My Tanzu Tuesday Session Review
Tanzu Tuesday is one of my favorite shows. I love the content, the people and pretty much everything about it. This show represents the group (Spring Team) that provided me with a lot of new ideas and concepts that I leveraged during my start-up days. In retrospect, it’s one of the biggest reasons I fell in love with it and keep tuning in every week.
So you can only imagine how much of an honor it was for me to finally be part of it. All of a sudden, I was the one delivering the same kind of content and session that others can leverage. Also, my mom and dad were watching it live, so I was feeling pretty good the entire time.
I’m not going to dive into the 15 factors and the code in the demo. I just want to talk about what the experience of being on the show was like for me. Suffice to say, it was a pretty big deal.
The Session (in a nutshell)
For the episode, I was going to show the audience how to build a 15-factor app with Kubernetes. Specifically, I wanted to upgrade their knowledge from 12 factors to 15 factors. And to demonstrate how they can deliver apps using the cloud-native features of Kubernetes.
Note: If you’re not familiar with Kubernetes, it is an open-source system created by Google for the automation, deployment, scaling and managing of containerized applications.
The session wasn’t so much about the number of the factors themselves, 12 vs 15 (many have remained the same). It was more about the order in which they should be prioritized for apps to play well on Kubernetes. My goal was to take the audience from zero and put them on that 100-level in terms of knowledge.
I used demo-magic for the demo sections. It’s just a tool that allowed me to script out the demo in a bash environment. That way, I don’t have to type and present at the same time. I just run the script and the magic happens while I explain. I had been using this at work, but never “on the big stage” like this.
Preparation
For the session, I absolutely over-prepared. Tanzu Tuesday is a one-hour show, but after my first attempted run through, it was about 3 hours of content. Realizing that I only had 45 minutes, I had to trim it down significantly.
Basically, I had a lot to tell because the 15 factors story was a huge part of what I was doing at the time. I had just ditched a pattern I was using and wanted to show what can be done with 15 factors and Kubernetes.
To squeeze it down to 45 minutes, I pointed to some previous Tanzu Tuesday sessions. This was a really fun part of it; to point to code that was delivered in the previous sessions.
There were concepts I knew the audience might not be familiar with. For that, I gave a very brief overview and pointed to an upcoming session that discussed it in detail. That way, they can look forward to learning more about it on another Tanzu Tuesday.
This was the best way I could cover a lot of material really fast and keep everything condensed.
Another fun part of the preparation was using RevealJS. This is a framework that allows you to create slideshows with HTML. I used it for the session slides (admittedly, I went overboard at first).
I did a couple of practice runs leading up to the show. The last run, minutes before showtime, really made me feel like I was ready because I felt like I really stuck the landing. But when it came to doing it live, it was the best run ever.
Wrapping up
So that’s it about my Tanzu Tuesday session where I talked about 15 factors with Kubernetes. It was a big deal and an honor to be on the show. Everything about it was fun, including the people.
You can watch the session here and check out the presentation here.
Post-show reflections
One thing happened, that can only be described as a “weird moment.” During the show I referred to the book written by Kevin Hoffman called “Beyond the Twelve-Factor App.” So what was weird about that? I found out weeks after the show, that Kevin had “copied legally but without mention” from Josh McKenty. Josh wrote a blog post and published it under Creative Commons. Then Kevin took the content and turned it into a whole book without mentioning Josh or the source of his inspiration. It was weird for me because I consider Josh to be a friend. I have also learned a great deal from him over the years. And I really should have been referencing him instead of Kevin Koffman.