 So thanks. It's really great to have you in our in our fun car interviews while we negotiate to make sure we don't try to go to Canada, which is always kind of an exciting little moment here because if you get trapped in the wrong lane, you all of a sudden are customs. So that's not something we want to have, because I don't know if you have your passport. I don't have my passport on me. I don't have and I don't even have a visa. So yeah so why don't you tell me a little bit about what you've been working on since we last talked. Sure. So first of all, thanks for having me here in this interview. It's been absolute pressure and I really enjoy these. Off late I've been working on a project called Conveyor. I'm really really excited about it. It's about application modernization. Every company goes through this like right now they're all heavily investing in hybrid cloud and cloud and containerization. They have this giant working apps and they're still working and if it's working no one wants to touch it, but then they have already invested so much money into like cloud and whatnot and you want to move those apps. So if you're saying that paying for a data center in a cloud know that is not you know goal in itself? Like people don't want to just pay for it to do nothing. They do. But the thing is that it's like getting revolutionized and like when everyone does that you also want to like get on the train and then like be a part of this awesome journey. So that's what like I'm doing right now. In the modernization we have the older applications and we try to give them an estimate assist and what needs to be changed to refactor and the platform and Kubernetes. So that's what the project's about and it has like super cool interesting things and the most interesting part for me is I'm building the community. Nice, yeah. It recently got accepted into CNCF. So it's a CNCF Sandbox project so that gives me the awesome opportunity to actually build it. Right. And you know the beauty of whatever I learned in Kubernetes I'm taking them all and not the heavy process because this is a small project and so I'm taking them all and like distilling it and then taking the little things that will work for the current project and I'm like doing that to convey it. So it's been like working pretty great. Let's work for me. Yeah, right. So okay so here's the question I have to ask here. So I've built a number of communities you know kind of over my career. What have you found to be like the most surprising thing that you learned while trying to build this community that you just it never would have crossed your mind? Yeah, anything like that? Yeah, I'm still building the community but the one thing that stumbles me these days is the amount of like the waste that you have to use. It's just not about mailing list anymore so I have to be a savvy with all the technologies that kind of like stumps me on top of the human factor. Like these days the attention span of everyone's like super limited and be a part of the community or anything to keep them interested. It's really hard to like keep someone interested so you have to do really really good work. So like I'm trying to balance like not to introduce so many stuff but also like give them a safe space. I want to create a safe space for everyone. That is the part that I find the hardest because I can do all the work that needs to be done but still there are like X number of things that's like out of my hands. So I should know how to react in that moment and how to handle a particular given situation. So all those things I'm still figuring out I'm not an expert and it's good to know that you have done a lot of these so I can like you're a text away. Yeah, I am happy to help. Yeah, the reason I'm always curious about that sort of thing about most kinds of activities like what you know so I relatively recently became you know academic full-time right and the thing that one of the things that's been most surprising to me is how different the cadence of fall semester is versus spring semester and because it's where the break falls because Thanksgiving is so late relatively speaking in spring break is kind of early right and so it throws off the the cadence or like the you know speed or whatever of the entire semester or changes it and that's been the hardest thing one of the weirdest things for me to like wrap my head around because I never would have guessed that that was such a pronounced effect you know so that's why I was curious so what is so the project is officially a sandbox project now which is very cool what does that change like what do you feel like that brings to the table for the conveyor project? So it's again everything for me bubbles down to the community but the another portion of it that is that there are no open source modernization tools available so that puts conveyor at the unique place where it has the potential to collaborate with so many folks so it's gonna be like one big community and everyone it's like even though they work for so many different companies at the end of it it's just gonna be community and that's one part like I'm super super excited about and the next thing is that the potential of like all the new stuff that you can add like for example my friends are working on so right now the project supports like analysis of Java application so like you can supply a binary or like a old Java code and then it will do a deep analysis based on some of the rule sets and then it will spit out telling like oh to modernize is in like