The One Where We Geek Out on Conference Crafting with Marino Wijay of Komodor

Apr 9, 2024

Ask episode

Chapters

Transcript

Episode notes

About our guest:

Marino Wijay is a Canadian, Traveller, International Speaker, Open Source Advocate for Service Mesh, CNI, Kubernetes, and Networking. He is an Ambassador @ Civo Cloud, and Lead Organizer for KubeHuddle Toronto. He is passionate about technology and modern distributed systems. He will always fall back to the patterns of Networking and the ways of the OSI. Community building is his driving force; A modern Jedi Academy.

Find our guest on:

X (Twitter)

Find us on:

All of our social channels are on bento.me/geekingout
All of Adriana's social channels are on bento.me/adrianamvillela

Show Links:

Additional Links:

Check out Marino's upcoming talks:

Transcript:
ADRIANA: Hey, y'all, welcome to Geeking Out. The podcast about all geeky aspects of software delivery, DevOps, Observability, reliability, and everything in between. I'm your host, Adriana Villela. Coming to you from Toronto, Canada. And geeking out with me today is Marino Wijay of Komodor.

MARINO: Komodor. Love it. Thank you so much, Adriana, for the introduction.

ADRIANA: Thank you for coming on. Where are you calling from today?

MARINO: I'm actually not too far away from you. About, I don't know...40 minutes east out in Whitby, Ontario. Nice little town in the GTA, somewhere near Toronto. Close enough.

ADRIANA: Awesome. Yes. Close enough that we still embrace Toronto-ishness.

MARINO: I know, right? Like, it's...there's this running joke that in order to get to Toronto, you have to cross Toronto and go through Toronto to get to Toronto because that's how large it is. And then even then, someone you're trying to, like, cross to get to other cities or something, it is a reality. Yeah, that's. That's what we're stuck with.

ADRIANA: Cool. All right, well, we're going to start with some lightning round questions, or I guess more. More icebreaker questions. Okay, first question is, are you a lefty or a righty?

MARINO: I'm a lefty. Wow.

ADRIANA: Oh, my God. I'm sorry. I get so excited with fellow lefties.

MARINO: There we go. Okay, so that's...okay...I'm kind of cheating because I also do use my right hand a lot because I use my right hand for my mouse.

ADRIANA: Yeah, me too.

MARINO: So in a way, I'm ambidextrous, but I do a lot of my work with my left hand, so I'm with you. I love it.

ADRIANA: Yay. I was like, IDing lefties. Like, I'll be watching a TV show with my daughter...My husband and my daughter are both right-handed. Poor them. And I'll be like, hey, see the way that guy's holding his glass? He's left-handed.

MARINO: We are actually still trying to assess whether our son is a righty or a lefty. I think he's a lefty, but my partner thinks that he's a righty. We'll have to wait and see. A couple more years.

ADRIANA: Yeah. Yeah, I know. That was...I was. I was, like, dying with anticipation, waiting to see if my daughter was going to be left-handed. And she's so artistic, so I thought for sure she was going to be left-handed, but alas, that's okay. But she. She does archery left-handed, so...

MARINO: Oh, interesting. Okay.

ADRIANA: There you go. Okay, next question. Do you prefer iPhone or Android?

MARINO: iPhone all the way. IPhone. It's such an ecosystem. I mean, the moment you enter, it's like everything is, is like stitched together so elegantly. I mean, Android is like, yeah, you know, sure, you could do whatever the heck you want, but, oh, you want to integrate? No, that's not happening. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, that's not happening.

ADRIANA: Yeah, I'm with you there. I buy into the cult of Apple and I'm okay with it. And you know, like, I know a lot of Android people are like, but you can customize all this stuff. I'm like, yeah, but I don't really want to. I'm okay with the way it is out of the box. That's cool. I'll customize other stuff. Not my phone, I think.

MARINO: Yeah, it's a lot of the experience and just the friendliness and simplicity. Like I have no mental capacity to try and like navigate Android's UI. Like, I don't want, I don't want to figure stuff out. I just want to be able to do things right.

ADRIANA: Yes. Yeah, I'm there with you. Okay. Follow up question. Mac, Linux or Windows?

MARINO: Well, this is a tough one because someone asked this on Twitter earlier today and it was either between Mac or Windows and someone came in and said Linux. And I'll be honest, I think it's for what you want to do or what you're intending to do. It's going to have to be all three. For me. I can't pick one because if I try to play games on my Mac, it's never happening. If I pick Windows, I can't do development or Iubernetes very wel. If I pick Linux and I'm probably looking up documentation how to make XYZ work, but then I have like, you know, so much like each one has its own thing. I gravitate towards the Mac because it's such a, such a beautiful device. Everything works out of the box just like our iPhone.

