 So everybody hey, thanks for coming out here. We're towards the tail end of Kubcon. We're staying awake. It's great. It's great Welcome to charting your own course through the cloud native ecosystem and my name is Maddie Stratton And I'm Whitney Lee lovely to meet y'all So I first started learning Kubernetes about two years ago I remember talking with my dad on the phone telling him I was starting to learn this new technology and I was trying to describe to him how overwhelming it felt for me It feels like I'm learning a plate of spaghetti I said not only am I trying to memorize the shape in the placement of every noodle But I'm also trying to understand while how every noodle touches every other noodle and why I Remember Kubernetes felt so complex to the point of it seeming magical and as random and arbitrary as trying Understands a plate of pasta. Where does one even start? So everyone has a story Maddie and I are each gonna share ours and we ask that you reflect on your journey to So my name is Maddie Stratton my background. Well, everything's going too fast. Okay. It's fine First time using iPhone clicker. It's alright. It's totally good. I've spent a couple decades working in operation So my background is kind of traditional Jumping ahead Years ago when I wanted to learn more about DevOps. I decided the best way to do that was to start a podcast really because I felt there wasn't content that was beginner-friendly in that area and One of the really fun little secrets about running a tech podcast is it's a way to get people to come and spend an hour Talking to you when they might not necessarily spend that time Any other way so I had an opportunity to learn a lot from from folks in the industry of all kinds of different ways From doing the podcast. I also spent years and continued to as a conference organizer I started the DevOps day Chicago conference years ago. I'm one of the global organizers for DevOps days around the world and That's been a way that I've learned things because you put programs together You're exposed to those things and then over time I myself Wow that just totally ruined the joke Sorry, there's a delay on my clicker. Wow. Okay. Well forget that part um the story of that though was I Used to have the license plate DevOps on my car and then I moved to California when I moved back to Illinois I actually couldn't get the DevOps license plate because I already had it But they wouldn't give it back to me because bureaucracy So I needed something clever and came up with with having kubectl Even though I actually really didn't use Kubernetes very much one of the side benefits of that license plate though Is if the police are ever looking for me They won't be able to find me because they won't be able to tell each other what my license plate is because I'll all argue about how to pronounce it I figure we'll be fine and But then I went and I worked at Red Hat and Helping organizations through their transformation using OpenShift which meant I had to learn a lot about Kubernetes because OpenShift is a platform Built on on Kubernetes. So what's working through that gave me a requirement to learn that now today? I work at Pulumi and I do a lot with that both in helping folks who are using Pulumi to build and deploy and manage their Kubernetes environments, but also myself. I'm building it. I'm building things for demos for workshops So it's really given me this need to have this hands-on kind of applicable approach to to my learning about Kubernetes Mine so I am a career changer I've sent most of my adult life as a wedding photographer as a wedding photographer for 10 years I photographed I've been to over 500 weddings So at the end though the business ran me instead of me running the business I was super stressed and ready for a change So when my brother's band mutual benefits got some notoriety and he wanted to go on tour He invited me to play keys in the band and to sing harmonies so I jumped at the chance so I Spent all my savings giving my wedding clients back their money. My partner at the time wasn't supportive. We'd been together eight years gone And I put all my stuff in his storage and I lived address free for a year touring in a band Then when I got back, I wasn't sure what to do next my son was in college studying Software engineering and he was like hey mom mom you would like this you should try it out And so I did and I really enjoyed it. So I ended up going to a boot camp I wrote my first line of code in January 2019. I Spent hundreds of hours getting ready for boot camp once I was in boot camp that started in July I spent I did 11 hour days six days a week for three months graduating in October So and then in November I got a job as a cloud developer just like that So I I worked in a pre-sales team. Oh, thank you So I worked in a pre-sales team at IBM and we'd put together proof of concepts for clients But work was on or off and so when I didn't have work to do on the side I would make YouTube videos from behind the lightboard. I honestly couldn't believe they let me behind the lightboard when I was So green, but I think that's part of what made my videos good is that I really explained stuff at a beginner level So all in all I made seven lightboard videos for the IBM cloud YouTube channel and those have a half a million views altogether So then I realized actually this is what I want my career to be not the pre-sale stuff And so I got hired as a developer