Day 31 - 60

The Learning Curve

The first round of dust settled pretty quick. The daily routine taking hold, legal to work in Germany, got the equipment, met the team. So, what’s this Kubernetes thing and how do we use it?

Positions and Titles of my Dev. Colleagues

Some of the titles of my colleagues are easy. We have the Co-Founders, CTO, UX/UI, Working Students, etc. But better understanding what my colleagues do, besides run Kubernetes infrastructure has been a real learning curve. We have Solutions Engineers, Platform Reliability Engineers, Support Engineers, a Developer Advocate only to mention a few. Each developer does their thing and I do mine - and from what I’ve found, they know as much about what I do as I now about what they do, all the way from the daily routine to the terms and acronyms we use.

Terms and Acronyms

Admittedly, this is about the most fun part of the learning curve. Every acronym that you nail, gets you closer to actually (feeling like) you know what you’re talking about and even more importantly, what (the Hell) they’re talking about. Here are a few when using #Slack, GitHub, VS Code, Kubernetes.

K8s - It’s what we do day in and day out. Kubernetes.

Repository - A repository is usually used to organize a single project. Repositories can contain folders and files, images, videos, spreadsheets, and data sets – anything your project needs.

Bare Metal - A computer system running on physical hardware compared to using a virtual server provided by a cloud provider like AWS or Azure.

Commit - These are saved changes on Github. Each commit has an associated message, which is a description explaining why a particular change was made. These messages capture the history of your changes, so other contributors can understand what you’ve done and why.

AFK - Away from Keyboard. It’s to let your colleagues know that you’re not available for a period of time.

Retro - Look back at the month (time dependant on organization).

Branch - Branching is the way to work on different versions of a repository at one time.

SIG - Special Interest Group. These are groups that are used across teams to both help in a specific category (channel) or communicate to the entire team.

Platform Reliability Engineer - That’s Joe.

Pull Request (PR) - To implement a change using team-sourcing. Requesting approvals and comments from chosen team members. Once the PR is approved, it gets merged and goes live.

mühsam ernährt sich das Eichhörnchen (it’s a German startup) - Idiom: used in the English context of Slowly but Surely.

The Giant Swarm Infrastructure

Not going to go too deep into our tool. If you are interested in learning what it does, we do have several tutorials online that explain how we launch and scale Kubernetes clusters. Just know that there is a learning curve with this one that is ever-changing alongside the product - big one.

Competitors

As you may know, competitive research in online marketing is essential. I spent a long time researching competitors and running analysis based on standard practices. Things like what marketing automation system are they using, how many pieces of content do they post weekly/monthly, who picks up their stories in the media, how many followers, etc. Competition however in the Open Source space is very different. There are your standard competitors, which we all agree are not as good as us but there are also so many available tools for Open Source that it is tough to say who adds value to your product compared to who is your actual competitor.

Even with Publicly Traded companies who are obvious competitors, our team may know a dozen people who work there and we may even invite them to speak at a meetup. As long as they offer good insight to Kubernetes as a whole. That makes it easy to be a part of the ecosystem but very difficult to make sure you don’t plug a product that is the one gunning after you.

Settled in as the Marketing Guy: Days 61 - 99 »