I've been giving talks at meetups and conferences for a few years now. I started off after the encouragement of my friends giving their own talk and looking so cool doing it! It's taken a while but I think I'm at a stage now where I'm not only good at it (at least I hope so 😅) but I feel confident and comfortable while doing it. I want everyone to have that same confidence and I want to hear ALL OF YOU giving talks too! You have stories to tell, lessons to share and experience to pass on. So here is my learnings on how I approach giving a talk in front of a crowd of techies, mainly focussed on technical talks but most of this should apply to most public speaking.
I run several bots that post to social media and the number seems to keep growing. I've had a few people in the past ask me how I run them so I thought I'd finally get around to writing down how I manage it by leveraging Node-RED.
I have a habit of automating as much of my life as I can. As part of that I have some small automations that handle posting to social media automatically when I publish a new blog post. (More on this in a future post). In the past this was Twitter but that is dead so these days I post to my Mastodon and Bluesky accounts automatically whenever a new blog post is available on my website. Maybe that's how you ended up here today! One platform I had been avoiding for a long time was LinkedIn. I had the impression that they didn't have a free, personal API available for users to use to post status updates. Well, turns out I was mistaken and it's actually not too difficult to setup, there's just a LOT of outdated information out there. So lets fix this...
Last week I announced the launch of a new project I've been working on - Cloud Native Now - a new monthly newsletter that will provide a roundup of all the happenings in the cloud native world. This newsletter is my attempt at keeping myself, and others, up-to-date on all the latest news, tools and events happening in the cloud native world. A new issue will be published each month on the last Friday of that month and contain a roundup of articles, announcements, tools, tutorials, events and CFPs relating to cloud native technologies and the community.
As part of a side project I'm currently working on I needed to spin up a new Kubernetes cluster that I could manage via GitOps. I decided to take this opportunity to take a look at OpenTofu and see how it handles as it's been several years now since I last used Terraform. My plan was to use OpenTofu to scaffold a fairly basic Civo Kubernetes cluster and then use Flux to handle installing workloads into the cluster. It took me a little trial-and-error so I thought I'd write up my final setup to help others avoid the issues and to help my future self when I come to do this again in a couple years!
