Speaker 1
I mean, this is both a short and a long answer, but I never want to use one word when two will do, so I think I'll give you both. So the theme of this release is Penelope, and it's Penelope because of the Odyssey, right? The ancient Greek myth with Odysseus or Eulises in the Greek and Latin name. And this is, I mean, for one thing, a theme doesn't have to mean anything, right? This is like a small little thing that it's left up to the decision of the release lead just to add a certain flavor, right? And it's completely detached from the actual version numbers that end up on the cloud providers, etc. So it's not very much used outside of this, but I still think it's important because it gives great t-shirts and good swag. And then in a way, it is a reflection of the community work that we do. So why Penelope? I think I need to go back for my own path in life to give a better answer. So I actually joined technology or IT or computer or programming, as I mentioned, in the 90s. Why? Because I started with Linux. I installed Linux and I started to learn with Linux. This will be a story that many of our listeners will understand very well. So you get this like black screen in front, you don't know anything about it, but you have this passion to learn and you end up learning by yourself. Programming in C, in common list. I mean, that was my door into technology. And why am I mentioning this? Because my actual academic path was archaeology. So that's what I did my bachelor's and master's. This was in archaeology. While pursuing a career, so I'm a bit of an oddball in that, my career was entirely in technology. Linux and Unix administration, then joined IBM for technical solutions, from IoT, quantum computing, ended up in Kubernetes because Linux obviously has a huge importance in when CloudNative started. All my background in open source and Linux was right there. And currently I'm working at the SAS Institute as a cloud and architecture lead for Europe. But going back to Penelope, my knowledge of obviously the ancient Greek myths made me, I was a co-organizer of Kubernetes Community Days Porto a couple of months ago, and there was a cybernetics exposition just on the room next to the KCD1. And I mentioned in passing that cybernetics and Kubernetes actually come from the same Greek root, which is pilot, helmsman, etc. And that made me think, and by that time, I still hadn't the team completely settled, made me think, well, actually, this is interesting because a release cycle is a voyage, is a sort of an epic voyage, where a journey where teammates help each other. But I still wasn't absolutely settled until I remember that actually, the voyage from Troy to Ithaca of Odysseus took 10 years. And that like, I remember that we are on the 10th anniversary of Kubernetes. And after that, I just actually introduced this in my release comms to the mailing lists. I started with a small quotation of the Odyssey, which is applicable to the specific release week that I was in. And in the last third of the cycle, I settled on Penelope because I also, on top of the 10 years and on top of the Kubernetes and journey theme, also Penelope ended up with a loom, right? And she weaves by day, but unweaves by night because she has all these suitors that they want to marry her, but she wants to wait for Odysseus, obviously. And that actually reminded me of the way that the Kubernetes release cycles work, because we have these deprecations, and then we have the new alpha, beta, and stable features. So we end up, as a community, building this very large project, the second largest open source project in the world. We end up doing a bit like Penelope. We woof things in and unwoof others as we progress. So yeah, I mean, several different layers here from the very simple, it's just a cute thing that I end up liking because of my past in archaeology, but also because I think it makes sense on the 10th anniversary of Kubernetes and pays a certain homage to the Greek roots of the Kubernetes name. Excellent.