advocate at VMware tons you and I've been working really hard to learn Kubernetes last few years and learn it well and be able to teach it and now I have a show called enlightening So from behind the lightboard I'll have a guest come on and explain a technical concept to me And I'll draw out the concept as I understand it a show looks like this This is my mentor Rick came on and taught me how you add persistent storage to your Kubernetes application That's me So when we're looking at a big topic like Kubernetes like different things in the ecosystem it can seem very overwhelming and it can seem very overwhelming because well It is very overwhelming. There's a lot to it and We you know kind of look at that and I don't know if you know this or not, but the internet is vast There are a lot of resources out there So how do we start researching a big topic? And one of the things that really helps is to have a planned pattern that you can repeat So we're going to talk about this this cycle that we continue to repeat and if you think about it if you've worked in You know agile software development you think about DevOps all these things this cycle looks kind of familiar because what it is In a way is a feedback loop. We're going to sit there. We're going to say okay. We we're going to collect resources. We're going to skim through them. We're going to refine them. We're going to learn and we're going to Repeat this cycle and we're going to dig in a little bit about how this cycle works So the first step is to collect resources so find Introduction resources often ones that start with the title what if so you're going to get a sampler Now this doesn't have to be exhaustive The idea is for you to know what are the most recommended and popular resources out there just to get started Don't worry about actually trying to learn the concept yet Just get a sense of the landscape and a sense of what the choices are Now we're not going deep here while we're skimming these resources This is just to help us evaluate What we're going to focus on so like Whitney said don't worry about trying to learn it don't go too deep we're literally skimming over them to get a sense and Here's the thing at first you don't know what you don't know and As you're looking through these resources and evaluating one of the things to look for is What concepts continue to come up right you might sit there and say like there's a lot of stuff about storage I see these themes right okay. There's things about role-based access control. Should I pay attention to that? Here's the wonderful thing fundamentally. What's happening here is pattern recognition what humans are really great at That's what one of the things that's awesome about our prefrontal cortex that other mammals don't have it helps us look for patterns So we're saying what are we seeing come up as patterns? Now you kind of sit there and say okay with these resources what assumed knowledge are they expecting with this for me When I was learning kubernetes with my application developer background. I hadn't ever worked with Linux So when I one of the first resources I worked with it's like how do you find what application image is running in a pod like? Oh, all you do is run cube cuddle describe and then grep for the image and I was just like Grep what's that and like pipe grep this I was like I have no idea these language this language is getting thrown at me And honestly, I was so clueless that I didn't even know to look like oh I need to learn more about Linux because I didn't know it was Linux was the thing I didn't know So I ended up backing out of trying to learn kubernetes. I got a Linux command line book I read a couple of chapters of that and then I started my kubernetes journey back up What and you want to sort of sit here and say what resources? Resonate with you Personally right this may have to do with your learning style or your experience level how much time you have available And as we talk about this you may be a beginner at the idea you may come with a background of experience This is all different kinds of stories So what resonates to Whitney is different than what resonates to me is what different than resonates to you You're the only one who can evaluate that and then now now we're gonna let Whitney talk Now we'll take the resources we've collected in skim and we're gonna narrow them down So the idea here is like what Matt said to identify the resources that resonate with you personally So for example to learn kubernetes. I see a lot of people recommend to each other Go look use kubernetes the hard way go to Kelsey high towers resource and I'm sure it's an incredible resource But a little baby Whitney two years ago who doesn't know what grep is That resource is way way above my head from back then and only now do I feel it's in my zone of proximal development So now that we've collected the array of resources we've skimmed through them with chosen ones that resonate with us now It's time to learn so So the work of learning to to learn consistently the best strategy is to define bite-sized goals Achieve those reasonable goals and then do it again. So remember to reach for knowledge. That is in your zone of proximal development And then so the zone approximate development are concepts that will challenge you But are not so hard that they feel overwhelming. Look at all these loops We're just looping all over the place. It's phenomenal So the next thing you