 Greetings, humans, and welcome back to the windy city. We're here at QCon North America, CloudCon, CloudNativesCon, or excuse me, the CNCF Foundation's largest event of the year. As you know, we talk a lot about the intersection of humans and machines here, and whether that's software or hardware, we're always intrigued in the intersection, and we're always evolving. I tried to embrace this as much as possible today by evolving myself into a Daft Punk character. Now, we talk about how fun QCon is, and I know we're making a little bit of a joke out of it, but it really is a special event, and I brought my business partner along on this trip, and he was saying he's never seen swag or give away like this anywhere, and if this helmet from Chronosphere is not proof of that, I don't know what is. My name's Savannah Peterson here for theCUBE. I couldn't be more excited about our very infamous swag segment. I've got John, Rob, and Dustin with me, and Dustin. We're going to give you a unique opportunity here to shameless plug and throw off some of yours. What do you got for us? Cool things here. So by day, I lead the engineering team at Chain Guard, the source for, the secure source for open source, and it being a little bit chilly in the Windy City for this Texan. Of course, I need the beanie, the hat, and it is so cold. And we've also got this Chicago Cubs-inspired jersey. Zero CVEs, that's what we're building here. Love me some local swag. There we go. And you're going to stay nice and tosy. The temperature certainly dropped today. Congratulations on your new job as VP of Engineering at Chain Guard. Great plug. Thanks for continuing to be a great CUBE analyst. Savannah, I got to ask you. First of all, this was awesome, by the way. The helmet is amazing. I've never felt cooler doing an intro for the record, although it was quite warm in there. And your fellow humans comment was very good and also tying humans plus machines. AI, it's all good. I got to ask, this is from Chronysphere. Give us background. Is this, they giving that weight to everyone or is it a raffle? What's the deal with this? So Chronysphere has a cool theme going on this year. Better, faster, stronger. It applies both to their offering. We had their CEO on the show earlier today, but they are actually giving off this one-of-a-kind custom helmet. I mean, as you know, we pick a winner every year. It is going to be tough to beat the Daft Punk helmet. I mean, the polish, it's so cool. I honestly feel like I could start making music right now. I don't know what's going on, but this is, they have one very special helmet just for this show and it's themed for the show. So I would bet this is a one-off, one-time only kind of situation, which I think is a super cool opportunity here in Chicago. I'm thrilled. I love that they're always on our show. You know, Justin, oh yeah. And for the folks that don't know the infamous swag segment, give history on how this all started because this is a unique KubeCon kind of cultural vibe because this is a combination of a melting pot of developers, open-source contributors, businesses, entrepreneurs, hyperscales and customers. The swag is like a big, it got some good swag here. But give history to why this segment is here. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, as you know, I've ran a marketing agency for the last 15 years and I think about booth design, I think about swag, I think about experiences. I also think about minimizing waste. I'm very passionate about the sustainability of that. Just like a lot of, we talked about sustainability and compute here. It's all a part of the theme, but developers are hard to impress. They're hard to recruit. It is a tough crowd. You know, a simple branded t-shirt or a simple branded pair of socks isn't going to cut it anymore. You're competing against Daft Punk. I mean, I love that you guys brought the Chicago theme. That's always one of my favorite parts of the show. I'd actually like to highlight a few more of those, but yeah, when we were in Detroit last year and the energy started to kick back up, I was looking around and seeing how creative the booths were and as much as there's a lot of product story and a lot of innovation story, there's also creativity in how these companies stand out. And if you're a startup or an early stage product looking to recruit contributors, which everyone here is probably trying to do or trying to recruit your team, if you're one of the bigger companies, you want to be engaging your community somehow in a way that's memorable or with a talk trigger, just like my Rubik's Cube's earrings. If anyone's a pro, we'd love to have you on the show to solve them as quick as possible. But I do love this because it allows us to talk about the brands and show off their playful side. Let's get into it. Let's get into it. So, well, first of all, just to explain my jacket, just in case I end up needing to take this off here, for those of you familiar with the ecosystem, there are a lot of characters that CNCF and the community of collaborators have created to help tell the story of CNCF and act as a gateway, act as the welcoming committee, so to speak, to the community when they arrive. Perhaps the most famous character of this is Fippy. Now, it might not be distinctly obvious from this particular shot, but I am now a giraffe, an educational giraffe that can teach you all about Kubernetes. So this is awesome. I actually have a tail right now, which I will not show you for the sake of the production team, but it's a lot of fun. Very excited about that. Also in the vein of Chicago, the first piece of swag that I actually saw when I walked in today was this beautiful deep dish pizza hat. Now, this is from the team over at Solo IO. They have quite a bit of swag going on, but I really dig when companies do take that extra thought and make it local. They go from local vendors. We've actually got some local popcorn here from Zeta. This was actually, this tasty butter popcorn was actually roasted here in Chicago. This kind of stuff matters. It's a lower carbon footprint. It's also far more creative, and I think it's super interesting. Sticking