Sounds like a neat story title right?
The more you learn about me - the more you will see the experimentation is how I approach all facets of my life. From day to day learning and work, to my mental and physical wellbeing, the journey towards my daily %1 better never stops.
You’ll notice the Experiment tag across different series or blog post categories - This tag illustrates the many facets of life where I put experimentation into place.
Welcome to my Homelab series!
A friend and former co-worker of mine - Alex - was really the inspiration behind a lot of the homelab infrastructure that I learn/develop on every single day. He got me started on what to look for and what services I may want to explore.
As many homelabbers know - this only snowballed from there. I learned much of what I know about Kubernetes and all of the related technologies by trial and error of setting up a variety of configurations and machines. I used this as a platform to enable my learning and testing.
Given the wide-array of available options for where to write and host blog articles - what lead me to Hugo and the markdown -> html translation workflow you might ask? It really comes down to knowing how I operate and what would make this venture successful….
Knowing myself and having tried a number of content delivery blog services - I just didn’t feel at home with writing content in a workflow that suited me. Inspiration striking and translating that into words is still somewhat of a new a skill that I am working to harness. As such, writing articles may be a labor of love that requires multiple writes/re-writes.
You are here:
You might be asking yourself how you ended up here. I’m just as surprised as you are :wink:.
Nonetheless, these are the hosts for the website you’re viewing - or rather they run this workload and others with some room to spare as an experiment.
(More specifically - Two Raspberry Pi 4’s)
The answer is because I’m very extra when it comes to looking to accomplish any high-level objective in the most difficult ways possible (kidding of course). So maybe this is less of “Blogging the hard way” and more of “Blogging the extra way”.
How to be Competitive - Proposals 101 There are a lot of ways to be competitive in the Conference proposal space - but I will add the note that proposal reviews have a lot of dynamics - and not leveraging the “most optimal” scenario does not mean you will not be competitive.
Ensure your abstract and benefits to the ecosystem are aligned and don’t contain “fillers”. The abstract should be written to draw attendees into your presentation. Benefits to the Ecosystem should be written to get straight to the point - why does this matter and how is it different from past presentations on the subject. Do your research - you can’t predict who will submit a similar proposal to yours for the same event - but committee members are responsible to attempt to ensure the proposed content is not recycled from a previous presentation. Present new and interesting information. This is a space where we can particularly shine. We’re constantly producing and implementing new use-cases for tools and technology that would benefit the ecosystem. We also represent a group more often than not that is categorized as an “end-user” of some technology (IE Kubernetes). We can leverage this to shine light on these unique perspectives that might resonate with others (who knows, another hero/influencer could be present). Collaborate - find partners (company/industry/open source) who would be willing to collaborate on the proposal. This adds an element of diversity to a proposal that helps ensure the lens is crafted for non-marketing focus. Select appropriate categories for the presentation - what technical level is the content for the audience and what category does the information fall in. Selecting these accurately will lead to better success in the review process. While hard to explain without adding a flair of negative connotation - how well does the experience and credentials of the presenter align with the content to be presented. It is expected that the level of technical content is supported by that of the presenter themselves.