Meet the Team: Brice Fernandes (Weaveworks Engineer)
This is the first post in our ‘Meet the Team’ blog series. We will be showcasing some of the Weaveworks’ team who are attending, speaking and teaching at the upcoming CNCF KubeCon held in Copenhagen. First up is Brice Fernandes - software engineer, entrepreneur and instructor.
Welcome to the first post in our ‘Meet the Team’ blog series. Over the next couple of weeks we will be showcasing some of the Weaveworks’ team who are attending, speaking and teaching at the upcoming CNCF KubeCon held in Copenhagen from May 1st to 4th, 2018.
First up is Brice Fernandes. Brice is a software engineer, entrepreneur and instructor. At Weaveworks, Brice makes containers easier to use for developers. He has also taught different programming languages, built a complete developer learning platform and has been a startup coach at the University of Cambridge Judge Business School Ignite Programme.
His interests and areas of expertise are in functional languages, flow based programming, functional-reactive programming, polyglot frameworks and data-centric design.
Five Questions for Brice Fernandes
What does a typical day look like for you and what are you currently working on?
It's hard to say. A day will involve everything from collaborating with colleagues on our next workshop, talking to some customers on slack, interviewing an engineering candidate or trying to add a new feature to our product. I'm working on a lot of demonstrations and training at the moment, including the workshop we'll be delivering at Kubecon EU.
Any words of advice for others trying to learn about containers and Kubernetes?
- Go through the official tutorials. The Kubernetes documentation is excellent, and the tutorials will more than repay the time you invest in them. Thank you to those who contributed to making them so good!
- Be social. Talk to other people who use the technology at events and meetups. Share your own experience and questions. You'll gain a lot of practical knowledge while having a good time.
Can you recommend any Talks/Books?
- I cannot recommend the talk "Growing a language" By Guy Steele Jr from OOPSLA 98 enough. It's a phenomenal talk that uses the format of the talk itself to make its key point. It's funny and illuminating.
- I don't come from a ComSci background, and completing the exercises in the book "The Elements of Computing Systems" brought everything together for me for the first time. It's also known as "NAND to Tetris" because it goes through creating a game of Tetris from almost nothing but the NAND logic gate. It's also accessible with little more than basic programming knowledge.
- "The Future of Programming" by Bret Victor is an excellent talk that questions the progress we made in the last 50 years, and demands to know why some of the visions we had in the 1960s still haven't been realised. In fact, I'd unreservedly recommend any of Bret Victor's talks. See http://worrydream.com/. I share some of Bret's vision sufficiently that in a previous life, I ended up starting a company based on the ideas outlined in http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/, with the aim to improve how we teach STEM. (What happened after is a whole other story).
What do you wish other people knew about Weaveworks?
The people here are some of the best people I've ever worked with. Not only are my colleagues exceptionally competent and capable, they're also good human beings and approach their work with humility. Almost every interaction I've had with my colleagues at Weaveworks have reminded me how glad I am I joined the team. It's also a pleasure to hear what they get up to outside of work, from a healthy theatre addiction, to film criticism of 1970s Italian cinema.
What’s your favourite cool new technology?
I'm excited about serverless / FaaS. I can foresee an empowering ecosystem built on top of the technology, and think that we can get an enormous leverage by applying some of the existing functional tools (Function composition, Flow-based-programming, Reactive programming, etc...) and approaches at a higher level. The early signs are excellent, and I look forward to seeing what people will create in the future.
Wrapping up…
Brice will be one of the instructors at the ”Your Path to Production-Ready Kubernetes” workshop presented by Weaveworks. He is also leading the CICD BoF: Delivering Quality Quickly session. Both of these events will be held at Kubecon EU this year. There’s still time time to register if you haven’t already.
For more information about Brice Fernandes see his github, follow him on Twitter or visit his website.
