Guest post by Ricardo Aravena
Hello everyone! I’m excited to write this post about my experience at the Kubernetes Forum Seoul and Sydney 2019. My journey started in San Francisco on Friday evening, December 6th, 2019, on a flight to Seoul.
I arrived in Seoul on Sunday, December 8th, in the morning and had plenty of time during the day to rest in the hotel at the venue, The Seoul Dragon City. As speakers, we were invited along with the organizers and community leaders to an event dinner in the Goguryeo room. During that time, we had a great start networking with fellow industry leaders with an opportunity to connect. In my opinion, the number of people was just right to talk to most of the guests at dinner.
The next day started with breakfast and plenty of opportunities to continue to connect with local and international attendees. Then we got off with four very insightful main keynotes. Interestingly, the event had talks in Korean and English and both cases were being translated in real-time on screens under the main presentation panels.
Next, @lumjjb and I gave our talk to a full room of people in the beginner track.
Then a series of beginner and advanced talks throughout the day followed by two main keynotes. The close of the day was a happy hour, where we got to network with local and international speakers again. It was a lot of fun gathering around to share our first computers and favorite programming languages. Overall, a great day in Seoul. You can find the talk recordings and event pictures here.
The following day included Korean food, a rendezvous with the SysCall button at the table, and an overnight flight to Sydney (together with some of the international speakers). Ironically, syscall also refers to Linux system calls as in here.
I arrived in Sydney on Wednesday, December 11th, in the morning, which allowed me to get a good rest during the day. Later in the evening, we had the Sydney speakers, organizers and community leaders dinner where we met local folks together with the international speakers. The dinner event happened at the Waterview, and we had a great time geeking out and talking about our jobs and different interests with Kubernetes and the cloud-native community.
The next day I was in the Sydney venue with some new speakers, some speakers from Seoul and local attendees, overall a great mix of new talks and the ability for the Seoul speakers to experience the talks they didn’t get a chance to attend previously. In this venue, our talk was in the afternoon.
The highlight was the farewell dinner with a similar group from all the previous dinner. Afterward, some of us decided to take a relaxing boat ride from the Sydney Harbour to Manly Beach
The Sydney talk recordings and event pictures are here.
I spent my last day chilling, enjoying the weather, having fun street walking Sydney and having some drinks 🙂
Finally, my flight back home to SF, and I felt I was ready for Christmas!
Thanks to the CNCF, the attendees, and the speakers to make both of the events happen. Not to mention all the community members I met (Sorry if I missed anyone): @birdsaiview @lumjjb @drnic @youngnick @lizrice @hippiehacker @oicheryl @ATechGirl @estesp @k_gamanji @dankohn1 @yaempiricist @IanMLewis @mattfarina @kamcmahon @consindo @Outlaw11A_
I’m thrilled about the upcoming events from the CNCF, such as the future Kubernetes Forums and Kubernetes Community Days. I’m also excited about the KubeCon/CloudNativeCon conferences, but I believe every event has a different place in the community. The smaller Forum and Days, in my opinion, are more general events where you may have an opportunity to have a more personal connection with the speakers, organizers, and attendees. Larger events like KubeCon/CloudNativeCon target a wider variety of different skill levels, allowing an understanding of the full breadth of the cloud-native open-source ecosystem, technologies, vendors and end-users. I hope I get to attend and speak at several of them in the future!