want to measure your progress to get a sense of accomplishment I personally love my Anki flashcard deck So it's spaced repetition study and I study cards every morning when I get up I added a stats plug-in too So I have a github style graph so I can see my progress and that I've studied every day Other popular note taking and study tools are notion and obsidian But maybe you're not that fancy Maybe you want to hand write your notes in a daily learning journal Or maybe you keep a blog of what you learn each day Like the there are different ways of finding joy with it and every way is valid The goal here is to keep learning at a consistent pace and to get a sense of purpose And a feeling of success and the journey in itself and not in those far away goals So years ago there was this up-and-coming comic named Brad Isaac He was a young comedian and somehow he found himself kind of backstage with legendary comedian Jerry Seinfeldt And he went to him and he just sort of came out and said you got any tips for an upcoming comedian And Jerry said to him, he said the way to be a better comic was to write better jokes But then he said, okay, how do you write better jokes? You write better jokes by writing a lot of jokes and by doing it every day So what he said to me said, okay, you're gonna get yourself one of those big whole year long calendars That's a whole year, not a not a flip one like in the picture But you know whole year one put it up on a wall where you can see it Get a big red magic marker and every day that you write a joke Cross off that day and then your whole your only job is to not break the chain Right keep them going and then you as you continue to do it You see this streak, you see this chain and you don't want to break the chain and it makes you feel good Your only job is to not break the chain and you notice that in any of that Nowhere did he's focus on results, it was just doing So you can do the same thing, you can say every day I'm doing something with my learning journey It doesn't mean I'm learning a lot, it doesn't mean that I actually I didn't accomplish anything but I did something Because when we get those streaks going it makes us not want to break them and we build those patterns And that's what moves us along So now when you're gonna go through this we're gonna ask a couple questions of you You can answer them to yourself in your head Because if we all answered them out loud at the same time it would be chaos But I don't know that might be kind of fun And these are questions that will help evaluate how you're gonna approach Your learning and your techniques So right now in your head ask yourself what is your own personal level of technology experience So when I started learning Kubernetes I didn't realize that a node is the same thing as a machine Is the same thing as a box, is the same thing as a worker And all of those things just mean computer So I particularly had to choose learning resources that have a beginner level Manny on the other hand started learning Kubernetes from a completely different perspective Where he had a lot of experience with DevOps already The point is learning can begin from anywhere And the next question you're gonna ask is how much time do you have to devote to learning Some folks are in a place where you can do full time boot camp style learning Where you can devote that's all that you're doing Some of us are doing it maybe 10 minutes a week And anywhere in between we have, we all live full lives that do other things We have different responsibilities, we're in different places There's no right answer but you wanna be realistic So you set yourself up for success You know if you realistically can't devote more than a little bit of time a week Then don't create a plan that's not gonna allow for that So you wanna make sure what you come up with is sustainable Whatever that way, whatever that amount of time is It will get you where you want to go So the last question you wanna ask yourself right now in your head Is what is your learning style Now you may not know the answer to this one yet But the good news is that's what we're about to talk about next So as we talk about different learning styles We're gonna focus on the VARC model So VARC stands for it's an acronym for visual, auditory, reading, writing And the K is for kinesthetic Or Kubernetes These learning styles are not mutually exclusive I personally think I'm both a visual learner and a reading, writing learner But Maddie identifies as an auditory learner and a kinesthetic learner That actually worked out really well Another thing to note is that concepts will sink deeper When you consume your concepts Learning more than one style, using more than one learning style at once So for example, if you watch a video that engages you both visually and audibly Then you take that and then apply that knowledge kinesthetically Then that's gonna help that concept sink very deeply for you Your learning style can also be situationally dependent So maybe you learn one way with work concepts in a totally different way When you're doing your hobbies So what type of learner are you? How do you know? Maddie and I are each gonna go over the four learning styles And ask you more questions for you to consider in your head To help you figure it out Did you know there was so much homework in this talk? So first let's talk about the visual learning style How do you know this is you? Do you understand information