to be platformed from the current VM to a Kubernetes cluster these are the things that you need to change and these are the things that are risky and these are the things like the amount of time it'll take to do it and these are the places where you have to like do like for example you cannot hard code the secret anymore you have to like inject from outside so if it finds a secret and I like highlight it and then it'll say like oh your imports are outdated so you have to like do this you have to upgrade the language like all the little things that you would miss in general so that's what the current capability is the things that people are working on in this project is adding multiple languages to it in an extensible way so anyone could come and plug in stuff so today we had this career workshop and then we met a couple of folks who attended it and they were saying like they did not have like one of them mentioned that they did not have such a questioner which could just give them an all 360 degree view of like how they can they didn't know what they got into kind it would have been nice that if they had the opportunity to see all these things beforehand and so many it was like nice to have such conversations seeing that bringing so many folks together and I think that is possible because it is CNCF project so it kind of even though like it was conveyor was always conveyor has always been an open source project Red Hat has kept it open source from the start and right now but once it became a CNCF project it kind of gets its own you know it's like status bump yeah I should say like yeah so like a lot of eyes on the project and so many completion folks want to collaborate so it's so cool yeah yeah I would imagine I mean it also kind of I feel like it would also give it a certain amount of almost like ratification right like you know it's a pretty good chance this project is going to stick around so like investing in learning how to use the tool stuff like that isn't I mean one of the hardest problems you have in the open source world right is that anybody can build anything they want and then they can stop working on it also anytime they want and so I think one of the hard choices is like you know should I go with this path or this path because if you invest in the wrong one and that project goes away you know you're often in quite a lot of trouble talk talk tell me about it I used to be a platform engineer yeah one of the biggest no-no things for me is like pulling in a dependency that is being maintained by one single maintainer right and which is fine like one single maintainer is still good but then you look at the commit history and the project hasn't been touched for like two years and then you don't want to build your infrastructure around it and it's like setting it up for failure because like your entire thing is just like built around one little thing which is not maintained anymore so that's a big no-no for me and like to put something in prediction I always make sure that it's not maintained by a single maintainer because things happen life happens I'm not like saying that they should be responsible for doing it anyone who's like a single project maintainer should be like doing it lifelong it's not feasible it's not possible so having a good section model or like having multiple people actually helps right yeah no I fully agree I think you know I much prefer excuse me sorry we just started so I used to do some theater work in college and you know one of the things that you had to create was like the stage manager's book right and it was the run book for the show and it had every single little detail in it and in those days we used to call it the hit by the bus factor you know where you know but these days we've been trying to get to take off right something more like the win the lottery factor right so you know a positive experience instead of a negative one but you know sometimes as you said life happens right and people want to go in a different direction making sure that your you know infrastructure isn't going to fall over it's really important you know you got to have you know some way to back that up yeah even like the cube project got pretty hit during the pandemic yesterday I was to contribute so much and someone mentioned that that it saw like a 25 percent decrease in the amount of contributors oh really so and such a project can like it can still withstand because it's huge so many contributors but you can think about the single maintainers or like the projects which are like small maintained by like few people it was a lot and it's still a lot like so many people are still going through burnout and whatnot so yeah yeah it's one of the things so I have anecdotal evidence of this as well but there's actually been some research done about like the new students like freshman coming in as you know this year are kind of very very high strong like you know very kind of their baseline stress level is already very high and so they're having a lot of trouble with college because yeah and there's no real nobody's really sure why yet you know but it's probably pandemic related right but yeah like it's people are not back yet you know like there's some of it and I think there's a lot of particularly politicians who want us to be back but it's just not really true yet you know and I think you see that in the open source community just as much as anywhere else yeah yeah it's like no one's like psychologically ready to be honest to be out and about because like everyone was