And for what we need and what we're trying to do for the majority of our tasks and operations, great. But that's where I'm like, hey, what if I want to play games? What if I, what if I want to get into the nitty gritty and start like going underneath the hood of the operating system? And you cannot do that with a Mac. Even Windows you cannot do that with. So it's okay, fine. If I had to pick Mac. All right, sorry.

ADRIANA: No, that's good, that's good. I love it, I love it. I think this has been. And your argument makes a lot of sense because each one is very well suited for different things, so. Totally agree. Yeah. I was trying to convince a friend of mine a while back to switch to Mac as his primary computer. He's like, but you can't do gaming on it like you do with Windows.

ADRIANA: I'm like, yeah, yeah, that's true, that's true. Alas, you need all three.

MARINO: Yeah, I'm staring at all three right now.

ADRIANA: Or virtual machines, right? You got one machine with, like, massive compute power and then VM, the other stuff.

MARINO: I thought about that, too. But if I showed you my desk or like, my office space, I'm okay. I've got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 computers in this little space. Yes. Various operating systems for fun.

ADRIANA: Nice. That's awesome. Yeah. Once upon a time, I used to have a similar command center of computers.

MARINO: It gets overwhelming, though, at times.

ADRIANA: And then you lose track. Like, what was this for again?

MARINO: What was the IP? What was the password?

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right, that's right.

MARINO: Yeah, I'll just reimage it, whatever.

ADRIANA: I don't remember. Out of sight, out of mind.

MARINO: Yeah.

ADRIANA: Okay, next question. What's your favorite programming language?

MARINO: Ooh, this is a tough one. Um, the, the. My favorite programming language is one where I don't have to remember syntax and there are none where I, you know, that exists, unfortunately. If I had to pick one though, I would probably gravitate back to Java. And it's funny because, like, I even tweeted about this yesterday about how I should go back and relearn Java after so long.

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, I remember that.

MARINO: And, like, there's people that are for it, against it. Some people are probably thinking, what the hell? What the fuck is wrong with this guy? He's probably said this every year. And it's funny because every year I do tweet something about Java or the fact that I will get back into the ecosystem. And I started learning Java years ago, like 20 years ago.

ADRIANA: Yeah.

MARINO: And, and it was in school and it became a point where it was like, this could become a real thing, a project. But at the same time, like, I'm a golden retriever and you, there are other things that probably interest me more. And at the time, Java wasn't it. Then 20 years later, you start to see this massive Java ecosystem with Spring and Gradle and everything in between, and it's like, what the hell did I just miss? Right? But that also speaks to the fact that if you're in this ecosystem or you're looking to transition away from, let's say, the Kubernetes ecosystem. There's another place you can go to, right. And it wouldn't be so difficult to jump from Java seven all the way to what is it, Java 18 now or Java 20 or I don't even know what version they're on.

ADRIANA: Yeah, I've lost track of the Java.

MARINO: And that's going to be Kubernetes too. Like 20 years from now we'll be at like Kubernetes 30.0 or something like that.

ADRIANA: You're basically saying you don't think Kubernetes is going to go away.

MARINO: Yeah, it probably.

ADRIANA: It's like Java. We're like too heavily invested in it.

MARINO: Yeah. Well when you think of, so look at the ecosystem of Java and how big it's become and then you look at that ecosystem within Kubernetes cloud native and it's not like it's shrinking or consolidating, it just keeps growing and something else comes up every year. And when it does come up, when that new area comes up, you see all these open source technologies and players also show up. So I don't think it's ever ending. I think we'll just see a massive community in Kubernetes 3.0 or 30.0 by then in 20 years and it'll look so different.

ADRIANA: Oh yeah, I'll bet, yeah. I mean, even thinking back to Java, like, I started learning Java...definitely...It must have been like around '99 when I started learning Java and it was the hot new language, right? And I mean that was...that was the place to be. I remember my first job out of school was, was at Accenture and they wanted to like put me on the, on the SAP group and I'm like, but I want to do Java.

MARINO: So cool, right?

ADRIANA: Yeah. because it's so cool! And I managed...I made...you know, half my career is, is, you know, thanks to, thanks to Java and being like ass deep in Java for so many years and, and then like I went through a period where I hadn't touched Java for, for years and then I was just doing something at work, I don't know, like three jobs ago and, and it was, I was doing some automation with Bamboo. And at the time the only way to automate, like to create any like codified CI/CDpipelines with Bamboo, they had a Java API. So I went...I came out of Java retirement, had to like relearn all the stuff. I didn't have like a Java IDE or anything installed on my machine. I even took on the brave adventure of trying to install, like, all the Java plugins on VSCode, which wasn't a disaster, and came out of retirement for this, like, final hurrah of, like, building the CI/CD pipeline in freaking Bamboo using their Java API, which was like, it was special. It was very special. And that was it for me.

