Recently I did a series of talks focused around building Kubernetes Clusters. In these I demoed how Terraform can be used to build out a Kubernetes cluster and then ideas for working with that Kubernetes cluster or building out other infrastructure with Terraform around the Kubernetes cluster. I’ve posted the first of several posts that I’m putting together related to the configuration, code, and work I did for those talks.
On this topic there are several additional things I try to do for and after every presentation I give. This adds value for me, the people who attend the presentation, but also for others that did not attend after the talk. At least, that’s my intent and hope in this and related follow up material. Here’s the breakdown of what I try to do with every presentation. Below I’ll also have links to presentations I have succeeded in accomplishing this mission.
Mission Goals
The mission goals involves getting the presentation posted along with other key goals upon notification of date, time, and related details to several key places:
RSVP Site — Next I ensure it is listed on meetup or whatever site the organizers are using.
Composite Code Blog Listing — Next I create a page where I will put all of the collateral for the presentation and list it on this page. Often this starts out merely as a listing and then a link to the page where I’ll simply write “Content are TBD but actively being developed! Stay tuned!”
Code, Slide Deck, Collateral — Other elements I make ever effort to include code repositories (usually on Github), image or slide deck files, and anything else I used to demonstrate during the presentation.
Presentations That Accomplish This Mission
There are a few of these presentations I’ve given that have had every mission criteria met. Here I’ve linked a few just to point out what a finished presentation and follow up looks like. At least, these are examples of what I aim for, there are always ways to improve on this.
Visual Studio AWS Tooling & SDK — Even though this is a presentation from a different era of technology, it still represents all the pieces collected for a successful mission. Video, write up, and collateral repo and such. I’d be curious, since it has been such a long time, if the code still runs.
That’s that, and onward and forward to the next code challenge. I’ll be publishing that shortly on my blog, at https://compositecode.blog/.
I sit here at the moment watching two Kubernetes Clusters build. One is building on Azure and one on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). I’ve got a presentation coming up this Tuesday and Thursday, both I’ll be digging into Kubernetes, Terraform, and a number of other technologies. Those are the two hot technologies for the talks though. Albeit, the continuous integration, languages, and tooling that Terraform builds via configuration and Kubernetes runs in containers is what is actually the meat of this whole sandwich. Which is where I ponder what all of this goo is that wires together things in this virtual programmatic realm in which I’ll build something on top of.
It seems messy from inception. But then of course, all programming and related ecosystem elements in which programming takes place is a messy bag of guts.
Here I sit then, waiting the rather unknown pseudo random amount of time for the Kubernetes Clusters to finish building. A few moments pass and sure enough, as always, very inconsistent build times. The Azure Kubernetes Cluster took 7 minutes to build and the GCP Kubernetes Cluster took just 4 minutes. Last night the Azure cluster was taking 20 minutes or more while the GCP cluster was consuming about 3–4 minutes to build. I’m not sure, as I’ve not dug into the matter deep enough, but something seems awry within the way Azure needs to build out its instances, networking, and related cluster mechanisms. I’m not surprised though, Azure has always behaved and felt slow and cumbersome during the build out of infrastructure. GCP on the other hand clearly comes from Google’s thoroughbred engineering focus on things. It generally builds in a much smaller range of time, consuming much less time overall.
As I build all of this, to work out what will and won’t be in the demo, I find myself next fiddling with presentation material. I really don’t even like to have presentation material, I’d much rather have an interesting enough talk and respective code, samples, and demo to just show the whole thing. Presentation slide decks always fell like, and almost always are, just a crutch for the inability to form ideas, show concepts, or otherwise actually engage the audience around what is being presented. It’s a frustrating dichotomy to say the least. Eventually, with these latest efforts, I actually intend to get down to two slides: one for my information when ending the talk, the requisite contact information and such, then two would be the intro slide with a fancy title for whatever the meat of the talk will be about.
All of this work however is going to be interrupted by the dramatically more important bike ride I’ll take later to clear my thoughts and get the blood flowing through my veins. As things go, I actually dislike sitting still for more than a few hours. I like to chunk my time into brackets, get the work done, and then go for a ride, walk, or something to get my mind cleared back up. I hear it’s healthier for us humans too, but I’ve not set the research to memory to make that argument.
One type of writing is that where I pick apart what’s going on in the industry. This is something I ought to be doing for a number of strategic reasons. Many people should honestly, but it doesn’t happen. We’re often just limited to very specific analysts that may or may not have a solid grasp on what is going on. Since I’m often in the innards of industry projects and efforts, I have some fair insight to apply that isn’t at hands length, it’s from the bloody front lines.
The second type of article is some type of disciplined approach to teach and to learn skills forgotten, skills needed, and hash through things that work into bigger projects.
The third, which is fun and also usually useful are the use case, patterns, and practices articles. I like these, they’re often fun and sometimes even a little controversial.
These all wrap into a steady flow of thoughts, ideas, learning, teaching, and related things. So this is that restart. Against all suggestions to write this type of article, here I’ve done it anyway as a stake in the ground of where I’m officially starting these writing efforts today, Friday the 29th at 8:21pm while at Farley’s Easy in Oakland, California writing while waiting for the arrival of the Coast Starlight. So here’s to writing rhythms and exploring this medium as a medium in which to publish among the mediums! Cheers!
First, I will be available with a possible start date of November the 28th. I’m currently wrapping up some big projects and completing training for the Home Depot Team and the great progress we’ve made over the last year. If your company is looking for someone with my mixed array of technical skills and soft skills, you can check out my resume & details and initiate job talk with me here!