like confined to their own space for a really long time so it takes time sometimes it takes like double the amount of like it's like a cause and effect it's not like immediate on and off switch so you say like oh you cannot come out of the house for like 10 days and all of a sudden you are like oh you should be in a room full of like 10 000 people yeah it's a little bit of an adjustment well I mean I think that's why you know you mentioned kind of a safe space you know it's like that's why I think one of the things I also like about open source you know particularly ones that have strong communities is it's a lot easier to kind of re enter society you know if it's with a community of people that even if you don't know them particularly well you at least share a lot of like something with right you know in you know in the case of conveyor right it's you know we we all work on this kind of problem right you know but it doesn't matter what it is it but it gives you that that community and it it's almost like safer to kind of re-engage again and you know kind of ease into it rather than you know I take public transit all the time right a whole bunch of random people who are getting on the bus you know and you know I'm the only one there in a mask so it definitely takes some time getting used to it and the fact that now if you like it almost feels like the rules have reversed so it's like if you are wearing a mask it's like it just gets teared down so you have to have a strong willpower to like keep that going my family back home like I keep telling them like wear a mask and they're like no one's wearing anymore and like they are like they are stuck between the social construct right now like where if they were then they will be like cost out or like right right ostracized yeah yeah I will say Boston is nice in that regard like as in there's not a lot of that sense of you know you're giving in by wearing a mask you know so it's pretty tolerant but on the flip side there's not a lot of people wearing masks you know even on like public transit with like enclosed spaces and stuff so it's a little you know it's a little crazy but you know you do what you got to do I guess so let's see what else can we talk about there oh so I wonder I noticed you looking out the windows I mean isn't the view out here this is Bell Island it's called for Bell Isle and it's we're still in the U.S. even though the river right is basically the demarcation line between the U.S. and Canada and I don't know I just thought this little drive-around was really pretty it's super pretty I'm like it's so peaceful too and thanks for not taking me to Canada yeah exactly we we aren't we aren't completely done yet there are still opportunities for us to get trapped and go to Canada so we'll just have to keep our eyes open but yeah so you've been a lot more involved in at least the insider show have you been getting more involved in Cuba example as well or kind of more broadly I guess I would look forward to that I'm hoping that I could bring a little bit of conveyor into the Cuba insider what like there are like tutorials in the Cuba insider which I really like learning parts sorry yeah I was exactly looking for the word but I want to like bring this in so like there is a chance that folks can pick it up and like someone wants to contribute or someone wants to participate it's just like you know it's a nice place I really like the Cuba insider not just a show because I'm on it and not because like almost one of the coast but like overall I like the people and like the mission too it's catered towards any beginner too like if you look at some of the Kubernetes stuff there like part and like learn basic Kubernetes it's hard now everyone talks about Kubernetes but no one explains it like what it is like no one says like at the beginner level so it just goes above your head so I'm hoping that we could I I would participate more right in other avenues that are available like whatever it is I want to figure it out and I want to like be a part of it more yeah that's cool I yeah I've been working on a tecton learning path for Cuba example and I can definitely see a conveyor one I think one of the things what I was doing with the tecton learning path the problem I think with application modernization right is it's one of those like software engineering activities where you when you look at it to go start doing it it looks pretty straightforward and then you kind of get into the weeds and you're like oh my god this is so much harder and scarier and everything else than I realized it would be and so I think using a tool like you know like that and I've actually used similar tools years and years ago it's really useful because it gives you a sense of like like all the in the weeds scary bits before you go in right so you can kind of like get at least a sense of you were kind of saying this before it's like okay we're gonna have to like fix this piece we're gonna have to upgrade that part and then if you kind of can know all that before you get into it you can plan for it properly you know you're less likely to be terrified later so I think it's they're really useful even if it isn't a you know magic bullet kind of yeah and I think it's like some people expect you to be able to just like plug a button and you know magic happens here I like to think it off like this like in this awesome car we have like super many features right it's not like it's doing all the work for you but then it gives you like a awesome lane assist or like the