ADRIANA: This was, I think, back in like, 2018, 2017.

MARINO: Yeah, we, we have certainly come a long way since then.

ADRIANA: I know, right?

MARINO: Yeah. Java. It would be Java.

ADRIANA: Cool. Cool. Awesome. Okay, next question. Do you prefer dev or ops? Do you have a preference?

MARINO: I prefer ops. I prefer to be able to. It's nice to be able to build things, but I also love to be able to see things and see how they work and see the blinking lights and the things that go wrong, the things that have gone red versus that are staying green. And it's because I've had a past in ops and the things that broke that, you know, forced me to decide how do I best solve this problem also drove a lot of curiosity. On the other hand, that's not to say that being a developer or a builder doesn't drive that same level of curiosity, but I like to see when things go wrong and that translates to the operations side for me.

ADRIANA: Nice. Awesome. And then next question. Do you prefer JSON or YAML?

MARINO: Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. JSON lovers. I totally love YAML. I'm YAML on board. YAML ninja. YAML all the way. YAML all the things,

MARINO: if we can...if we could totally do that.

ADRIANA: I'm with you. I'm with you. I have this disagreement with my husband, who's also in tech, and he prefers JSON. And I'm like, how can you like, I can't fucking read JSON.

MARINO: And that's just it, right? Like, all those extra curly braces is just noise to me. And I'm like, why do you need that noise? What's the point of that? Sure, it creates some level of scoping or maybe makes things look like, look like it's grouped together, but to me, YAML just reads so elegantly. Like, I could read through it, like a top down list or something, you know?

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, I'm fully with you there. Similarly controversial. Do you prefer spaces or tabs?

MARINO: So I like, here's the thing. When it comes to, when it comes to writing code and whatnot, for the sake of, like, just making things look nice, I would much prefer tabs. But I think it comes down to, like, just syntax and, you know, what a space does versus what a tab does. And, like, quite honestly, I don't know if one has a larger effect over the other. If I can make everything with tabs, certainly, you know, it makes things look so much more readable. Spaces can get a little wonky because at the same time, you don't know how many spaces you have and your eyes play tricks on you at times.

ADRIANA: Yeah, true, true.

MARINO: Right.

ADRIANA: But then you can get into the nitty gritties of like, how big is your tab? Is it the equivalent of four spaces or two spaces?

MARINO: That's just it, right, because, you know, it's a tab versus a space.

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. I've gotten, that's one, one place as much as I love YAML, one place where I've gotten dinged where like, you know, you open up a YAML doc and whoever it is, define the default tabs sizes, like to, but like, on my IDE is set to four. I'm like, ah, yeah, damn it.

MARINO: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

ADRIANA: And then, and then things get angry. Okay...do you prefer to consume content through video or text?

MARINO: So I prefer both. And it all depends on how long form the content is. If it's like too long, didn't read perfect, if it's 30 seconds or less perfect, and it's just my attention span and how it works. Right. And I think it's the majority of folks in tech, too. I don't think a lot of people like to spend a lot of time reading. They do, like watching. And this, like, for example, if this was a video cast as well, which I think it is.

ADRIANA: Yeah. Yeah.

MARINO: I think people, people may like, watch us for our, for our reactions and, you know, our expressions and stuff. But this is also great to have as background noise. Right. But if I want to watch something just to kind of like, you know, stimulate my mind a little bit, the 30 seconds or less is the way to go for me. It can't be one or the other. I have to have a balance of both because sometimes even video isn't enough for me. And the text helps me process ideas or it helps me process an understanding of something a lot better than a video does at times, vice versa.

ADRIANA: Yeah, fair enough. Yeah. For me, I like to be able to skim through text. So, like, I'm doing a tutorial. I'm like, I want to skip ahead and see, like, where this is going. And video, I'm like, oh, my God, where's this guy going? And that I find excruciating. But, like, I'm okay to, like, sometimes treat a video as, like, a podcast, right?

ADRIANA: I'll...I won't necessarily look at the video, but I'm interested in just, like, what the audio is. And then when...but then when they have the visual stuff, I'm like, crap.

MARINO: Yeah. It's good, though, that we do the video part, too, because it's just nice to, like, see people in their own element and. And being able to just be expressive about ideas and whatnot. I do Twitter spaces, and I'm sure you've seen a lot of them. And while it is very low pressure and the fact that I don't have to, like, dress up or wear anything, anything at all, it's still, like, you're still engaging, but you don't get to see the other person. Right. And I've also found that when you do live streams or something like this, people feel a little bit more connected to you as well. Get to see your face and hear your voice at the same time. That's why I do live streams.

