 Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon EU 2024, live from Paris, France. Join hosts Savannah Peterson, Dustin Kirkland, and Rob Streche as they interview some of the brightest minds in cloud native computing. Coverage of KubeCon cloud native con is brought to you by Red Hat, CNCF, and its ecosystem partners. theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon EU 2024 begins right now. Good afternoon nerd fam and welcome back to KubeCon cloud native con here in fantastic Paris, France. My name is Savannah Peterson and I am very delighted to have a return guest on with us this afternoon and one of my favorite, most creative guests that we have. Cassandra, thank you so much for making the time to join me today. How are you doing? I'm really happy to be here today with you. Me too, this is a great reunion. We first had you on the show in Amsterdam. You showed us the game that you had made about leveraging Kubernetes. You teach about Kubernetes. You're one of the most important people in this ecosystem in terms of educating young people. How did you decide to, well, what drives your passion rather for helping other people, specifically young people, learn about Kubernetes? Well, there actually is a book called The Illustrated Guide to Kubernetes and the goal of that book is for developers to take that kid, take the book home and show their kids and explain what Kubernetes is. So I wanted to take that a step further and really dub it down. Well, and simplify it. Simplify, yeah. I think one of the things that I've found in your demos and your teaching, even in our conversations, is you have a wonderful way of taking something that is incredibly complex, Kubernetes. Everyone in this room, no matter your technical skillset, would agree that managing Kubernetes is complex and make it so accessible. So in between the last time I saw you and today, you've published a new book. This is absolutely fantastic. I want to point out that Cassandra is such a good marketer. You actually sent it to me in advance of KubeCon, one of a few hundred recipients that were fortunate enough to have their first copy. I mean, just check this out. There's so much, and oh, I want to point out actually, one of the first things that I noticed, you can see on the cover too, but the illustrated book is set in Paris. We're in Paris. You obviously thought about it, and you probably chose to do that after they had announced Paris. So you must have done this in the last year, correct? Yeah, I've been working on this since about January 1st. That's it? Just since January? Yeah. Oh my gosh, you published, I'm feeling like a slacker. You came up with an idea and published a book in 90 days. That's amazing. So what's your process like? What's the creative process? For me, I just take a piece of paper and I start drawing pictures, and some of those pictures lead to good ideas. I kind of do it like a comic book form to have my ideas flow across. Yeah. And so you worked with an illustrator, correct, on this book. How many iterations, how many different versions of the book and the visuals here did you go through before we ended up where we are? Well, personally on my desk I have a stack of papers, maybe this thick after scribbling a bunch. Yeah. And my illustrator has his own stack of papers. So there's a little bit of work that goes into this. Yeah, but for the first version of the book, or I guess sketches I drew, I divided a single sheet of paper into nine squares and I just hand drew each scene what I thought it should look like. Then I cut up the pieces of paper, rearranged my ideas, scrapped some pieces, drew some more. It helps with the story flow. It's good, it's all part of the creative process. How did you decide, I mean, how did you know this is the next thing, the next tool you wanted to create for folks? Well, I've been teaching kids workshops for a very long time, since I was 13 years old. Incredible. And I think it's really great, I can make an impact on the 20, 30 kids I teach that day. But it's only 20, 30 kids. There's a lot more kids out there. How can I get my content accessible to everyone? So I think this book is the answer to that. I can compress my content into an easy, readable format which parents can share with their kids and become the teachers for them. Yeah, and parents can learn. I mean, I was showing your book to my boyfriend and he doesn't understand, he's not a Kubernetes nerd like we are. And I encouraged him to read it to learn as a gateway into the industry which I think is super awesome. So you've been teaching since you were 13, if you don't mind me asking, how old are you now? I'm 20. So you've been teaching kids workshops for seven of the 10 years that Kubernetes has been a tool. That's pretty impressive. That's got to put you in a category of folks who are the elite teachers of Kubernetes. You did a book signing, how was that? I think it was really successful. So there were a lot of people, they all queued up in front and eventually started blocking traffic through the venue. I mean, your dad was telling me that it wound all the way through. Did that make you feel a