Open at Intel

DevOps and Platform Engineering

Ryan Wallner and Brad Maltz of Dell joined us to share their work furthering best practices in DevOps and Platform Engineering and advocating for open source development within Dell. We discuss the importance of adapting to technical and cultural changes within organizations, the evolving notion of what it means to be "full-stack," and the rise of Kubernetes and the evolving cloud-native landscape.

00:00 Introduction and Guest Backgrounds
00:32 The Role of DevRel in Open Source
01:40 Balancing Community and Product Management
02:00 The Importance of Advocacy and Education
08:35 The Developer Experience and the Role of Platform Engineering
11:31 The Challenges and Skills Needed in Platform Engineering
20:18 The Ubiquity of Kubernetes and the Complexity of the Cloud Native Landscape
23:33 Closing Thoughts and Reflections

 

Guests:

Ryan Wallner is a Lead Developer Advocate at Dell Technologies and host of the Kubernetes Bytes podcast. Ryan is a cloud native and Kubernetes enthusiast, husband, and dad of fearless daughter. Ryan enjoys adventure moto riding, hiking, mountain biking.

Brad Maltz is the Sr. Director of DevOps and Developer Relations Ecosystems at Dell Technologies, focusing on delivering DevOps technologies and a developer-oriented user experience with the Dell portfolio. He leads a team that is connecting Dell to the community to enable our customers on their journey to becoming mature DevOps organizations. Brad has been in the industry for over 20 years driving innovation and solutions across the strategic technology landscape. With experience across multiple verticals such as healthcare, finance, biotech, education, government and manufacturing, Brad has been able to help customers with a multitude of problems up and down the technology stack.

GitHub, Open Source, and Developers Helping Developers

Kedasha Kerr, a GitHub Developer Advocate, shares her non-traditional path into the world of coding, inspired by a FreeCodeCamp post on Instagram. Kadesha shares her insights on the importance of empathy in the tech sector as well as tips for beginners starting with GitHub. She emphasizes the potential of tools such as GitHub Actions in maximizing efficiency and encourages more women to get into coding. The conversation touches on the role of a developer advocate at GitHub and provides tips on optimizing one's GitHub profile as a working resume. Finally, Kadesha speaks about her excitement about engaging beginners in open source development.

00:00 Introduction and Personal Backgrounds
00:35 Journey into Coding and Developer Advocacy
02:01 The Importance of Coding and Non-Technical Backgrounds
02:53 Empathy and Impact in Tech
04:40 Advice for Aspiring Developers
07:49 Exploring GitHub Features and Tools
17:43 The Role of GitHub in Developer Identity
21:42 Excitement for Open Source and Final Thoughts

 

Resources:

There’s an Action for that! Exploring the Possibilities of GitHub Actions

Guest:

 

Kedasha Kerr is a Developer Advocate at GitHub where she enjoys sharing the lessons she’s learned from her time as an engineer and from her day job talking with other engineers at GitHub and in the wider developer community. Prior to her transition to the world of tech, she worked as a social worker in various government agencies. She finds joy in helping others learn about the tech industry and loves sharing her experience as a software developer. When she’s not building software, you can find her in the kitchen cooking up her favorite Jamaican dishes. You can find her on Instagram & Tiktok at @itsthatladydev

 

 

 

Bridging the Gap: Growing Our Community

We spoke with Lisa-Marie Namphy, a CNCF ambassador, who runs a large San Francisco Bay Area user group focusing on open source technologies like Kubernetes. Lisa shares her experience running meetups, her focus on delivering valuable content, and her perspective on inclusivity in the tech community. The conversation also explores how she balances corporate interests with community values and talks about the importance of consistency in meetups. Lisa is excited about the role of AI in open source and talks about the challenges related to data and security. Lastly, she gives her advice on measuring success in developer relations.

