Pardon me, as I'm practically a celebrity now. I started off as a junior (going on mid) level engineer turned blogger, that wants to educate and empower people who look like me, and now I got retweeted by the CNCF. So yea, I basically made it.
But seriously, that was a HUGE honor. Wow, I walked away to see that and had my mind blown. KubeCon is (by far) my favorite tech conference for a reason, and I know it's alot of people's as well. So, sadly it went by too fast, and wrapped up in Salt Lake City, where 737,000 square feet of space was dedicated to people arguing about the proper way to configure their ingress controllers. And trust me, that's a positive. Almost brings a tear to my eye.
But hol up – let's talk about what actually matters here: CNCF partnering with Andela to train 20,000-30,000 African developers? Now THAT'S what I'm talking about! Some real investment in global talent! I have friends in Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa that will be overly excited to hear about this.
Of course, we got three new certifications dropped on us – Backstage, OpenTelemetry, and Kyverno. They also announced two new Certified Cloud Native Platform Associate and Certified Cloud Native Platform Engineer, the first being a multiple choice, and the latter being hands on. They will literally be the first to the market to certify the set of skills of a platform engineer in full. And you know what? I don't care what the "You don't need certifications because they are worthless" crowd says, these certs matter. This isn't the early 2000s or the 90s. Computer Science degrees are a tick on the checklist, and the degree programs are more than often behind on what is being taught in the curriculum. Try debugging a distributed tracing nightmare without proper observability knowledge, and validation, BRO. It's impossible getting an interview by saying "TRUST ME BRO" on a resume. With that being said....I'm gonna try the Backstage one out. I have built Backstage twice in two different methods, so let's go.
As far as the 2025 calendar, it's looking real spicy – London, Hong Kong, Tokyo (first time!), Hyderabad, and Atlanta. Remember when we used to think San Francisco was the center of the tech universe? CNCF is changing things again.
From what i gathered they're scaling down KubeDays in favor of more community-led Kubernetes Community Days, which is exactly what we need. More actual engineers sharing actual solutions. As someone who attends local KCDs, this is good news to me.
Now, as to the sessions I attended, The Value of Higher Ed & the Linux Foundation Together: I personally don’t want Universities to gatekeep cloud native careers, and cause a shift in recruiter behavior, as we are one of the few places where a self taught CKA can have a career without a degree, so I attended this one with trepidation, yet academic collaboration in the curriculum is always welcome to improve its quality. But the ClashLoopBackOff competition? Pure entertainment gold. Nothing like watching someone debug a misconfigured StatefulSet while sweating bullets, amirite? Though I've been there at 11 PM, it's significantly less amusing when it's your cluster.
The peer mentoring session actually turned out to be legit useful, which is more than I can say for most "networking opportunities" that usually just turn into vendor pitch festivals (I'm not naming OTHER vendor conferences).
Look, between the Africa initiative, the new global venues, and the community focus, CNCF might actually be walking the walk on inclusion and accessibility. And for once, I'm being serious about that. This is directly in line with my mission statement:
Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go update my study notes and argue about prometheus exporters on Reddit. But before that, the last shot of JOBS:
Here's to another one next year. I doubt I'll make it to London. Unless I get my passport, and business is good. We'll see!