ADRIANA: Yeah. Yeah, I definitely agree. And, like, we've had. I remember, like, when I used to do On-Call Me Maybe with...with Ana, and it used to be like, we...we only did on the, like, audio only, right? And I vowed, like, next podcast, I'm gonna do audio and video because, like, we had, we had some guests come on with, like, such fun, like, you know, office setups or, like, awesome hair, right? Like, funky hair colors that I'm like, oh, I want people to see this. Or, like, my first season of Geeking Out, Tim Banks came on, and he had, like, a fan that he pulled out a couple of times throughout the episode. I'm like, you just don't get that, you know, cool visual cue when you're just listening to it. So I think it's nice to have the option to do both. And I agree. Just having the visual is very cool.

MARINO: Oh, yeah. I'm totally on board with that.

ADRIANA: Okay, final question is, what is your superpower?

MARINO: Procrastination. It's...as dangerous as it is to say? I think when you're literally down to the last few minutes of anything, your brain rewires itself to ensure that you're successful. I don't know if this is everyone, but I found that the case to be with me in that I could try anything and everything in my power to do my best job a month before something is due, but it won't be anywhere near as good as maybe doing it the day before or the day of. And that's why, like, in a lot of ways, it's bad. It really affects your time management. But I've performed way better when I limitedly prepare myself, and then I just show up as if I'm parachuting out of a helicopter. And I have very limited context. And the reason why that is, is because, I think it...and this is very tied to us being in DevRel as well.

ADRIANA: Yeah.

MARINO: We have this very strong ability to think on our feet in that we can stitch ideas very quickly because there's information that's being processed in real time, just in time to make those decisions quickly enough. But when we have all this data in front of us ahead of time, it just, like, it's noise, right?

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah.

MARINO: And that's why I think, like, procrastination, as bad as a word it is, or it may come across to people, it is a superpower because it's consolidating all of your mental energy into a confined amount of time for you to make the right rapid decisions on the spot. And that's been my superpower for, like, the last probably decade or more. And it's worked out. There have been times where it hasn't worked out. And I think, like, those times, I reflect back on what went wrong or why it went wrong or what could have changed differently. But for the majority of things I've done, yeah, it works.

ADRIANA: That's so great. I love that you called out procrastination as a superpower, because the way you described it is so absolutely perfect. There's nothing more than, like, having the fear of God put into you as you have to, like, meet some deadline. And you're right. Like, for me, some of my best work has been under extreme pressure. I have...I think the first time I noticed that, um, procrastination worked in my favor...I had this boyfriend in university who was a very, very needy boyfriend, and he was, like, always picking fights with me.

I know. Like, and this was in my fourth year university, and it was, like, the least amount of studying that I had done in all my four years of university because this guy was, like, always on my ass, like, complaining about shit. And so I didn't have time to study. So then the little time I had to study, I had to make the most of it. And I'm like, oh, my God, I did the best of all my four years because this guy was, like, being a pain in my ass. And that...that was my kind of, "Aha!" Moment of, like, okay, this...

This is a thing. And I love that you called out procrastination as a superpower because we should look at it that way.

MARINO: It is. It's just your ability to, to really maximize impact and output for a shorter, like, spurt and spa...amount of time. And that, like, that becomes apparent, like, when you're starting to assess projects and your own, like, motivations, your own energy levels. I do best in smaller spurts and smaller, like, sprints than I do, like, over a longer marathon. You will never find me sitting in front of my computer for more than, like, an hour, right? 'Cause I'm just very fidgety. I like to get up.

I like to get around unless I need to be there. And I'm actually engaged. And that's a different thing, too, because I'm engaged, I'm actually doing something. But in the time that I'm meant to be productive, like, literally the magic and sparks and everything just flies, and my brain is rewiring itself to make sure it's all possible. So, you know, for folks that are listening to this later on, right? You may think that procrastination is or potentially might make you believe that you're lazy or you're not able to accomplish something, but it's like that moment where all of that, all of your energy is just harnessed together, right? And it's just like, you just got to execute that time. But it's, folks, you gotta, like, really assess when that is right. And for me, it took me a while to figure out that it's not literally the moment before it's due. It's maybe a few hours or a day before, and that's where I can harness that energy.

