Meet the team: Daniel Holbach (Community Manager)
Meet Daniel Holbach, who joined us recently as Community Manager on the DX Team. Daniel is a software developer and will use his experience at Ubuntu to head up community events and meetups in both London and Berlin. He is also a Developer Advocate for Weave Cloud and for the Weaveworks’ Open Source Projects: Flux, Scope, Cortex and Net.
Meet Daniel Holbach, who joined us recently as Community Manager on the DX Team. Daniel is a software developer and will use his experience at Ubuntu to head up community events and meetups in both London and Berlin. He is also a Developer Advocate for Weave Cloud and for the Weaveworks’ Open Source Projects: Flux, Scope, Cortex and Net.
Catch Daniel at KubeCon in Copenhagen from May 1st to 4th and also at our workshop: “Your Path to Production-Ready Kubernetes” on May 1st, 9:00am.
Five Questions for Daniel Holbach
What does a typical day look like for you and what are you currently working on?
I get up in the morning, cycle to the Berlin office (a great time to listen to podcasts!), have some mate tea, go through emails first and get some stuff done before going out for lunch with the Berlin team. We all work on different teams, but it's a great time to hear about what's going on in other parts of Weaveworks. In the late afternoon, it's usually time to sync up with the Americans who get up and have just gotten through their mail.
I'm mostly taking a look at documentation, tutorials and how developers get started with our product Weave Cloud and at all the great open-source tools we make. I just joined Weaveworks a couple of weeks back, so I'm learning loads in this process.
Any words of advice for others trying to learn about containers and Kubernetes?
If you are completely new to Kubernetes, check out the Kubernetes tutorials. If you want to figure out what Weave Cloud and Weave Net can do, check out our own tutorials. They give you a chance to experience and play around first-hand and don't get you lost in walls of text and too much detail. Try standing up your own cluster using minikube or kubeadm - if you sign up for Weave Cloud, you can then observe what's happening in the cluster very easily - another easy first-hand experience to get you started.
What’s your top 3 Talks/Books?
- "Kubernetes: Up and Running" from Brendan Burns, Kelsey Hightower and Joe Beda. It's a slim book, very easy to read and has loads of tips on every single page. Opening it up on a random page will almost always teach you something useful.
- Not necessarily a book or talk, but I love the GitOps blog series on the Weaveworks blog. It explains very clearly how modern deployments should work. It looks at this from various angles and highlights the benefits from a security, team, technology, process and flexibility point of view. What I like a lot about it are the many references to other very useful articles which illustrate the thought process these patterns went through. It also explains what works well for us at Weaveworks and how we got there. This includes the story of a total wipeout of Weaveworks systems and the lessons learnt from there. Well worth a read!
- One talk you might want to check out at KubeCon is Alexis's "GitOps for Istio: Manage Istio Config like Code". I've seen some of the content already and it's going to be great!
- All the other books I read recently were all part of my non-work related training, oh and a huge compendium on the most interesting scuba diving destinations on the globe.
What do you wish other people knew about Weaveworks?
As most people already know Weaveworks for Weave Net and how seamless networking suddenly becomes, it's got to be Flux. It's been the open-source tool for GitOps since about 1.5 years already and as the Deploy feature in our SaaS-product Weave Cloud, it integrates beautifully with 13 months worth of metrics and great observability of your clusters. For the last few weeks it comes with Helm integration as well.
Any favourite cool new technologies you’ve been looking at lately?
Last week in London, my colleague Stefan Prodan walked me through his own project podinfo. It's a great app to learn about best-practices in the world of microservices and Kubernetes. It comes with all the bells and whistles you'd expect and the guides take you through deployment strategies, monitoring and more.
Wrapping up…
If you are planning on attending Kubecon EU this year please visit the Weaveworks booth, and register for our workshop, “Your Path to Production-Ready Kubernetes” on May 1st, 9:00am.
For more information about Daniel Holbach, find him on Github and Twitter.