little bit like a celebrity? Yeah, a little bit. But from my seat, because of the angle, it's a little hard to see how far the line goes. But eventually they wrapped the line around in a big zigzag. That is so impressive. So how long were you signing books then? Over an hour, maybe two hours. That, wow. How many books do you think you've given out at the show? It's hard to put a real number on it, but during the book signing itself, maybe 80 books, probably, is how many I got out. That's a lot. But I've also been walking around handing books to people who come talk to me personally. That's so fun. So you just come with a big box of books? Yeah, pretty much. And I load it up in my backpack. You're a trooper. So have you thought about what you're going to create next? Because we're headed to Salt Lake City, and then we're going to London. So I'm curious if you're going to maybe do another book and more videos. I think the book is actually a really great way to reach more audiences. This is not concrete yet, but this book is about AI, but it's not about gen AI. Yeah. So I think we need a book on gen AI, because that's what people are hyped about. Absolutely. And kids use chat GPT and Google Gemini, which are gen AI technologies, but they don't actually understand what goes behind it. It's kind of a magic box. Yeah, no, I think you're absolutely right. I think that would be super useful. And I mean, we've never seen a tool get adopted as fast as gen AI has in terms of the user base. So all right, I'm looking forward to the next book there. What has been the most interesting part of the show for you this week? I think it's the busiest KubeCon I've been to. Yeah, I mean, most people ever, over 12,000 people here, it's the biggest KubeCon of all time. Does it feel like Kubernetes is more mainstream to you now than it did before? To be honest, I'm not sure. I can't read into the minds of everyone to see if they're actually using Kubernetes. It definitely looks more popular, but I'm not sure how that translates to actual adoption. I think that's a really important statement. Yes, and so you're teaching this week as well too, yeah? Yeah, I'll be teaching the kids workshop at CNCF Kids Day. Which is rad. How many students are you expecting? We're expecting, there's four workshops total, but 70 kids for the event. Wow. This book also has a workshop in it. Of course it does, naturally. So it's an AI workshop. It's all in Scratch. And a lot of us already know what Scratch is, so it's very approachable. Parents have the confidence they can teach their kids Scratch. That's great. And for the Scratch, I have an AI extension. So it's not just Scratch. Right. This is the scanning page for the book, which you need for the workshop. And so how cute are these characters, sidebar? This is just, I want to learn from all of them. So for the workshop, maybe you want to train Fippy. So you hold Fippy up to the camera, and you take about 20 pictures of Fippy, and that creates a neural network of the photos you created. Wow. And when you hold Fippy back up again, the program knows that it's Fippy. So kind of similar to the facial recognition technology on our phones, for example, to unlock them. Yeah, but facial recognition feels a bit magical. So this kind of reduces it and makes it easy to understand. Fippy makes it more approachable. Yes. Yes. Do you think that, I think it's actually really unique that the Cloud Native Foundation has these characters, has a giraffe-like Fippy. Do you think that that helps people learn about these projects in general? I think it brings awareness to Cloud Native. Yeah. Because you know like the go-gofer from Golang? Yeah. So I knew about the go-gofer since I was 3 or 4 years old. Wow. Because there was a go-gofer plushie in our house. So I think it's the same thing for Fippy. Just you have the Fippy plushie in your house because your dad brought it home. Yeah. It kind of grows up with you, and you kind of know Cloud Native exists. Yeah, no kidding. That's, I think that's actually a really good point. And there is actually, there's a really impressive amount of Kubernetes swag. I saw they've got button-ups. There's Fippy's sweatshirt with the little ears. There's a whole, it's a whole vibe. There's a whole Kubernetes fashion is a thing, which is not a sentence I ever thought I would say in my life. But that's actually pretty fun. Outside of being an incredible teacher and author, what are you working on in school? In my school, I'm doing a computer science degree. And what are you hoping to do when you graduate? Because you're a third year now. You're about to be not too far away from being done with school. I want to have a base fundamental of programming. But I don't want that to be my day job. I think it would be better to enable other people to do programming and make them heard, because there's a lot of people doing cool projects, but they don't have the same visibility. You are all about impact and teaching and inspiring. I love that. Who inspires you? Who do you look up to? Well, my dad is the one who decided I should teach kids workshops from such a young age. So I've