better when it's presented in a visual way? Are you a doodler? Are you a list maker? Do you see patterns in things? Are arts, beauty and aesthetics important to you? Do you enjoy consuming pictures, diagrams, maps, charts and graphs? If so, you're a visual learner You have a superpower So as you're learning a concept, draw out your understanding Maybe assign colors to common themes in your notes Your brain remembers colors very well So use this to your advantage On my phone I organize my apps and folders according to color Watch videos with a large graphic component Lightboard videos And visual learners may need more time to process material But then they often understand it more deeply This is something I wish I knew sooner Because in boot camp I felt like it took me longer to understand the concepts Than the people around me But now I know once I do know something it's really stuck in there And I can examine it from all angles So if you are an auditory learner like me Here's some of the ways to find out if you are Maybe you learn better when the subject is reinforced by sound I really like reading, but audio books help me catch things better Do you like to talk things through? It's actually kind of funny, while we've been working on this deck More often than not I would be sitting there and talking to myself Or we're talking to Whitney and say, sorry, I'm just thinking out loud I'm just thinking out loud, I'm just thinking out loud And at a certain point Whitney's like, well you are an auditory learner Another thing if you're familiar with the idea of rubber duck debugging If rubber duck debugging works really well for you And that's the idea of that someone, you know, a programmer came up To a senior programmer and asked for help with a problem And he had a person add a little rubber duck on the desk And said explain it to the duck And explained to the duck in the middle of explaining to the duck Figured out the solution, we call that rubber duck debugging If it resonates with you, you might be an auditory learner Are you really great at verbally explaining your things? Is that where those go in? Again, like me, I find myself often saying things like Okay, let's get this out of slack and get on Zoom and use mouth words for a minute That is definitely an auditory type learner I don't know, and maybe you create songs to help remember information People do that I've done that Oh yeah? Yeah Let's hear it I wish I was a Kubernetes baller I wish I could install her I wish I had a cube API I would call her I wish I had an app that was fast and don't crash And whose footprint was smaller Boom Fun fact, original title for this talk is I wish I was a Kubernetes baller But it felt like the other title might have gotten us through But a little bit better So if you are an auditory learner How do you maximize that superpower? One of the things is learning in groups Because we can talk it out So study groups, maybe a book club Get some study buddies Another thing is All of this material that we're providing here Could be written in a blog post and you might read it But we're sitting here listening to it be spoken And this is a different way So guest speakers, guest lecturers Go to meetups, all this stuff that's online And audiobook stuff I talked before about how I really like to read I like to read so much that when I was a kid I got in trouble, I got grounded from books Because my parents knew they could ground me And I would just sit and read One of the things I've realized over the last few years Is I've gotten into audiobooks is They resonate different, like I catch things I will listen to some of my favorite books And catch stuff, these are books I've read Dozens of times in my life And I'm like, oh, I didn't even notice that happened Because I'm at the pace of the narrator And also kind of explain things In your own voice And I said, my dog knows a lot about Pulumi Because I explain a lot of stuff I'm trying to figure out To my one-year-old Australian shepherd So... So is your learning style, reading and writing Here's some questions to help you figure it out Do you prefer to learn through written words? Are you drawn to writing? Do you enjoy reading articles or books? Do you keep a journal? Are you likely to look up definitions? Do you Google everything? Do you make lists? Interestingly, these two styles The visual style and reading writing style Have some overlap If this is you, you have a reading writing superpower So here's some ways to take advantage of that Read and write Note-taking is a powerful tool in your belt For me, if I read only The information goes in one eye and right out the other It does not stay in there, but if I read and take notes It's a different story Join a book club This is a fun way to reinforce your understanding When taking notes, don't write word for word Paraphrase the ideas in your own thoughts This will help you to think critically about the information Use flashcards Give yourself opportunities to recall the information That you're learning And strengthen the neural pathways That are forming in your brain And then our final style is kinesthetic And one of the ways Some of the ways you can figure out if this is you Is do you learn by experiencing or doing things I always think of kinesthetic also to me Is a visceral learning, right? It's somatic, it's body, it's feeling Do you like to act out events Or use your hands to help promote understanding Does it