with the pizza theme, just since we're here, we've got another really fun one. These guys always do a thematic t-shirt. We've got spider bats, deep dish Chicago theme. I like that they actually have their logo on the pizza. Again, giving us that branding, but serving it to a Chicago style quite literally. Maybe hot and fresh, baby, that's what I am. According to some of y'all here as the co-host, we always keep it hot and fresh on the cube. I love this for us, and I do really love the Chicago touch. My whole family's from the Midwest, and there's two things that we do. We eat popcorn, and we also drink beer. Now, I really like that one of the booths is not just thinking about their activation as a today activation, but actually looking at the year ahead. And DataVail is giving away beer for a year. So for any of you, and I'm assuming they have an NA option as well, so for any of you who enjoy a beverage, this is a really fun one to go check out. I also got to give them credit because they are really smashing the swag game over there. DataVail also did DataVail Oply, which is a custom monopoly game. They had their team all contribute to this. They work with a company that makes custom monopoly games to get this over the line. So this is, I mean, I got to say, this is a hot contender. I kind of want to play that right now. Let's go. I know, we're going to have to break it out. We might have to do a segment with all of us, with all of us playing on the cube. I'm feeling the vibes. I love the creativity. What is it like different bad sequel code in there? Do you go to jail? Is that like? I mean, we're going to have to bust the soap into find out. But I would imagine, you know, there's some deploy, I would imagine you're perhaps buying software or security. Data Protection Lane. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Who knows, we're going to have to bust that open. But I really just thought it was creative. Great way to bring families into playing and learning about cloud native ecosystem and everything to do with it, which I really. I guess run. Yeah. Go best. Run the app. Got to raise a little DPA, I guess. Yeah, no, exactly. You need to build. We're definitely at the CICD pipeline. So this is actually kind of fun, speaking of hot and fresh, and that being really, really fun and fiery. This is actually a portable fireplace from Replicated. Now I had to go buy the Replicated booth. They do a really excellent job every year of having standout swag. They actually won our contest in Amsterdam with the apron that they had. Really cool kit. We all loved it. I know that Frank on our team brought some home. We were fighting over it a little bit at home. I promise Noah on production, I would not ignite this on fire on the set, but I really, really, really want to. So the idea is you pour liquid in here, light it up, and you can have a portable little fire. Make your own s'mores at home. Do whatever you need. Perhaps less of a carbon situation, and less of a fire hazard. We got Californians on the, yeah, it's got some weight to it too. Yeah. Yeah. Also on the camping theme, love this actually, so you could have your own little campfire. And since we spoke about Fippy. That's through the customs. Yeah, that's a tricky one. It's a little hard to explain. We've got Fippy's Field Guide to Wassum. Now this is from our friends over at Fermion. We've had Matt Butcher, their CEO on the show multiple times. They've got little stickers that go along with it. A little adventure book. I also like that they have their Field Guide here so you can take your notes throughout the course of the show and just in general. And of course, you can snore, explore, and smore with their cup. So this whole brand activation is very cool, makes me feel outdoorsy. We're all on a journey with technology. That's a nice mug. We've now got our beers by the fireplace. We've got the right gear. It's a whole vibe. Oh, and speaking of staying cozy, this is kind of a fun one. I don't know that we've seen scarfs before. Equinox has their classic soccer scarf. Now for all of us here, it dropped about 20 degrees Fahrenheit since yesterday, probably about whatever that is, 8, 12 degrees in Celsius. And this is gonna keep a lot of people nice and toasty while they're here. Also very fun, good standout color. I'm feeling the vibe. We started the day, our opening segment, was talking about cats and dogs and dinosaurs. So we've got the plushie that goes along with the T-shirts that Ian and Michael had on earlier in the show to match the mug. It's a little ying-yang. They even separate, so you can be, you know, dino and your little cat-dog situation. Very cute. It matches their T-shirts. I am a sucker for useful tools as well. I noticed that our friends over at Mac Stadium have a back scratcher. So I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine, Dustin, it's a nice little tool. Easy one to get home for the friend. Ooh, yeah, that's what I need right now. Oh, that's the spot. Good one to get home to the family if you're looking for some swag. Also very useful. I like that Autometrics did something different. I actually mailed a card to my mother yesterday. John can attest I was asking the hotel for where the post office box was. And Autometrics did a postcard here. It says on the top, KubeCon has me captivated, but Chicago is calling. So a nice way to check back in with your family at home, send one back to the kids. I'm gonna fill one of these out for my mom. I think it's quite cute and a nice way to, again, extend the activation off the show floor beyond just that initial interaction. All right, we're getting down to it for day one, but I've got a couple other little nice joys. So we are all travelers here. We've all flown in. I think most of this community is flown in to be here. And we've got eye masks. Now, oh, I can put this on. Why not? I've put just about everything on. Do not disturb minds working in the cloud. So when we talk about cognitive load, sometimes those developers just need to take a chill pill and take a little nap in the middle of it, restore, and we've got all the gear for them to do that. Now let's