blind view mirror like if some car comes by the right the all the all the nice things like you can think it think of it like that like it's not gonna handle you too much but then it will be like there to assist you with the journey and make your journey easier so that's all like I see it I know the sorry but the bad analogy I was actually gonna say it's like it's kind of helps you stay in your lane right and yeah because I think that is a deceptive it like you know I always talk about package managers databases those are also very deceptively easy pieces of software yeah and then you kind of get into it and you're like wait this transaction has to be atomic how am I going to make that happen if there's a power failure you know so database is much harder to write than people realize when they start writing one I'm super bad at it I would never touch any database the fun fact is that on my first two weeks of my first real graduate job I deleted prediction database without a backup that's no good yeah no good although on the flip side whose fault was it that there was no backups right yeah yeah and but I did learn stuff so I learned a lot of Linux that day because it was like stored as a file so the file never actually gets deleted even though it goes so well so like the worst part was it was a Saturday morning before my coffee and I was like oh I'm getting no no it's what is that let me check it out oh like I'll just do this and that's the bad thing so I made a rule in my life that I will never do anything just after getting up at that two over a weekend right well I don't know I mean you're doing this interview and you told me that you hadn't had coffee yet today so I don't know I'm not the one behind the wheel so yeah that's true but I completely agree with the rule of must have coffee first yeah and one thing that I want to also bring to kbi kbi whenever I have a chance is that I want to include a little bit more about the security tracks you know like security is also like important and I like to see more of those and I want to like if there's time if if someone would accept whatever I'm writing then I'll be like happy to like put all those things that's another thing that people like even the growing engineers and like students and you know hourly professional in the career they should like not it's not an afterthought and right there are like so many supply chain attacks and whatnot so yeah I think what's interesting is like as as our kind of infrastructure gets more sophisticated there's even more opportunities for us to not really know what's going on and as such really potentially bad security holes and so I think one of the things that I like about kind of a lot of the approach to how kind of Kubernetes works and things like that is that you have it's almost like the security is on by default you know red hat you know like rel a lot of that is like that too so it's it's super nice when you are trying to you know kind of build out an application you know is that as long as I know how to turn the security off you know I can kind of do my development or stuff and have things break because of security and then turn it off while I try to figure out what it is right then turn it back on I do this with like SC Linux all the time you know I leave it on all the time and then if I run into a problem I turn it off make sure that's the problem and then you know and then figure out what it is and then I can turn it back on again but I think that that kind of model is becoming ridiculously important because there you know so little about how like because you have this wicked long supply chain yeah yeah yeah so yeah I I definitely would agree so you want to talk I can't remember uh yeah I have a um so I am one of the I have a maintainer track section for sick security okay so like I help lead the sick security documentation sub project so I am a person who believes everything and starts and ends with documentation so like you want to hack a project you read the documentation you will have everything even including the loopholes that someone would have missed so Kubernetes documentation is quite awesome and extensive but there are places where it could be included improved in terms of security like when I you know used to work as a platform engineer I struggled to find the proper RBAC and RBAC is everyone's nightmare right so like we want to improve little things like that so when this SIG got they had the first meeting they said like oh we are forming a new SIG and everything I just raised my hand up and I said I want to volunteer for this I don't know much about security I'm willing to learn but I want to volunteer for this because this is what I want to see I want to make this document like documentation like one step like one stop like one stop shop yeah one stop shop for everything because it's already awesome and why to like look at something so if you have something official from the documentation the Kubernetes folks it's of the amount of issues that it'll run into would be later less and then to find some RBAC randomly on the internet and they copied and put it where it'll give access to every single thing and you would just like oh it worked so it's like it starts with an innocent poc like oh it works and then like you never intend to go back and change it I'm guilty of it I've done many times because well you intend to you just never get to yeah but you always want to yeah and then like there is less time and you're always on like something when you're doing a poc or like