ADRIANA: Yeah. And I think the other thing, too, that we don't...we sort of take for granted is the fact that while you're procrastinating, your mind is actually working in the background. So it's not like nothing is happening. So I will...when...when I'm aware enough of it, I will actually say, like, I don't want to deal with this now because I need to let it just percolate in my mind and I'll come back to it later. And I find it makes such a huge difference because, like, there are connections being made that you're not even aware of, and then they suddenly come out when, when, when it's time.

MARINO: I think that's just it, right? Like you just said it, your brain is literally in let's figure this out mode. And when the time is right, which is literally moments before it needs to happen, it's going to happen. And that's, that's the beautiful thing about our brains, like, and how they work. I really wish there's more. There was, like, a lot more information and studies around, you know, the mindset and, you know, the behaviors of folks that procrastinate and what actually drives them to just perform a lot better in those scenarios. Like, I'm literally staring in the face of a presentation I haven't even built yet, and I'm gonna have to figure out how to build it, like, literally for next week.

ADRIANA: That was my KubeCon life. I'm like, oh, my God, I have, like, four weeks to, like, learn about two topics for two talks, and I did not have any more time than that. And it's like this. I have to fit it in this timeframe and learn this stuff, like, mostly from scratch. I had a little bit of background information, but otherwise it was like, you know, hurry, hurry, hurry. Adrenaline just shot way up.

MARINO: I was very happy that this one KubeCon, I didn't really have to stress too much about talks or, like, anything. Not actually. None of my talks got accepted. And while it did suck, it also felt really good that I didn't have that responsibility to actually feel like, oh, my gosh, I have to develop a presentation. Oh, my gosh, I got to do a demo as well.

ADRIANA: Yeah.

MARINO: Is this demo going to work, right?

ADRIANA: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. That's the thing, right? It's like, you have the, yay, my talk got accepted, and then, oh, my God, my talk got accepted. So, yeah. And I think that's really important to underscore too. Like, first of all, getting accepted to KubeCon is really hard. Secondly, it's not the end of the world because if it you takes a lot of pressure off of you, and then you can, like, focus on, you know, just like, doing networking or whatever other KubeCon-y things, which is just as awesome.

MARINO: It is. And by the way, congratulations for getting accepted to KubeCon. I heard it was a fantastic talk that I wasn't able to even, I wasn't even able to get into because it was a lineup out the door, and they cut off access to everyone, and they're like, sorry, not even standing was available. So, yeah, yeah. Bravo, bravo.

ADRIANA: Thank you, thank you. Yeah, it was pretty wild. I did not expect that people would be so jazzed to hear about Prometheus and OpenTelemetry, but I'm glad that they were. So. Yay. Now, speaking of conferences, this is my lovely segue to talk about KubeHuddle, which you're organizing, and I am. I am volunteering for as well, we are.

MARINO: We are co-organizing. We have equal ownership. We have equal responsibilities. Even though...

ADRIANA: There's a lot of freaking work. There's a lot of work. Yeah. Talk about KubeHuddle, because it's happening in May, so. Yeah.

MARINO: So first, I want to just say, like, thank you to all the organizers, whoever listens to this, especially you, Adriana. You put in a lot of work to ensure that we're going to have a successful conference. And this is important because when we're thinking about the right set of speakers, the right audience, the right set of sponsors, it's a lot more like thinking. It's not just about, yeah, we're gonna say yes to everything, or we're gonna say yes to our friends. It's very intentional, especially when it comes to a community based conference. Now, the history of KubeHuddle is interesting because it wasn't something that started off in Toronto. It was something that David Flanagan, aka @rawkode, started in Edinburgh in 2022. So that was the first event I went to.

It spoke there, and I asked him, hey, can we do another one in Toronto? And he said, sure, let's. I'll support it. You know, do whatever you need to. I'll give you all the kind of the framework or the blueprint of how I did it for Edinburgh. So that worked out. Except, look, we're talking about Edinburgh versus Toronto. Two different cities, two different sets of costs. Availability is completely different, and we're talking about a massive, like, scale of a lot of different things.

Anyways, so the planning started, like, probably towards the end of 2022. And, you know, we started the year 2023 with, like, almost nothing. We didn't have a website. We didn't have a CFP opened. We didn't even have our sponsors or anything. So, like, it was just me on Twitter and LinkedIn, just saying a bunch of stuff about KubeHuddle, right? Yeah, we're going to run KubeHuddle. It's going to happen. And then I'd get DMs being like, is there a website? Why does the website show Edinburgh? And I'm like, we'll get to that.

So it was very slow going, and eventually things started to pick up. And I noticed around the mid-March, early April timeframe, when we had a lot of things already locked in. We already had a CFP closed, and everything was mostly sorted. It was really just getting the logistics locked down. Long story short, the event, you know, came by. It was a two day event. It was great. We had a lot of people.