00:00 Introduction and Acknowledgements
00:00 The Busy Life at KubeCon
01:11 Introducing Lisa Marie Namphy
01:39 The Evolution of OpenStack Meetup
04:27 The Challenges and Opportunities of Tech Meetups
05:03 The Many Hats of Lisa-Marie Namphy
05:31 The Importance of Community in Open Source
07:08 The Role of Meetups in Community Building
13:56 The Balance Between Commercial Interests and Community Needs
25:07 The Importance of Measuring Success in DevRel

Guest:

Lisa-Marie Namphy is a developer advocate and community architect, and a CNCF Ambassador with 20+ years of experience primarily at Cloud Native, Analytics, and Enterprise Software companies and start-ups. Lisa organizes and runs the SF Bay Cloud Native Containers User Group (one of the world’s largest CNCF user groups), personally hosting meetups for the past 10 years. In her “day job” Lisa runs the Developer Relations program at Cockroach Labs. For 10 years prior Lisa led marketing, open source, and developer advocacy teams across Portworx, HPE and HP Software. Lisa is an advocate and frequent speaker for Diversity & Inclusion initiatives and open source technology, a writer, an avid sports fan, and loves wine and dogs.

 

Automation and Infrastructure as Code

Rosemary Wang of HashiCorp, author of Infrastructure as Code, Patterns and Practices, talks about her experience in the open source world, and her passion for infrastructure as code. She discusses automation and common pitfalls, as well as the need to explore 'break glass scenarios' in case automation goes wrong. 

00:00 Introduction and Welcome
00:00 Open Source Conferences
00:52 Automation and Infrastructure as Code
01:19 Exploring the Concept of 'Break Glass' Scenarios
03:48 Common Pitfalls in Automation
06:31 The Importance of Auditing and Inspecting Automation
08:02 Advice for Early Career Engineers
18:16 Introduction to the Book 'Infrastructure as Code Patterns and Practices'

Guest:

As the author of “Infrastructure as Code, Patterns and Practices”, Rosemary Wang works to bridge the technical and cultural barriers between infrastructure, security, and application development. She has a fascination for solving intractable problems as a contributor, public speaker, writer, and advocate of open source infrastructure tools. When she is not drawing on whiteboards, Rosemary debugs stacks of various infrastructure systems on her laptop while watering her houseplants.

Tidying the Cloud with Cloud Custodian

Kapil Thangavelu, CTO and co-founder of Stacklet.io and the leading force behind an open source project called Cloud Custodian, talks about his journey in open source, beginning with his transition from Windows to dabbling in Linux, marking his shift toward open source development. He talks about the creation and development of Cloud Custodian while at Capital One, highlighting how the cloud management tool has grown to adopt multiple cloud providers like Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Oracle, and Tencent Cloud. He gives credit to the tool's vast community of over 400 contributors, and thousands of users, and attributes its success to welcoming contributions, not only in the form of code but also in essential non-code contributions like documentation. He ends the conversation by addressing the future of open source, expressing concern over changes in licenses and tailoring open source projects to fit into a more commercial, rather than a community-based landscape.

00:00 Introduction
02:05 The Genesis of Cloud Custodian
05:48 Expanding Cloud Custodian to Multiple Platforms
06:21 The Versatility and Use Cases of Cloud Custodian
14:11 The Challenges and Future of Open Source
17:28 Closing Remarks and Reflections

 

Resources:

Cloud Custodian - State of the Mop

Guest:

Kapil Thangavelu is a Co-Founder and CTO at Stacklet, building products to help companies be well managed in the cloud. He started his career in open source working on Zope and Plone (CMS) communities as a consultant. Over the last decade he’s spent time building open source projects and accelerating cloud innovation at Canonical, Capital One, and Amazon.

 

It's Finally the Year of the Linux Desktop

Barton George of Dell joins us to discuss his involvement with 'Project Sputnik', an initiative created about 11 years ago aimed at making Dell hardware more appealing to developers. The project involved making pre-installed Linux laptops available to consumers.

Our conversation touched on the community's loyalty, support, and critiques, which have significantly influenced Dell's approach. Notably, Barton highlighted the crucial turning point in Dell's market strategy of veering towards high-end hardware while preserving the open source platform, enabling synergy between corporate dynamics and grassroots community efforts.