just been working on it. Do you ever get nervous in front of the students? My first workshop, I was very nervous. I was shaking. Oh my gosh, I bet. Yeah. And do you practice a lot before you do a workshop? I actually never practice. Oh, you just go in and just gun it? Yeah. I like that. That's a little more my style. That's very fun. What do you think are some of the coolest applications of AI? Or what sort of problems do you hope that AI solves in our world? I think the largest problem we have now is cars. There's a lot of accidents. Yes, a ton. And I think we could prevent that. I think it's really sad that if you actually Google statistics for accidents, it's unreasonably high. And it's something which should be avoidable, because we are the ones who choose to get in the car and drive. So I think I hope AI can solve it with self-driving cars. I like that. I'm in San Francisco. There's self-driving cars all over the place. And I'm here for it. I would love to see more lives saved. That's a nice thing. Let's talk about where you hope the industry is, this whole cloud-native industry, when we get the chance to sit down next time. So either in London or in Salt Lake City, what do you hope that we can talk about? Or what do you hope that we get to see out of this ecosystem? You've been a part of the ecosystem for seven years. You're someone who's seen it really evolve and mature. I think I hope to see more AI integration with cloud-native. I'm actually on this AI working group, which their goal is to integrate AI to cloud-native. Because right now, there's kind of a divide. You have AI developers, cloud-native developers. They don't really know how to talk to each other. So we need to work on that relationship. I think that's an extremely important thing. There's a lot of hype, but I haven't seen a lot of things actualized to your point. I definitely agree with you. I hope more of it gets actualized and becomes practical for a day-to-day life. Yeah, absolutely. And that's when we're going to save lives with cars or in healthcare or all the really cool applications, not the scary applications that people are talking about. Do you think that Kubernetes is having its Linux moment? Do you think that it's now become a standard across the board? Um, like I was saying earlier, it's definitely hyped up, but are people actually using it? I feel like there's a lot of big sponsorships here, which aren't even related to Kubernetes. I agree. Yeah, it's interesting. It's a very, it's a whole little buzzy atmosphere, and yeah, it's interesting. How many students do you think you've taught over the last seven years? Um, I did go back on my LinkedIn profile and put all my experiences for each workshop I taught. So I'd say about 25 sessions across the world. Wow, that's pretty impressive. So that's hundreds, maybe thousands. Yeah, probably. Probably thousands, oh my goodness. So what is your advice to a young person who might be watching us, or they don't have to be young, frankly, someone watching us today who's curious about the space, but doesn't know where to start outside of getting your book, which they should obviously do? Probably the best way to start is just find a local developer conference and walk around, maybe watch a few sessions, and it kind of shows you what the real world is. Yeah, and I think it's, you know, walk around, say hello. This community is really welcoming. Don't you agree? I definitely agree. I've never felt lost here. Like, I thought I would be lost because it's all adults who are like this tall, but they all talk to me when I speak up. Yeah, no, I feel welcome. I don't have a technical background. I can't code. And I feel very welcome here as well. And I just think it's awesome. It's a sweet, it's a really sweet community. So I have to ask, because this is a really unique opportunity, would you mind autographing my copy of my book? Yeah, so I'd love to sign it for you. Thank you so much. This is Rad. Can you believe for everyone? Seriously, one of the most impressive young people I have ever met. Cassandra, thank you so much for being on the show and for joining me. And more importantly, thank you for reaching out. I was so impressed when I got that LinkedIn DM from you, asking if you could send me a copy of the book. I am absolutely blown away by you in every sense of the word. And I feel very lucky to sit here next to you. So thank you. I'm really happy about that. Thank you. Yes, and thank all of you for tuning in to this special fantastic segment. Be sure and pick up your copy of Phippie's AI Friends book. When you have the opportunity, I believe it's on Amazon, yes, correct? Yes. Yes, you can get it on Amazon. It's also a French version of it. Naturally, of course there's a French version of it because we're here in Paris. Cassandra's fantastic. Make sure you check out more of her work. And if you have kids, send your kids to her workshop to learn about Kubernetes. So much impressive stuff happening on this stage today. Thank you all. We're in Paris, France, at KubeCon, CloudNativeCon. My name's Savannah Peterson. 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