Less than a year ago I attended my first Kubernetes Community Day ever, in Amsterdam and I would never have guessed that some months later I would have started contributing as organizer of KCD Utrecht 2023.
What is this KCD?
What will probably be the KCD logo for 2024 and on
Quoting CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation)
“KCDs are community-organized events that gather adopters and technologists from open source and cloud native communities for education, collaboration, and networking.”
We are missing a big point here: FUN!
Let me explain why.
The start
I always loved communities. I used to be part of multiple online forums when I was a teenager, mostly about videogames or music.
When I started working in the IT industry, mostly as consultant in a body-rental / body-shop fashion, I didn’t like anything revolving around IT, at all.
After my — long — working hours I (almost) never wrote a single line of open-source code, went to a meetup, answered to questions on Stack Overflow, joined a Slack channel... Let alone organizing an event.
So, how did I start enjoying the community side?
As Sarah Gruneisen said during her wonderful opening keynote: I stopped compromising on my values.
This is part of the beautiful Cloud Native Dutch community, gathered to listen to Sarah’s keynote.
Since I started freelancing, almost 3 years ago now, I opened myself up to my LinkedIn network, travelled and visited beautiful countries, contributed to open source software, attended meetups and conferences, shared my startup work… In short?
I dove right back into the community side of IT.
Welp this is me now :D
Still a long way to go but I find it to be a good starting point!
Back to the story, I met part of the people organizing KCD between a series of DevOps and Cloud Native meetups in October ’22 and at the end of February 2023, during the actual KCD event in Amsterdam.
I bonded particularly fast with Alessandro Vozza, William Rizzo and Andrea Giardini, my beloved cloud native italians 🇮🇹
I started to attend more and more events to see these and get to know people around, to share ideas and to discuss over tech (but not only).
As some of you may know, my previous startup adventure ended in an unexpected layoff and I was hit, kinda hard.
I have been holding up fine since then, but I still had to find a new purpose and the community came to my aid immediately.
Every single person in those meetups cared about my job hunt and helped me in countless ways, I can never be thankful enough for this.
On top of all the help, after one of the meetups the community organizes, Alessandro asked me to join the organizing committee for KCD Utrecht this year and I could never say no to a community call at that point, so I gladly accepted.
I take everything as a challenge and I accept them, even if I am not sure I will succeed, because I believe in “fail fast” and other principles, usually applied in software engineering, to be also fairly good for real life.
From chaos to matter
When I joined I realized that we needed to organize everything in just 2 months and that felt quite overwhelming at the time and it was, until the very end!
You know what? I enjoyed every second of it.
Of course we had some more tense moments, especially because most of us were both organizing and juggling between our daily jobs, interviews, kids, partners and well, life.
Misunderstandings can happen but we overcame them in the best way possible:
Over dinner!
Selecting a venue, sizing the catering in advance, contacting companies and organizing sponsorships, signing contracts, sending invoices, reviewing and accepting CFPs, figuring out backups, building and updating a website, create social media campaigns, printing and delivering stickers to meetups, organizing dinners and calls, handle track changes, coordinating volunteers, craft badges, set up video and audio equipment and boom.
It’s showtime.
Me and my dear friend Carlos at 8:18 AM, awake since 6:something :D
In medias res
I volunteered to be the second track MC for the morning shift.
I was kinda scared about it since I’m not a big time public speaker and when organizing events I tend to stay in the backstage, orchestrating lots of the more “technical” side, but this time I was trusted with a mic (not to sing unfortunately) and a tight schedule to adhere to.
In the end I was so lucky, all of my wonderful speakers did such a good job by themselves.
They never went overtime, had no issue when switching laptops and I ended up just introducing them shortly to leave room for their amazing show!
They really shined and shared such powerful and interesting talks, you could feel the passion and the effort they have put into those.
We learnt about Multi-Cloud with Nico Krijnen, what the Dutch Tax Office is doing for Platform Engineering and Open Source with Jan Willem van Hermon and Sebastiaan Mannem, how to use the CLI with Erwin de Keijzer, Postgres in Kubernetes with Maxim Burgerhout, migrating k8s with ease thanks to Raja and Soumyadipta, how to leverage IDPs by Kasra Amirsarvari and then my favorite: lightning talks!
Marco Verleun shared quick tips to get rid of CVEs, Louëlla Creemers explained Docker and Kubernetes how we needed to hear when we first started, Serdar Kalaycı brought the 12 factor apps in Kubernetes and Jan Karremans convinced us to (maybe) use databases in k8s.
Oh, and the crowd.
What a brilliant bunch of techies crowding the event!
They asked a ton of questions — sorry I had to interrupt some of these Q&A sessions but the schedule must be followed 👀
During the afternoon I handed the mic to Luca and I started chasing speakers around to check they were ready on stage during the afternoon.
Of course these kind of events, as an organizer, you end up doing a bit of everything, to ensure that everything runs smoothly and it is tiring but so much fun.
I can’t wait to see the videos from track one too!
Andrea and Shweta talking about Service Meshes, in room 1, how cool!
Weeks of effort flew by in just a couple of hours, it was super fast and now… Closing keynote already!
Sevi shared a part of her personal journey with us, both on stage during this wonderful keynote and off stage as organizer of the event.
I found my journey a bit similar to Sevi’s, at least for the part where the community helped and supported me through hard times, asking nothing in return and giving me the world.
We can do so much with our small acts, being kind to each other and being true to ourselves, to our values.
(not) the end.
Time to wipe our tears of joy, clean up and then drinks!
Afterdrinks with a mix of speakers, sponsors, attendees and organizers :P
Thanks to our wonderful speakers (+ Erwin and Soumyadipta that substituted last minute, unsung heroes!) we missed Giuseppe and Nirav but we’ll se them next time for sure.
Thanks to all the sponsors and people at the booth, the venue staff, the over 400 attendees and last but not least: thanks to this dream time over here.
This is us! — source: https://twitter.com/cloudnativeams/status/1730623348529402014/photo/1
From left to right:
Catalin, William, Saif, Pablo, Sevi, Luca, Marcel, _me_, Carlos, Pavel, Rajesh, Alessandro, Jos (our star from the organizing committee of DevOpsDays), Serkan.
We missed Fahd, Meg and Karla a lot and even if they could not be there with us they worked so hard to make this happen.
A special thanks to Erycka and Natasha for helping out at the registration desk, social media and more!
To Andrea for joining us for the community panel and for involving me in the Cloud Native meetup community, back in October 2022.
To Robin and Ninette for professional pictures (coming soon).
To Salomao also known as “the best audio/video technician ever”.
To Mickey for the design of our logo.
Last but not least: to every single attendee, of course!
The coolest thing about these events is that we come together with all our different backgrounds, cultures, job titles, interests and peculiarities and we build something for our community, we give back, we share and we care.
If you wanna join us, feel free to hop on the CNCF Slack and hit me up, I can help you find your local chapter so you can help organizing events like KCD Utrecht in your city/region/country! ❤
What a ride!
This was my last event/meetup for the year and I’m so energized by the outcome.
Well, I’m energized for next year, now let me sleep for a whole week 😴
Reminder that to go to Paris for KubeCon EU 2024, we are organizing Kubetrain with support from members of the CNCF TAG Sustainability, departure from Amsterdam the 18th of March, passing by Rotterdam, Antwerp and Brussels.
We need sponsors and most importantly we need people interested in travelling sustainably to KubeCon while also having lots of fun!
See you in 2024, full steam ahead! 🚂
Find all my links 👉 here.
That’s all for now, ciao :)
Originally published on blog.mb-consulting.dev.