On to the rest of the news. If you’ve seen me speak lately I’ve mentioned the open source efforts we’ve had going on at Home Depot and related efforts I was working on. Some I’m working dilligently to release via the Home Depot OSS Organization on Github and I’ll still be releasing others soon via my Github account (@Adron) and blogging about it here on Composite Code.
Since this is one of those rare times in my career where I’m not 100% sold on what I’ll do next, I’m open to fielding prospects and seeing what is out there. This is a different approach for me, as I usually determine a company, particular work that needs done and go after that gap. But I’d like to get a feel for what companies feel they need at this particular time. Since I have a wide range of skills, I can step into a number of positions and immediately start to contribute to projects within a company.
Here are some positions I’d find attractive and could provide value for (or build) a team immediately!
Building or Expanding a Team
Need someone to hire, build, and create a cohesive, diverse, and powerful culture of core contributors (developers, designers, advocates, evangelists, or similar). I can knock this one out of the park for the right company. Yes, I’m a bit particular, but I’m not just going to whimsically work for any company (the best people won’t work for just any old company anyway). If you are looking to put a team together and want somebody that can do that for you, I’d like to sit down to a conversation soon. Let’s talk jobs.
Coding Architect
Have some architecture problems, that seem a bit unique or problematic? If you need someone to come in and push forward on design, patterns, practices, and actual implementation then this would also be a conversation I’d be interested in having. I’d be happy to dive into whatever the stack might be (or help decide on the stack): Java (Scala/Kotlin), Golang, Node.js or even .NET (C#/F#) for the right company. Let’s talk jobs.
Development & Operations Architect
Have some architecture that needs to go along with an application and want to build or insure a solid continuous integration and delivery pipeline (or messaging based queue for delivery to production)? This is another possibility I’d be happy to talk about. I really love working with systems to build out reliable immutable infrastructure, data storage mechanisms (distributed, RDBMS, whatever the need calls for) and insure development can continue forward with extremely high confidence levels. Let’s talk jobs.
Developer Advocate/OSS Project Lead
If you have an open source project I’d love to take lead on it and also provide advocacy for that project. This role is not to be confused with evangelist, as that’s a fine role for other people, but I want to be in the code and advocating from a position with the team. I’ve done this before with projects like the Iron Foundry for Cloud Foundry and others, and loved it. Let’s talk jobs.
Mergers & Acquisition Technical Evaluations
This is not something one sees everyday, but I’ve worked in a consulting role and have assisted others with this work before. I find it really interesting looking at prospective ROI, current run rates, but also at the specific details of whehter a product or service can even be incorporated and integrated into the acquiring company. In the case of merging, this differs from acquisition in that both entities and both companies’ products and services will both need to polymorph into a new whole. If you’re company is looking to get into some M & A’s, let’s talk about how I can help.
Besides the above theoretical jobs above, here are a few other things that I would like in a job. Things that just make it all worthwhile, here’s a list.
Work Environ / Soft Skills / Culture
Flexible hours remote or remote (out of office). Whatever the case, I’d like to work with a company that has the ability and acumen to manage the workflow and efforts among team members remotely. If you’re a company that wants to upgrade the development and operational characteristics of the culture, I can also help your company incorporate highly effective remote capabilities.
If there is travel, I prefer to keep it to a productively effective 10-15% of the time. Traveling dramatically decreases overall ability to contribute to actual work in an effective way. I do love to travel, speak, and get involved with the worldwide community but I always like to make sure that this involvement doesn’t stymie me from contributing to actual coding, design, and related efforts. NOTE: If travel is within the Cascadian Bioregion (see image: includes YVR, PDX, SEA, etc) it’s easy to increase my travel to 15-25% of the time as travel within the region is so easy. I probably should include SFO too, it’s super easy to get there and doesn’t cause disruption to daily workflow. (i.e. < 2 hr trip)
Design, build, and communicate. These are the things I like to do. I like to create what will work for high volume or high speed systems, then build prototypes and communicate how these work. Maybe I would be the one deploying to production, maybe the system is production that I’m deploying, but whatever the case is I’m happy to lead efforts on architecture and work with teams to build that architecture.
I love to provide leadership for teams, I love to build teams, and I like working with teams. Albeit I’m particular about team diversity and culture, I can bring my own skills and the ability to bring people together on a team and expand teams. If the culture is off kilter, I can help with that. If the culture is spot on, I can work effectively with that. Whatever the case, I’m a high communication, GSD type of guy provided the right environment and reigns removed.
Technical Skills
I’ve found Google Cloud Platform (GCP) a pleasure to work with lately. That combined with Terraform, Packer, and related HashiCorp tooling has been a lot of fun and provided an extremely high value for us at Home Depot.
AWS has been another I’ve worked with that has been of stellar value, not particularly at Home Depot but at multitudes of startups and during consulting. AWS is still for many things my go to cloud provider option.
Azure is another I’ve used that would be an interesting service to use again. It’s been well over 2 years since I worked with or provided Azure support or consulting. I’ve got a soft spot in my heart for this cloud provider since I led teams back in 2010 writing some of the first white papers for the service!
I’m comfortable with C#, JavaScript, Java (mostly), and am looking forward to writing more Golang and happily will dive into Scala, Erlang, F#, and a whole host of other languages.
I’m happy to work with container tech (Rocket/CoreOS) or Docker and I’ll also help keep your company grounded that it might not be the panacea you’re looking for. But they definitely have lots of awesome uses!
I’d prefer a Unix/Linux environment to work in, but I’ll happily help remove Windows Servers from deployment requirements! 😉
You must be logged in to post a comment.