You even spoke at that event as well. So it was great to have you there. And we had a nice intimate conference. There was about 170 folks that showed up and it taught me a lot about, you know, how to handle this for the next time around in the sense that one don't use so many remote organizers because they have no idea around the logistics of being in Toronto, right? It's so vastly different. I was probably the only organizer that was Toronto based and being the only person to do all the research and try and find everything was not fun. I had my partner help out here and there and thank you for her.

Thanks so much. Literally, if she's ever listening to this podcast, she probably will. Thank you, Anu. I appreciate you and I love you. But having said that, like, it all came together and it was a great event. But then I got asked, like, is there going to be another KubeHuddle? And I wasn't very, like, originally keen on the idea and it was because it was a lot of work the first time around and it was a lot of waiting and bottlenecking. And quite honestly, you know, having to be bottlenecked by so many different processes, even me becoming the bottleneck at times was not efficient at all, and it made for a very stressful experience. Now you take all of those learnings and you begin to realize that you could make this a lot more optimized.

You can streamline this process. You already have structure in place to make this happen again. Here's how you can start to do it differently. You know, work with some folks in the community that are local first. So that's one of the reasons why you're here, because you understand Toronto and you understand this community really well, and then also work with, with others, too, that know this, this space. We had some folks that entered the team and it was okay. Like, quite honestly, when I think about it, it all works out at the end of the day. But it also made me realize, like, next year, if I decide to do it again, you know, really shore up on who's going to be local.

Like, we want to make sure that there are much more local folks that are part of the organizing team, that embody the idea of what it means to be in Toronto as well, right? What it means to be Canadian. And really think about that lens as well, because I don't want it to be overly global centric. I also don't want it to be overly North American centric. Let's make it Canadian centric. There's plenty of other stuff going on outside of Canada. We kind of need our own thing, and we want to make it our own thing. But having said that, you know, the planning for this one is, like, many, many miles or kilometers ahead of what we were doing last year.

And it's because, like, everyone understands their role, what they need to do. The messaging is clear. And, like, Adriana, you could literally tell me, this is your podcast. You could tell me what we could do to even improve, because we've still got, like, a month left, and there's things we have to do, right?

ADRIANA: Yeah.

MARINO: And I think it's coming together. I personally think that we're a lot more ahead than we were last year, which makes me feel a lot better about things. But with the. With the last four or five weeks that we have before the event, what else should we be doing to make this a really good event?

ADRIANA: I think just doubling down on the...on the promos, I think, is the main thing. And I think, like, this year compared to last year, like, there is so much activity, so much activity on the socials for the promos, and I love that that's going on, but I think we can get more done. And, I mean, you know, one of the reasons why I invited you to come on the podcast, not only because you're awesome, but also I wanted um...give, like, an opportunity to, like, let's promote KubeHuddle. It's what, like, almost a little over a month away. Right? It's May 7, I want to say?

MARINO: May 7. May 7. That's right.

ADRIANA: Yeah. So it's. It's coming. It's coming our way very close, very fast.

MARINO: It is coming up really quickly. But, you know, for folks that are listening into this and are thinking about attending, right? I'll give you a little bit of a rundown of what's going to happen. So it's a two track event. It's single day. It's happening at the Toronto Public Library or the Toronto reference Library by Yonge & Bloor, right?

ADRIANA: Yeah.

MARINO: So if you're in Toronto, it's very TTC accessible. Literally just you walk outside of the station and it's like, right there. And if you're not. If you're coming from far, then, you know, make your way to Union and then take the train down, or up, I should say. And then, you know, come in and join in for a day of workshops and excellent talks, as well as lightning talks around Observability, Kubernetes, cloud optimization, security, even. And even hear from, like, end users who are using the ecosystem in production and some of their own stories. And challenges. I think that's important because we do have a lot of great speakers that do the speaking rounds quite often, but we also have people that build the technologies.

We also have people that implement and use the technologies and deal with the challenges of them as well. And it's important to see their perspectives, what they have to offer, as well as, you know, getting the opportunity to just chat with them and connect with them and growing your own network. You might be in the position where you're looking for your next opportunity, even. And this is a great place to come and meet some of those vendors, some of our sponsors, even, who...who might be hiring. There might even be folks that are just attending that are looking for their next peer or coworker, right? So it's great place to connect. It's not an in your face conference.

We're not a KubeCon. We're not...we're not an All Things Open. We're not an OSSummit. We're a Kub huddle. We're about 200 ish, maybe 300 if we're lucky. But we're small enough that you could have conversations with people, and that's important, right? We don't. I honestly don't like massive conferences as much anymore because you don't have the ability to really talk to people.

