 Welcome to the Windy City, where we are bringing many winds of change and certainly a fresh breath of air. As promised, I'm here to dish it out with all of you. You can bet it's going to be cheesy, and I haven't been able to pick up a bite slice yet this week, but I'm hoping to do that a little bit later. I've only been around my terminal, unfortunately. Now, if you get the chance to explore the city and walk a couple blocks, one of the wonderful monuments that you can check out is the Great Chicago Water Tower. This water tower was built all the way back in 1869, and it was one of the buildings that survived the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. So imagine finishing a production deployment and then being tested just two years after all of that finishes up, truly a marvel of architecture and something that stands the test of time. So you might have also heard of this wild guy here. Oscar Wilde used to frequent the city, and he's coined quotes wonderfully like this, be yourself, everyone else is taken. I hope to have a few of those on the books before my time here is done. So he also got a chance to see the Great Chicago Water Tower, and he said this about it. He cascaded monstrosity with pepper boxes stuck all over it. So maybe not his best quote, and didn't sound like he liked the building on the outside. But when he saw the inside, he did have to admit that the engineering was done pretty well. So maybe they just need a new UX team. What's really interesting is that as I was doing some research and looking at the water tower itself, I saw that it has inspired several different designs, one of which is a fast food chain that many of you might have been to, at least here in the states. That's White Castle. I know. They are good at a very specific kind of batch workload, tiny little burgers. Also check them out if you're here, if you've got a handker in for that. What's really nice about the Chicago Water Tower is the way folks here in Chicago have really focused restoration efforts and repurposed this building to maintain its relevance. What's really important isn't the limestone that it was constructed with, or the soil that it's built upon, it's the story. That's what people are working to preserve, and that's what we're pushing for. That's what truly makes this timeless, is not just that architecture, but the story that we carry forward. With that, they had me thinking about our end user program and building up four walls around that. What is the story of end users? What really quantifies that? And came up with an acronym, as we do. But no three-letter acronym, right? We need four walls to house this. And that's nice. No, literally. N stands for networking, which is what end users really want to take part in. They want to be able to talk with one another, meet folks, discuss what's going on, and make sure that everything is going according to plan, or if there's something new that they should be doing. Now literally talking about networking, some end users have been involved within the telecommunication space, and some of our efforts are shifting over to the Linux Foundation networking group to better house some of these projects, like the CNF certification and TESuite. If you want to know more, please feel free to check out the QR code. The I in NICE stands for impact. End users want to be able to have an impact both within their cloud-native ecosystem community, as well as interacting with our technical oversight committee, or TOC, our governing board, and with project maintainers directly. Which is what you just heard, one of our tab members, Joseph, on stage. We've kicked this off, so our end users finally have a place to gather and get some direction. These folks are going to focus on usability, reliability, performance, and sharing all of that knowledge with all of you. I'm really excited about the reference architecture and hearing what end users are using within all of these spaces, especially generative AI and all of these other problems that we're going to be tackling. We also kicked off a program called Zero to Merge, and that is a four-week program that teaches folks how to file issues, open up pull requests, and interact with CNCF projects in a meaningful way. One of the questions we get all the time is, where do I get started? How do I make this happen? And we answer all of those questions in this course. Our first cohort had 363 people graduate, and we were just aiming for 100, 150 people to be interested in this program. We were overwhelmed with over 1,000 people that had applied, so we couldn't fit them all in the first class, and we're going to be kicking off another cohort here in spring of 2024. I'm very excited about that. Scan the QR code, come join if you're on the fence about contributing, or if you don't know where to begin. The C in our nice acronym stands for Comprehension. We understand that folks have day jobs, and it can be really hard to keep up to date with all the things going on within our ecosystem. We have hundreds of projects, so many, like thousands of communications and conversation threads and other things going on as well. It's really difficult to stay up to date on that and be focused within your day job. So we have things like our wisdom of cloud newsletter where we scour the ecosystem, collect all of the gems, and bring them right to your inbox. Not just on the CNCF site, but across our entire ecosystem. Truly a labor of love. I get excited every time that we get to publish one of these. Last but not least in our nice acronym is Elevation. We recognize that uplifting folks within our community helps boost their authority, inspires them, helps them within their career, and gives us a chance to really highlight what matters within our ecosystem. It's the people sharing their stories, working together with all of us. And speaking of Elevation, I'd love to bring some end users up here with me right now for some blueprint banter. With that, let's bring up some end users.