see, what do we got? Tomorrow we're going to do a whole day about feet. There are multiple floating shoes on the floor. We've got a lot of socks. There's a lot of toys, and I am really excited to show all of those to you. Oh, actually, okay, so one last thing. Two more t-shirts to show you today, and then we will wrap it up. So CNCF always says a really interesting theme for the show. Back in 2021, when I met theCUBE, it was resilience realized. We had Build for the Future ahead in Detroit, and here we have Architect Your Future, very much in the Chicago spirit, just like we were talking about always nice quality tees from our friends at the CNCF fam. And then another theme this year, which is really interesting, we're dealing with a lot as a world, as well as as individual people. Most of us grew up or experienced watching the show Friends, and I noticed that both CNCF as well as Netris had Friends homage shirts going on. So rest in peace, Matthew Perry. You made us all laugh for many years, and we will be thinking about you as we continue to live your legacy in this fabulous apparel. All right, am I last? Ooh, actually, no, wait, sorry, two more. One more from ARM, another Chicago theme. If you join their developer program, they will give you this Gamer mat, which is quite fun. Love that. I know, very cool. Yeah, no, it's a pretty sweet one. It will match your new Daft Punk helmet as well, perhaps depending on. I love those. What you like to wear when you game. I know these are cool. Well, then we'll give this one to you, John. You can have that one, that's, yeah, yeah. You can use that plan, call it duty, and having a good time. All right, and my last little nugget, I think for today's show before we go on, is Spark Rocks. So some booths go out of their way to have a little food snack or something fun, like that local Chicago popcorn. We've also got some Pop Rocks. They, oh, I love this, this was very clever. This is a save on their marketing, on their part. They actually wrapped the Pop Rocks inside their own packaging, and they asked me very explicitly to eat them on camera. So I am gonna do that paper for them right now. I haven't eaten Pop Rocks in probably 25 years. Yep, it's still just as exciting. I wonder if you can actually hear the tingle on the mic right now. They are popping. It's popping. It is popping in my mouth. Popping off here. Is it? It's popping in my mouth. By all other things, I don't say professionally on stage very often, but here we are. CubeCon's always a nice little adventure. And I feel very lucky. I think this is such a fun, I mean what a good expression of our community here. We've got everything from our field trip accessories for our adventures. We've got pizza party, everything. The coolest helmet we've ever seen at a show. Our portable fire. I mean I could basically just live in this chair with all of this swag between now and tomorrow. We have so much swag going on here. Major swagger in that segment. There's some swagger in this segment. We'll decide who our winner is. We'll announce a winner tomorrow. But in the meantime, Rob, what's your favorite from today? I actually like the mug. The mug? You like the camping mug. It's pretty sturdy too, check it out. It's nice and thick, it's not one of those thin ones. Good mug is a good mug, yeah. Permion. Yeah, I mean Permion's got their stuff figured out. They're a strong player in the wasp's base. I love the color of this thing. That's my favorite. I love the big mouse pads. Yeah, the video game man, it's fun, huh? You know, always. I mean like the solo, solo stove is pretty cool. I mean like that's about as small of a stove as you could get, right? The pizza hat is also a favorite of mine. I like that, it was a winner. Yeah, it's really clever. Good hat, pizza. Of course, winning this would be phenomenal. Yes. Yeah, now I just want to do the rest of the show from inside the Daft Punk helmet. This would be great. I'm sure production would love that, having me to deal with my mic. Yeah, I see you over there taking your head, Brandon. Can you imagine all of us wearing that at the same time? Do a segment? I don't know that I want to imagine that, John. I think that's a really noble ambition, but most importantly, thank you guys. Dustin, do you have a faith? You can't say you're wrong. Oh yeah, the fire. That could be in our after dark series, yeah, yeah, yeah. Cube after dark. No, I really, I just love to see the creativity. I feel like we've really evolved out of a, you know, a bouncy ball and pen space into a far greater space of expression. Looking forward to seeing some more of this swag tomorrow and featuring some things for our feats, which we have never done a foot segment before, so bring your foot fetish and your fun fall attitude. Let's see how illiterative I can get. It's probably a good time for us to cut this segment. Okay, Rob, thank you so much for being here with us. Dustin as well, appreciate you contributing to this swag segment this time. John, your insights are always valuable. I'm glad we were able to send you home with something lovely. It's my first swag segment, I promise you that. Nobody ever does you. They never forget their first thing. Thank you for all that you do with the swag segment. It's my favorite and it's fun. I get to laugh at the long day we had today. A lot of energy, love the energy. And if you've got more swag, bring it to the Cube. We'll do a review. Yeah, exactly. Swag review. You can see your swag featured here on the Cube. If you're at CubeCon, come find us on the show floor. If not, come find us at your next event and we'll see if you make the cut. I'll be honest with you. It's not every sticker or every shirt that makes the cut. We'll judge crowd here. We'll judge it in everything. Yeah, yeah, exactly. We're ready to give everything. John, thank you for giving me the opportunity to do this segment. And most importantly, thank all of you humans for tuning in to this fantastic intersection all day of humans technology and software here at CubeCon, CloudNativeCon in Chicago, Illinois. My name is Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for technology information.