You have to talk over noise. You have to talk over other people. You have to talk over the music. You lose your voice. You have to deal with air conditioning and how it, like, dehumidifies the entire environment. So your mouth gets really dry. And, yeah, it's just not a very pleasant environment. Whereas you have smaller conferences...There's a lot that can happen.

ADRIANA: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's one thing that I really liked about KubeHuddle. Like, I found out about KubeHuddle because I think last year, Matty Stratton had posted something like, I'm speaking at KubeHuddle in Toronto. I'm like, there's a conference in Toronto? So then I started peeking around. I went on the DevRel slack, the avocado one, and I'm like, what's this KubeHuddle thing? Is this a legit conference? And so I was like, okay, this sounds pretty cool. And I applied to speak, and I had, like, zero...zero expectations. Like, I didn't know what to...what to expect. And it was my first year as a DevRel as well. So I'd seen the KubeCons. I'd seen the Open Source Summits. And then. So I'm like, I don't know what's, like, normal for a conference, right? Because they're vastly, vastly different experience. But this one, like, really blew my mind. I thought it was, like, so nice and cozy, and I. I got to meet a lot of really cool people from it, and I. I'm shocked that, like, you and I both, you know, live in the Toronto area and our paths have never crossed until now. But I'm very glad that our paths did cross last year, because it's been awesome. I've met so many cool people just...Just from KubeHuddle, and they're not even all from Toronto.

MARINO: Right. It's phenomenal. Like, you know, it just takes an event or something of that equivalency for you to just be opened up to this brand new world of folks that, you know, you can interact with, collaborate with, and just network with for the future. And that's why I love events. Like, I've always loved events just for that one little thing. Right. Yeah. There's all these great talks. You can always catch the recordings, but you'll never get the opportunity to do the hallway track all the time, right? You'll never get that opportunity again for that point in time conference, because something magical is going to happen. I remember that one time at civil navigate. This was, like, last October, I think, in London, and Kelsey Hightower actually came into keynote, and he's been a guest on your podcast, right? But he has a very type, very interesting charisma about him that, you know, it only takes. You know, what I'm really going for is, like, he had this little group outside the venue.

It was a little circle, and I would. I was walking back and forth throughout the venue because I was just trying to get some stuff done, and every time I came back to the circle, it would just get bigger and bigger and bigger. And we're not talking over, like, a course of, like, an hour. We're talking over a course of, like, 20 minutes, because I was just moving around, and that same circle just kept growing for a good several hours. Like, it just didn't let up at all. And I think, like, towards the end of the day is when it finally started to, like, collapse, because we had to go back into the venue for, like, the final, like, closing keynote or something like that. It was phenomenal to see these side hallway track conversations go on, and it's not centered around Kelsey. Kelsey is just the recurring character in a lot of these conferences, but the fact that he brings those people together to have these very diverse, fluid conversations amongst each other, not just directed towards him, but amongst each other.

And he also sits there and listens. The fact that he has that kind of power means that, like, we should be doing this, too. Like, we should be going out to other places and bringing those folks together and connecting and networking and, you know, creating a sense of inclusiveness, because that's what he does. And that's what I think a lot of folks like, even you, too, and people others embody, especially when it comes to our little, you know, our little community here.

ADRIANA: Yeah, absolutely. I love that. I love that. I know, like, we're, we've got not too much longer left in our conversation. You have a hard stop. So I do want to switch gears for a sec and ask you, you know, like, we were talking earlier before we started recording about spicy takes. So, I mean, I am happy to have any spicy takes on the podcast. Is there anything that's happening right now that's kind of like really grinding your gears or whatever that you're feeling super passionate about?

MARINO: Yeah, there's two things right now. So I'll start with the whole career and DevRel and contraction. And there's a lot of stuff going on in the DevRel space where there's much more demand for the time we spend out there in the community, for the time we get out to the conferences, right? So I know you do this very well. So I don't think this, this advice is applicable to you, but I think other folks that are either getting into DevRel or looking at this industry really need to take a hard look at, you know, how they can quantify and even, like, capture it as data around what they do and the kind of impact what they do drives. And I say this because what a lot of companies want, even though they won't say it, is they want tech marketing. What they also want is they want to see some of what your efforts do translate into revenue.

And that sucks because there's no, like, there's no quota. There's no, like, you're here to make a sale. You're dealing with, you're working with a community and dealing with something called top of funnel, which in actuality is not your responsibility to close on. There's a sales team that has to go and execute. And if they're not executing, why is it DevRel's fault? It's not. Yeah. So I've always felt like DevRel always leads the charge in a variety of different directions. They are most connected internally as well as externally because they're connected to all the different organizations within a company, but they're also tapped into so many communities.