on a deadline telling like oh I want to like figure out what would work because someone pays your check so you cannot always be researching or like playing away with all this shiny new toys right so like I have been guilty of that so that is one of the goals that I personally tell myself that I want to like help make this thing better yeah more approachable simpler I was just going to say actually for the benefit of the audience in case you have never heard it out loud RBAC is how you pronounce the acronym for role-based access control and it's one of those things where you know like there's so many things that until you actually hear somebody say it you're like oh I don't you know I don't know how to pronounce that in my head so that's why I wanted to just offer that so okay so rolling back to the talk so you're giving a talk about the documentation for RBAC or you is it what is it you're you're leading exactly it's it's for the entire project so it's just not gonna so I will talk about the documentation so project but this the kip cons highlight it's going to be on the assessment so the security has like three or four sub projects audit that does the Kubernetes audit which is really really important because we need to know where we also like even a big project can have it's like a little fall so we need to be on top of it so that project helps with that and there is this security tooling sub project where like recent achievement of that it's automated cv list so website didn't have the automated Kubernetes cv list and you have to be subscribed to the mailing list and mailing list and I just control all like all delete them so I select all and delete them so need to find a place where you can have it as a feed or something so those are the kind of all the tooling does and then there is documentation that you heard about and there is also self-assessment so each sub project like each individual or like related project to Kubernetes can come and then like get the threat modeling threat modeling done and like some reports and stuff like that so this year's highlight is going to be that last kip con was documentation highlight so we talked in depth in detail about like the entire sub project this time it's going to be like five to ten minutes quickly saying like what was the things that was done between the last kip con this kip con and like what we are planning to work in the next few months because it's nice to have little goals I'm not saying that it has to be done or like completed because everyone has got their lives but so that those are the things that I'll be like highlighting in the talk it's another thing that I want to like talk about when I talk about security it really warms my heart because the coaches put so much effort into making that a safe safe place for anyone and everyone that is my inspiration that I took from that and put it in the conveyor community to make sure that I bring it along it's not per se like a thing that you write down or it's not a rule or it's it's the it's like how do I say it's a quality or something that you learn and oh yeah yeah and practice I'm trying to think of a word for that I can't think of the word for that I'm like yeah kind of like a value or like a yeah I don't know it'll probably come to me in like three hours and I'll be like oh that was the word we were looking for so yeah so these are the things that I'm like doing um right now I'm excited about this cubecon because I have few free days where I'm just gonna go sit back and watch my friends talk nice yeah that is definitely nice I find conferences are significantly more relaxing after my talk yeah yeah um but uh yeah I'm always like stressed out up until then yep yep like last time I was so stressed out that I forgot my laptop in the hotel room oh yeah and it wasn't like Valencia in the hotels were like so far it's not like walking this yeah I actually because I was thinking about going and I thought the same I was like it's a like a 20 minute ride dude from the hotel to the conference this is like kind of ridiculous yep so and then they didn't have taxis so it's not like here they don't have that many taxis the entire city on the town had like 100 or 150 taxis it's about it and they also had some huge match or something like game um going on at the same time so like it was very very hard to get a taxi yeah yeah I imagine and they had their own um taxi app um like a uber something that was also very unreliable because they kept cancelling on you because um it was hard yeah um but like you learn few words along the way it was fun I really loved like it was it's a beautiful place yeah I would love to go back for vacation I haven't been to Valencia I was in Sevilla uh not that long ago and yeah I like I really wanted to go on that trip and um I was gonna take my wife and we're gonna like have like a bit of a vacation whatever and then she went and took a job what she hasn't had in I don't know how many years um and uh but you know it was a brand new job so she wasn't gonna like ditch for like a week and a half to go uh and I was like oh this would have been so much fun um so uh I don't know but I might be able to drag her to keep kind of Amsterdam maybe you know we can go to that uh but yeah I really liked uh the south of Spain I hear Valencia is different but still that I had never been there until I went to we said Sevilla a couple years ago it's it was beautiful it was my first um Europe a trip so I'm just gonna be like all awesome about it and they have the best orange juice