help you to draw things out? Now one of the things is I don't know if you know this or not I didn't draw these pictures because I don't draw well But I draw on whiteboards all the time But never to create an artifact that makes sense to anybody But I found in the days when we used to go out And do these things in person I'd be sitting in a conference room Trying to explain something And it's just a whole bunch of arrows and squiggles And doing whatever And it's literally just a dry erase marker That's following my gestures It is a way for me to sort of take my physicality And go into that Do you really want to have examples Especially if we're talking about technology and action And like real examples Not like dog implements class animal Right? But like a real thing That's saying if that makes sense to you Like good job, awesome That does not help me learn The you know those pieces Maybe you're good at applied activities Like painting or dancing Or cooking Or maybe you're good at them But you just like to do them a lot Like maybe I do, right? And you have to actually practice something In order to do it And for me I found this to be very true When I'm learning new technology I have to put it into a problem set That makes sense to me So that I can actually practice doing it And the other thing is Maybe it's difficult for you to sit still For long periods of time Have you noticed how Whitney has stood Very, very still and has been great And I've been And I'm like a conference speaker I'm supposed to know how to move on a stage And I still wander around So if any of those things are true You may have the superpower of kinesthetic So how do we maximize that? So and maybe writing code isn't the example This is one, but if it's a code type thing Write code while you're learning Go along with it Actually practice while you're doing it I also love turning learning into a game There's lots of different ways you can do that For quite some time I had an online game show called DevOps Party Games Which was basically just making a lot of jokes about tech One way to think about it I used to say that I wanted to learn Just enough about Kubernetes to make jokes about it Well you know what? That's actually not a bad way You know, you turn it into a game It keeps you kind of going But think about your pace We talked about how this visceral Kinesthetic style of learning Could actually be very tiring So just like Whitney said in some of the other ones It might take a little longer On the other side, if you're Kinesthetic Kind of pace yourself Because you're going to get pretty exhausted And look for real, exacting Hands-on ways to do things So they might be online playgrounds Might be easy local things like kind Minicube Something that's going to let you actually Just do this for real Without having to be given access To a giant production cluster And see what happens That could be a very visceral way to learn But maybe I don't recommend it Now, not to imply That Whitney and I are not real people I'm a hologram We are so not real We kind of wanted to talk to Some folks out in the community To get some thoughts on their journey And maybe some of their recommendations Because again, everybody has Some different stories So one person that I spoke to Was Gwendover Sanger Who's a software engineer Gwyn's tech background Again, career changer She did six months of a boot camp With Ruby on Rails Frontend stuff And learned Kubernetes as part of her internship And I kind of asked I said, you know, Gwyn What was a piece of advice that you got At first that was not helpful And it was this, right? I'm sure we've all heard this too Like, how do you learn things? Well, just go contribute to it, right? Well, the problem with that is What does that mean, right? Contributing to projects Can be a great way to learn But you need some guidance You need something So we kind of can run into that And then, you know, kind of ask What was some of the hardest stuff? And I really like thinking about this Because everybody has a different stumbling block So Gwyn said, I don't know This idea that you SSH into a node But then you kubectl exec into a pod It's just like where we trip up But every one of us out here Has got a different story of the one thing Where you're like, I don't know why That's just weird for me And then kind of finally I was like What was, what are the things Everybody was always insisting That this is really, really hard How many people continually heard this And even in a reassuring way of like Don't worry, don't worry Kubernetes is really hard The problem with that Is it kind of like Gwyn says Often times this is really when someone Is sort of referring to their Someone's inability to explain it And I'm just as guilty as anyone else of like Making jokes about Kubernetes Being hard because it's funny You know, I think we may have all seen Swift on securities tweet which is I think it was Swift, it might have been Swift or Ian, I now misremember but said I tried to explain Kubernetes as someone And now neither of us understands it The reality is this is not actually true, right Kubernetes isn't easy But it's not hard And it's not impossible What we have to do, this talk is about Accessing learning resources But those of us who are part of creating Learning resources need to think about How we can make this stuff more inclusive So now let's talk about Cat Cosgrove and her journey Like me, Cat is a developer advocate Who