During KubeCon week last week I wrote and published four blog posts. If you count this one, written and published on the following Monday, I’ve published five blog posts in seven days (Tuesday through Monday). Now, while there’s nothing particularly impressive about that (none of the posts are particularly long, and none are particularly in-depth), for me, it’s a huge accomplishment.
As I mentioned in my first post last week, I’ve been fighting writer’s block for months. Or rather, while I’ve been writing (some), I’ve been fighting “publisher’s block” - clicking “publish” on an email newsletter, knowing that doing so will “push” my writing into the inboxes of friends, family, professional colleagues, and interested parties, is tough. It feels signficant, and makes me want to hold off publishing until I have something more substantial to say, or until I’ve added more references, or until I have read another book on the subject, or until I’ve whatever elsed that isn’t actually publishing.
Last week, after Cloud Native Rejekts wrapped up, I dusted off my blog (this site - you’re here now!), a simple static site built with Hugo and hosted on GitHub Pages, and fired off a quick post before I left the conference venue at the end of the day. That post really didn’t say much, but publishing something felt good, and I entered the main KubeCon conference on Wednesday in possession of a new way to share my thoughts.
The next day, I attended Platform Engineering Day (one of the one-day pre-conferences co-located with KubeCon), and really enjoyed the talks. The platform engineering community, and the Platforms Working Group especially, are “my people” - I’m interested in just about everything going on in that space because so much of it rhymes with my own experiences.
I had joined Bluesky some time ago (early May 2023), but had become active there only within the last month or so. The “Data Twitter” community, which I love, seemed to move from Mastodon to Bluesky en masse, and then Kelsey Hightower moved from Twitter to Bluesky and the entire tech community seemed to follow him. I’ve been enjoying Bluesky and found myself “live-skeeting”1 some of the Platform Engineering Day talks.
During Atulpriya Sharma’s talk in particular I posted a couple thoughts on Bluesky, and then came away from the talk thinking that there was more that could be said there. So I found a bench in the venue hallway, sat down for a bit, and wrote a blog post about it.
I didn’t think much of it at the time. Having already posted2 about the topic on Bluesky, I didn’t feel much friction in writing it - I just wrote up a slightly longer version of the thoughts I’d posted about, and hit “publish”. The next morning, I was able to see Atul in person at the platform coffee group and tell him that I’d written a blog post riffing off his talk. That felt good, to tell someone that their talk had inspired me to write something (and of course, I shared the link).
That same morning at our platform coffee discussion, I started to have the idea of “platform as a startup” - of an early platform engineering initiative bootstrapping itself in the same way that a startup company does. I don’t think it’s “my” idea, per se, but I also don’t recall what was said or who said it that made me think of this, but it was something on Wednesday morning. After leaving the coffee group, I wrote up some thoughts on the idea and hit “publish” again. The next morning, I lucked into having breakfast with Daniel Bryant and got to discuss the idea with him a little. I was glad to have had written about it already (even if briefly) - I felt better prepared in the moment to summarize the idea.
On Friday, I attended the “Platform Engineering in Financial Institutions” panel, which was one I was very interested in (I do data engineering and platform engineering at a company in the payments space - I’m pretty much the target audience for this). I enjoyed the panel very much, and wrote up some thoughts afterwards about the panel and an idea that I came away with. I didn’t spend a lot of time on this - I wrote it in the Salt Lake City airport while I waited to board my flight home. I checked my notifications after landing in Kansas City and was very pleasantly surprised (flattered, really) to see that Paula Kennedy, the COO/Co-Founder of Syntasso, who had moderated that panel, had shared my post on LinkedIn (and Matthew Skelton said he liked my take!).
Early in my adult life I was very into photography, to the point of doing some paid work for both engagement portraits and motorsports events. There’s a famous saying in photography, “f/8 and be there”. The intent in this saying is that rather than fiddling with your camera settings and missing an opportunity, it’s better to set your aperture to f/8 (that is, use a reasonable default), and prioritize being ready to act when the moment arises. The best camera and the best settings won’t be any help if you’re not there and ready when there’s an opportunity to take a photo.
I’ve thought about that aphorism a lot over the years, and last week I really got to see it borne out. The posts I wrote last week were not remarkable. But they were timely, written and published during a conference. They allowed me to engage more substantially with the conference and with attendees, engagement that I wouldn’t have been able to have as easily or as meaningfully without those blog posts.
Last year, at KubeCon 2023 in Chicago, I attended the TAG App Delivery day meeting (another sort of co-located event on the day preceding the main conference). I wanted to write a blog post about that day. I remember drafting one in the evening, after the day’s talks and meetings had ended. I didn’t publish it. I wonder how much more meaningful my KubeCon conference experience might have been last year if I had published it. I can’t answer that question in hindsight, but this year, I chose to publish. I chose “f/8 and be there”. I prioritized sharing earnest thoughts in the moment over high-quality writing with a time delay, and I’m so glad I did.