no orange juice in the entire world yeah so that was something nice and I like there is a type of orange named after the place right yeah yeah I like their um art scene I really like chicken out art wherever I go I don't on that note have you walked around this beautiful city uh downtown and have you seen the mutants I've seen some of the murals yeah I'm not a ton but I did I walked around a lot on Sunday um and yeah it's funny because I was here like 15 years ago for like a sales call and like it's like a stark difference um and yeah like there's one right there yeah you know the elephant on the wall I mean there there's a lot of cool like there's a lot of cool kind of hidden art you know like you have to be like paying attention so I'm sure I've missed two thirds of it you know but yeah it's it's really quite cool it's so beautiful I was like oh my god um it's it's it it feels like everything has some meaning to to it and it's um it's I wouldn't call everything a super abstract to so um I could spend hours just standing at them and like yeah it's kind of walking around yeah yeah um I did that on Sunday too a little bit and then like I'm hoping that Friday I'll get to do a little bit because I really wanted to go to the eastern um market something like that yeah yeah uh yeah I went by I went by a sign for it um yeah that was eastern market it's supposed to be really cool um one of the other people who's involved in the show Tam um she said uh one of her trips here she went uh and said it was really awesome um like we were literally just talking about it last night or earlier today um but yeah I'm uh I'm sorry that my trip is like super tight but yeah uh because otherwise I would I would definitely do the same but I have to give a lecture on Thursday so that's all fun too I mean I would just write if I have to like sign a friend of like so many kids students yeah you do kind of get the hang of it um after a bit and you know and it's it's a little it's a lot easier if you've if you've already taught the class um but uh you know even so you know every every group of students right goes at a different pace yeah so I can't just like recycle the old slides immediately and just pop it up I gotta like work through it and figure out what exactly I'm gonna say and like which what what does this group of students seem to be having more trouble with than that group of students it was like really interesting like my first semester teaching it the students um really were not wrapping their head around like types of graphs um and and so I kind of the second semester I made a kind of a hyper focus and then all of the students seemed to get it just fine and so I'm not sure if I was teaching it better or if it was just you know so I don't know it's been a it's been a really interesting journey um you know teaching for a living um but yeah it's cool and um not to mention the vacation time that you would get over in theory in theory uh yeah so the um what's funny is that um because we we run a summer like internship program and I'm pretty heavily involved with that so yeah I did not actually get very much of my summer off I was I was a little disappointed um I was hoping to have some more break because there's a lot of software I want to build um you know all open source of course but um yeah fine in the time is still very difficult I'm hoping this summer will be more sane um because I think we like everybody else um have had the you know pandemic being over turnover so you know we lost a lot of people um you know and have to replace a lot of people and you know don't even have all the people hired that we need and the organization I'm with is like doubling in size every year um so it's been it's been a little crazy but we're getting I see a lot of intake in STEM I see a lot of people showing interest in STEM these days so when I went for grad school that particular semester there were like 300 to 400 computer science master graduate students and then the next semester there were like 600 or 700 like yeah like it was just like doubled in like less than a year yeah right so yeah I could imagine like it must be like crazy busy well we're yeah so it's we're getting a lot of more students and then on top of that like it's a new department right so we're doing data science and uh and so we you know our first freshman class was this fall um and we took I don't know something like 100 new freshmen but I think we want to like double and triple it but we also need faculty members to teach the classes so we had it we added like seven new faculty members last semester um and we're gonna add another seven um and while that doesn't sound like a big number for like you know like red hat or whatever like normally uh uh department adds like a person every year maybe a person every two years um you know so adding seven is like a lot a lot it's kind of it's been kind of crazy uh well so we're just about here uh so you have to say thanks so much for your time um and I hope you enjoyed the drive oh I really loved it as long as I didn't have to drive it and it's like really really enjoyable so thank you so much for having me yeah no problem I'm always glad to do it I'm looking forward to all the awesome things that KBEI is gonna do yeah yeah and it's uh you know you do co-host the KBEI show so maybe the next time we do something like this we're gonna make you actually drive people around or whatever we decide to do as long as we are going to be in the parking lot right exactly all right well thanks thank you so much