A Conference Story

Arvind is attending KubeCon for the first time. He’s on his own.

Arvind: Wow, this is all so grand! Let’s find a place to sit and enjoy the day and find new friends maybe!

Arvind finds his place. He finds himself surrounded by a lot of people.

There’s a constant buzz around him. People talking about life and work.

The Conference starts with the keynote and the talks follow.

After some talks, it’s break time. Arvind is all by himself, getting food. He’s introverted and not sure how to start a conversation. But he does want to network with people, as it started to feel very lonely and boring. He then finally musters up some courage and overcomes the social anxiety, and starts a conversation with two women who are standing close by.

“Hi, I’m Arvind”

“Hi! I’m Veena”

“Hello, I’m Sarah”

Arvind: So, how’s the conference going on for you folks?

Veena: Pretty good! It’s good to see the community growing. I’m also finding new friends! I just met Sarah!

Sarah: Yes! I’m also excited to meet new people. And I’m looking forward to talk to all the speakers in person! At least most of them if not all

Veena: Me too! What about you? What do you think about the conference?

Arvind: It’s my first time here. I’ve just started talking to folks, starting with you two. It looks pretty grand. It must have taken a lot of work to organize this event.

Sarah: Tell me about it. I’m part of the organizing team, and it’s a lot of work. Not easy to organize an event for so many people and the crowd is very very diverse in so many ways. Speaking of organizing, I just recalled I gotta take care of a small thing. Excuse me, I gotta go. Enjoy the day! Let’s may be meet in the next break!

Veena: Sure!

Arvind: See you later!

Arvind: So, how do you use Kubernetes?

Veena: The usual story. We have microservices. Hundreds of them. Initially we deployed each instance of a microservice to a VM. And had HA proxy loadbalancers in VMs. That was a lot of VMs. Now it’s all pods, and the cost has reduced quite a lot. And we don’t go and manually restart services in VMs by sshing into the machines. Kubernetes just restarts it automatically with liveness probe. We are also able to scale easily now. Next we are planning to have automatic scaling based on number of requests, which is in the works

Arvind: So, you are part of an infra team?

Veena: Yes. Our goal is to make it easy for developers to easily deploy and manage their apps on any infrastructure.

Arvind: Nice

Veena: How do you use Kubernetes?

Arvind: I just joined an infra team, which has similar goals like your team’s. We are still in the middle of our migration to Kubernetes. Some of them are still are VMs

Veena: Ah, okay

Arvind: Apart from that I have also been checking out how to contribute to Open Source projects. Kubernetes project being on them. I have started doing small PRs for documentation for Kubernetes

Veena: That’s cool!

Arvind: Hehe. What do you think about Open Source? Do you contribute to it?

Veena: I think Open Source is the future. And yes, I contribute to it sometimes. So, how did you get started contributing?

Arvind: I actually got inspired by this person on the Internet named ‘i m not a bot’. More like a single word imnotabot and not a sentence. They too tell the same thing, that Open Source is the future, in their blog. I’m actually here to see their first talk. I will get to see them in person. I have never seen them anywhere online. No pics anywhere on their blog or twitter. Not even in KubeCon site, and even speaker name on KubeCon site is imnotabot. They are very anonymous. Anyways, may be I’ll meet them and tell that they are one my inspirations

Veena: Oh. Looks like you really want to meet them

Arvind: Yes!

Veena: So, how do they inspire you?

Arvind: Well, when I was new to Open Source. I read their blog posts about Open Source and got inspired by it. I learned how to contribute to Open Source from it and started with that. Then I saw them contributing to Kubernetes. And I was going to move to a team doing Kubernetes. So I thought I could check it out and contribute. So I started following them on GitHub and started checking all their contributions. Now I’m learning from their Pull Requests, while raising documentation Pull Requests and checking out issues

Veena: Wow, you seem pretty inspired!

Arvind: Haha, yeah

Veena: Okay, I gotta go now and take care of something. May be meet you later?

Arvind: Sure. And do checkout imnotabot’s talk if you are around. It will start after the break

Veena: Sure thing! See ya!

The break is over. MC comes to stage

MC: How’s your energy after the break y’all? Can you show it to me with a loud roar? yes? Rooooooar!

Crowd: ruuuur.

MC: Rur? And that too so low noise? Come on y’all, I expect it to be more! I thought food gives you energy, come on!

Crowd: Rooooooarrrrr!

MC: That’s what I’m talking about! Now, next up is our mysterious speaker. They asked to put their name in the site and schedule as imnotabot. They like to keep it anonymous and interesting. They are also famous in the community, known by the same name. They are here to tell their journey about how they migrated from one cloud service provider to another. Let’s welome Veena, also known as imnotabot, with big round of applause!

Arvind: What? Veena? Woah.

Veena gets on stage. And the talk starts

“Hello folks! I’m Veena, and I’m going to share a journey with you.”

The talk goes on and Arvind is dumbstruck, and listening to the awesome talk.

The talk finishes. Arvind finally gets to meet Veena again

Arvind: Hey! That was a great talk! Why didn’t you say anything before?

Veena: Well, I like giving surprises. And I like to be anonymous, remember?

Arvind: Of course! Autograh please? Picture?

Veena: Seriously? Haha. Autograh may be. No pictures. You know right.

THE END