And so to be that conduit that can see both sides of the conversation and the coin and to be able to take feedback both ways is such a powerful thing to have. But a lot of organizations and leadership teams and executives don't even know how to harness that kind of power. And that sucks. That's on their end. That's their loss. And, you know, screw them, because at the end of the day, they have the best assets on hand, the best resources to go and close the largest deals, even though you don't have to put them in front of, you know, an exec to close that deal. You literally let them need to do their thing, be the voice of the company and holy shit, the magic will flow. And it's a simple recipe where, you know, it's really hard for a lot of board members to just part with money, right?

To see an investment kind of do its thing and like, see like it's not, not returning or doing its ROI. But if you play that long term game, right, if you decide you're just going to hold on a little bit longer, it's going to cash out hard and heavy and really good and really well. And the instant gratification is what's killing the DevRel dream.

ADRIANA: Yeah, I feel, yeah, I feel ya. And you know, on a similar DevRel gripe, organizations that tend to align DevRel with marketing, I think end up positioning DevRel for failure because then it's like, oh, you have to churn out like x number of tutorials or blog posts or blah, blah, blah. And so all of a sudden you don't have that organic interaction of DevRel, right? It becomes a lot more forced and I take huge issue with that. And I'm grateful that where I'm at right now, like there isn't, like we're not aligned with marketing because I think it would be a very different story right now.

MARINO: Yeah, I do think it's great to support other organizations or other teams in the organization and other, you know, functions like marketing and, and make sure that the efforts that DevRel does has some sort of common vision. Right?

ADRIANA: Yeah.

MARINO: But it shouldn't be at the tune of marketing. Marketing shouldn't be driving the direction of what developer relations or advocacy should be doing two different work streams altogether. But that's kind of led to something else that's gone on that actually leads me to my second hot take. There's been a lot of efforts around community. Community...and then you also see the side of where some open source projects are closing up shop or becoming a lot more enterprise and are locking down their open source offerings or changing up their licenses. And there is backlash. There's a lot of backlash around it.

You see people being very upset about the open source contributions that have gone on and no one got compensated for it. And then you have these big corpos running off with all of these, all of this IP effectively and basically capitalizing. Right? But the...the one thing that was really interesting in all of this, right, you know, there's always the distraction and then there's the subtle nefarious thing going on behind the scenes. I'm paying attention to what's going on behind the scenes. And there, there are some interesting companies. I'm not going to name them because at the same time I also don't want to deal with anything legal. I'm not in the position to handle that right now. But there are some companies that are creating an approach that seems good, that seems like it's solving a variety of problems, but are also creating the, okay, I'm going to describe the diagram where you have that little dependency that if that dependency breaks, everything breaks. You know what I'm talking about, right?

ADRIANA: Yeah.

MARINO: That is what these companies are trying to become. And you may think that, or people listening might think, what the fuck is Marino talking about? Here's an example. If I build something that offers zero CVEs, I'm being a little bit more specific now, but if I offer something that builds zero CVEs into an image, which means you don't have to think. Think about common vulnerabilities and exposures or anything like that. You don't have to think about that. You just deploy your images, you're good to go. If you decide to use an ecosystem product, something in the CNCF that I've built an image for that produces zero CVEs, what happens when support is required, right? What happens when additional features need to be built? So where I'm going with this is building something very proprietary that now forces the hand of other vendors to pay up in addition to customers. And that's the nefarious thing that's going on that we're being distracted by with all this, you know, open source community kumbaya and all that stuff like that.

And I say this because if you pay attention on Twitter, there's some interesting characters that are dropping some, some interesting takes out there. That's all I have to say about it. But all I'm saying is pay attention to open source, pay attention to cloud native, and read between the lines because there's something else going on and it's not the whole people are locking down their licenses and we're seeing the change in the way licenses are structured for the sake of business. That's not the big problem. There's something else.

ADRIANA: Right, right. Yeah. Thanks for that. And all this to say, too, that anyone who didn't think that tech conversations were still happening on Twitter, they very much are. Yeah, well, awesome. I think we're coming up on time, so thank you so much, Marino, for geeking out with me today. Y'all don't forget to subscribe and be sure to check the show notes for additional resources and to connect with us and our guests on social media.

ADRIANA: Until next time...

MARINO: Until next time. Peace out and geek out, y'all.

ADRIANA: Geeking Out is hosted and produced by me, Adriana Villela. I also compose and perform the theme music on my trusty clarinet. Geeking out is also produced by my daughter, Hannah Maxwell, who incidentally, designed all of the cool graphics. Be sure to follow us on all the socials by going to bento.me/geekingout.