It’s been a busy few weeks…

I got back home from Kubecon on October 15, and dived into a bit of a maelstrom. I’m finally coming up for air. 🎉

First; I gave my Kubecon talk, and even PRed all the changes I had to do to get the demo to work back to various upstream repos.

If you’re looking to run the demo for yourself (and why not!); it’s published on GitHub at https://github.com/evankanderson/klr-buildpack. Feel free to file issues if you find any problems, but it is demo-ware, so I’m probably not going to update it a lot further myself.

Maelstrom the first

At home, Halloween was coming, and Emily and I had agreed to construct costumes for the kids (Legolas for Erik, Fairy Princess for Eleanor). While Emily took on much of the work (tunic for Erik, dress and wings for Eleanor), I’d committed to making a “Lothlorien cloak” for Erik, so armed with some basic math and about 5 yards of fabric in grey and green, I pieced together a full-circle cloak.

The basic principle of a full-circle cloak is pretty easy — you make a circle of fabric, cut out a hole for your head to fit through, and add a hood — but there’s a lot of sewing involved, even if your circle only has a 40″ radius (40″ radius = 80″ diameter = 250″ or 21 feet of hem). I also did a few nice touches, like pinning seams flat-open and putting a small angle on the shoulders, and then used some of the remaining scraps to make a green quiver.

Interestingly, an over-the-shoulder quiver and a cloak don’t actually work together, but there’s no real discussion of this in the book or the movie. 😄

Maelstrom the second

One of the things I work on at work is the Knative project. We’ve been working on getting a release out the door (another post on that later tonight to make up for skipping a week), and despite not being on the hook for the release machinery itself, it’s been a pretty busy time. To be fair, I had some last-minute brainstorms about how to make things better and then I implemented them myself. In particular, I got annoyed with having a bunch of “extra” controllers which are optional installs to make the experience better, and so I rolled one that I use (the per-namespace certificate allocator) into the main controller using a label selector to control whether or not it was activated.

https://github.com/knative/serving/pull/12174, if you’re curious. I want to shout-out to Matt Moore, Scott Nichols, Markus Thömmes and others who built the controller-injection pattern that Knative uses – this pattern made it a lot simpler to merge the controllers together than most of the other Kubernetes frameworks. (The sum total of lines changed in that PR and networking#537 was negative, which is the best I can hope for from a code change!)

Maelstrom the third

In addition to the Knative project, I work on the Tanzu Application Platform. We’ve been producing betas monthly, which is a great engineering discipline and is helping to smooth out a lot of the rough edges, but has also bene a huge engineering coordination effort, particularly as we start to get closer to a GA release and cross-cutting features which were “out there” suddenly need to have a resolution.

I will say that I’ve been overall pleasantly surprised by the packaging improvements from one beta to the next, and I’m looking forward to running an environment where I can actually take advantage of more of the “app accelerator” and “supply chain” components compared with where I am today.

Anyway, expect a second blog post about Knative 1.0 tonight, and then I’m off to bed.