00:00 Introduction and Event Impressions
00:58 Barton George's Journey in Open Source
02:17 The Birth of Project Sputnik
07:33 The Role of Community
11:23 The Future of Linux Laptops
20:53 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

 

Guest:

Barton George has been involved with Linux and open source for over 15 years. For the last 10+ years he has been at Dell Technologies where, beyond Linux and open source, he has focused on cloud native computing and devops. Currently Barton is a member of Dell’s developer relations team. In addition to his day job, Barton is the founder and lead of Project Sputnik, a line of Ubuntu-powered developer laptops and workstations. Born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii, Barton is a single father of three teenagers. He and his children happily reside just outside Austin, Texas.

An Interactive Journey Through the Cloud Native Landscape

Whitney Lee and Victor Farcic discuss their unique approach to educating others about the Cloud Native Computing Foundation's (CNCF) landscape through their interactive presentations and YouTube project 'You Choose.' The pair explain how they incorporate live audience voting to determine the 'chosen' technologies implemented in their ongoing demos. Their fun approach helps newcomers in the field make informed decisions on the tools to use, and to understand how these various tools can integrate with each other. They talk about their previous talks and excitement for possible future events where they'll continue their interactive sessions.

 

00:00 Introduction and Meeting the Guests
00:33 Discussing the Concept of Rejekts Conference
01:45 The Popularity and Impact of Rejekts<
02:46 The Experience of Attending KubeCon
03:59 Getting to Know the Guests Outside of KubeCon
06:38 The Idea Behind a 'Choose Your Own Adventure'
09:36 The Origin and Format of the 'You Choose' Streaming Show
13:59 The Excitement of Live Voting
15:50 The Thrill of Live Demos
17:32 The Future: Security Talk
20:13 The Overwhelming Cloud Native Landscape
21:29 The Upcoming YouTube Series
23:12 The Aftermath of KubeCon

 

Resources:

Cloud Native Rejekts

You Choose series

Guests:

Whitney Lee is a lovable goofball who enjoys understanding and using tools in the cloud native landscape. Creative and driven, Whitney recently pivoted from an art-related career to one in tech. She is active in the open source community, especially around CNCF projects focused on developer productivity. You can catch her lightboard streaming show ⚡️ Enlightning on Tanzu.TV. And not only does she rock at tech - she literally has toured playing in the band Mutual Benefit on keyboards and vocals.

Viktor Farcic is lead rapscallion at Upbound, a member of the Google Developer Experts, CDF Ambassadors, and GitHub Stars groups, and a published author. He is a host of the YouTube channel DevOps Toolkit and a co-host of DevOps Paradox.

Istio and Ambient Service Mesh

Lin Sun, Director of Open Source at Solo.io, is an influential figure in the cloud-native world. We spoke at All Things Open and she shared insights into her experiences and contributions in the open source community. Discussing her prominent role in the Istio project, she shares how Istio fits into the landscape of cloud-native service mesh, offering connectivity, security, and observability. She also highlights the launch of Istio Ambient Service Mesh, which reduces the complexity of Sidecar. Venturing into the world of AI, Lin envisions a future where AI assists in coding and improves software security while predicting a transition to a more conversational interaction with technology. She emphasizes the importance of human supervision in AI's development and its usefulness in making developers more efficient.

00:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:29 Discussing Open Source Contributions and Community
01:53 Deep Dive into Istio and Service Mesh
02:49 Roles and Responsibilities in the Istio Community
04:24 Journey into Open Source Contributions
06:52 Advice for New Open Source Contributors
09:36 Exciting Updates in Istio
14:14 Exploring the Potential of AI in Open Source
19:33 Closing Remarks and Future Expectations

Resources:

Istio Ambient Service Mesh Made Easy

Guest:

Lin Sun is the Director of Open Source at Solo.io and an ex-CNCF ambassador. She has worked on Istio service mesh since 2017 and serves on the Istio Technical Oversight Committee. Previously, she was a Senior Technical Staff Member and Master Inventor at IBM for 15+ years. She is the author of the book “Istio Ambient Explained” and has more than 200 patents to her name.