What's New in 2019
I wanted to blog quickly about what I’ve been up to lately, because 2018 was crazy (so I want to look back a little) and there’s stuff to look forward to in 2019. Yes I know it’s April, it’s taken a bit to figure it out which is understandable if you read on.
The year 2018 could best be described as “the year of the acquisition”. Normally in a regular tech career, people don’t go through a single acquisition, much less two, but that’s what 2018 was. I was at CoreOS when it was acquired by Red Hat and late in the year I was with Heptio when it was acquired by VMware. It gets a little crazy when you realize that also late in the year Red Hat was bought by IBM. It was busy, and my tax accountant may file an extension to make more sense of all the W2s I have from companies that no longer technically exist. The picture above is from a tweet I sent in November saying my Halloween costume next year is set as a “Kubernetes Acquisition”. This also means all my CorpSwag is now “vintage”.
For both Heptio and CoreOS I got to work directly with highly technical teams at companies you’ve definitely heard of and help launch Kubernetes inside these giant organizations. While I can’t share stuff publicly like “that thing? I helped the team behind that thing! It runs on Kubernetes!” it’s definitely a point of personal pride to KNOW I had a hand in it. For more on what I did day-to-day in 2018, check out this blog post I wrote for Heptio’s blog.
Since the Heptio acquisition closed we’ve had to figure out where and how we all fit and get it all together. But… here… we… go!
“So… what now?”
With the Heptio acquisition, I’m now at VMware. That means a lot of different things, but our team’s mission is slightly changing. When you’re at a 100-person startup vs. a tens of thousands person enterprise, the scale shifts. So while my job is still to drive adoption of Kubernetes, a lot of that will shift from 100% direct customer work to enabling fleets of people to help customers and/or adopt Kubernetes themeselves. My focus has to shift from one-to-one to one-to-many. More to come on that front but you’ll probably find me more at local VMUGs, meetups, at conferences (I just spoke at InnoTech San Antonio on Kubernetes Security), on podcasts, and elsewhere both online and offline trying to help where I can. It’s going to be a healthy mix of both external advocacy and internal advocacy in addition to customer work. VMware is very large, and there’s a lot of work to do!
Speaking of Podcasts: SATechCast
In my last post, I shared the following:
This year, I’ll be working with a few friends on starting a podcast/stream on technology and working in technology in San Antonio. My employer has been wildly successful in building community with their YouTube channel, which I hope we can replicate a little with this project (we’ll record live, and publish the audio as a podcast). This will work as we all travel for work here and there, I don’t have to chase speakers (but I’m open to guests, especially first-timers!), and hopefully I can continue to put my mark on San Antonio’s tech community in my own way. Stay tuned for more info on the launch!
Well, guess what… we’ve launched! At the time of this post we have four episodes with a fifth recorded of the SATechCast. We’re not quite ready to do YouTube Live, but you can listen to episodes at http://satechcast.com or from there find us in Apple Podcasts or wherever fine podcasts are sold.