comes from a web developer background So the unhelpful advice that Cat got When she was first learning is the same Oh, this is always hard to learn This well-intentioned piece of advice Feels like a lack of consideration for learners So instead, Cat says It's important that new learners know That no one is an expert In every aspect of Kubernetes This is something I wish I knew When I started out Most folks employed in the field Likely know the fundamental concepts Of Kubernetes but they only have Really deep knowledge in one or two aspects of it So we also ask Cat What is the hardest thing about learning Kubernetes when you first tackled it And her reply, networking She said, frankly, I'm still pretty convinced That networking is magic It's not? So Maddie and I also tweeted Asking the community how they First learned Kubernetes One of our first responses came from Lena Hall who said I read a big percentage of Kubernetes documentation In 2015 in the last row Of a sparsely populated movie theater session It was fun. This tweet leaves me with more questions and answers What movie was playing at the time? Was it that boring? So Tim Davis said I still think it's a bunch of smoke, mirrors And a man behind the curtain He said, I learned it from watching you I still don't know it, send help And really it's sort of like The man behind the curtain, Tim We're kidding, we're kidding a little bit This is a line from The Wizard of Oz But that said, had to kind of Give a little bit of poke But I think the point here is that again As we continue to work there's always Still things where we don't completely understand And then finally I really love this tweet From Duffy and it kind of said There were three ways that he Kind of his story, part of it was Presentations from Kelsey Hightower And this reminds me of something I just want to call in and call out again We talked about Kubernetes the hard way Being not necessarily beginner friendly And everything like that, that is By no means anything to do with Kelsey Kelsey is one of the most accessible And creates all sorts of great content And is accessible to everybody Well that sounded more like Everybody can just go to Kelsey's house And ask about Kubernetes, I don't think you can do that But it's very inclusive stuff It's just that specific resource But then I also really like this idea Of like going into the slack But sometimes just by watching What other people have, which is kind of A reiteration on why learning in the open And asking questions in public Is really powerful because You'll actually get more answers yourself anyway But it helps other people And then also Duffy was working Actually on CoreOS, but I love this idea that Sharing with others is the most Effective way To learn a thing So we're here on the last day Of KubeCon, we've seen a lot Of amazing presentations From some of the Most advanced folks in our Community that are pushing The state of the art forward and no Kubernetes Better than anyone we could think of Every one of those people Was where you are now Where I am now, they've all been Somewhere, they got to where they are And you're going to get to where You need to be And then you can help all the others So let's go over Some takeaways So as we discussed at the beginning When you choose educational resources To start with, consider three things Consider your own personal knowledge level The amount of time you have to devote To learning and your learning style Track your study habits So that you have a sense of purpose And a feeling of success In the journey itself Remember, it's not about the results Learning is a lifelong process No one is perfect So if you miss some study days Be kind to yourself And get back to studying Life is messy and complicated And it can vary from moment to moment This is okay You know, earlier we said You don't know what you don't know Well, I'll tell you who it does know What you don't know, a mentor So... Sorry. So your mentor can give you Amazing perspective and guidance About what is the next best step And then finally There's no getting around it Deep learning takes time So accept that Build a good pattern And you can do it So this is our reference slide You can feel free to take a picture But don't worry, I'm going to give you A better way to get at these references So either that But we've got a lot of background articles On things that we've done But to make life even easier You can go to this bit.ly Or this QR code will take you to Where you can get the slides As well as on the website That has a link to all the resources That we refer to plus a bunch Of other great ones And speaking of even more resources In this very room At 4.55 There's going to be a great panel That's really focusing on some Specific resources and suggestions So sort of taking some of these ideas So giving you some great things to add To your collecting of resources So I highly recommend everybody come back For that panel. It's even in the same room I mean you have to wait a long time To sit in here so maybe go do something Else for a little bit But come on back again So my name is Matt Stratton And this is Matt Stratton And this is Matt Stratton And this is Matt Stratton And I'm Whitney Lee This has been super fun, thanks y'all I think if people have questions You can find us on Twitter We'll be hanging out up here if anybody wants To take some questions and stuff But I think we went right up to the time Thank you so much