, or if you simply use some framework, you can for sure learn how to contribute through writing.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to watch all the talks live, as I was helping out somewhere else, but I also know that Christian Köberl presented his talk Supply Chain Security using Free and Open Tools which was an improved version of what he presented in the Cloud Native Linz in November 2022.
Anyways, the whole playlist with all presentations is available on YouTube, so go ahead and watch everything: KCD Austria Playlist.
Career Change#
That was a rollercoaster year filled with ups and downs, but a couple of things were clear to me:
- I want to be more involved in Open Source and with the community.
- I love sharing what I’m learning and talking about it.
- I want to use my work time to do it, so I can spend my free time with my wife and our son.
That was when I realized that I’d like to become a Developer Advocate, to spread the word about technologies, help to enable devs and users, run training sessions, write more and be more involved with the community. But I wanted to do it full-time, and that wasn’t an option at the company I’ve been working for the last 5 years.
I decided to take my chances and after some discussions and interviews, it is set. In January 2024 I’m starting my journey as a Developer Advocate.
I’d like to wish you all a great holiday season and a wonderful New Year.
Also, stay tuned for more that is coming!