Meet the team: Ilya Dmitrichenko (DX Engineer)
Continuing with our "meet the team" blog series, we introduce Ilya Dmitrichenko. Ilya is one of our talented DX engineers at Weaveworks who spends a lot of his time seeking out new technology and coming up with innovative workflows that end up in our products. In addition to this, Ilya is also a CNCF ambassador and is a presenter and one of the creators of the Kubernetes Office Hours
Next up in our ‘Meet the Team’ series is Ilya Dmitrichenko. A lot of you who are involved in the Kubernetes community may already know Ilya as an early contributor to the Kubernetes project, a popular community organizer as well as a frequent speaker on all things Kubernetes at many different events and conferences throughout Europe and the US.
Ilya is one of our talented DX engineers here at Weaveworks who spends a lot of his time seeking out new technology and coming up with innovative workflows that end up in our products. In addition to this, Ilya is also a CNCF ambassador and is a presenter and one of the creators of the Kubernetes Office Hours - a live-stream question and answer session that happens on the third Wednesday of every month on the Kubernetes Youtube channel.
Five Questions for Ilya Dmitrichenko
What does a typical day look like for you and what are you currently working on?
I wake up at 8:30am (sometimes earlier) and have tea and breakfast. If I have an issue to debug – I do that first, otherwise I look if I have important emails that I need to follow-up and do that while finishing my 2nd cup of tea. Next, I usually cycle to the office, but sometimes I take the tube or bus and do more emails or read blogs on the go.
Once in the office, I look at my Trello board and pick some tasks for the day. I often check Kubernetes slack for any ongoing conversations. I get most things done in the morning or right after lunch. The last couple of hours of the day is usually the time for meetings, including community, 1-1s and team calls. My day stretches into late hours sometimes, but it's becoming less of a norm, it usually happens because of meetups or conversations on Kubernetes slack with contributors in the US.
Any words of advice for others trying to learn about containers and Kubernetes?
If you've not been asked to look into it yet, don't be afraid to tell your boss that you must learn this new stuff, and the chances are they'll ask you earlier or later anyway, and if not – it's good for your CV anyway, or you continue advocating it for your team.
If you are looking and getting lost – don't panic, the ecosystem is still a little immature in certain areas. If you don't find an answer in the docs or anywhere else, ask on Slack or StackOverflow, and if you’re still unsure wait until the next Kubernetes office hours (third Wednesday of every month) and ask the panellists (I usually take part in European edition).
What’s your top 3 Talks/Books?
I've not read any tech books in a while, most things I deal with evolve more frequently then books can possibly keep up with. From the university days, I still struggle to call the K&R a favourite as such, but it was certainly an essential one and I must have enjoyed some part of it and appreciated the rest. I quite enjoyed "The Design of the UNIX Operating System" by M. J. Bach too.
I still have a few books on CPU architecture and other similar topics, like embedded systems and FPGA. I had a hard time trying to free up some space on my shelf... But I must say, and you might find it more a surprise, that my most favourite technical book of all times is "The Theory and Technique of Electronic Music" by Miller Puckette.
What do you wish other people knew about Weaveworks?
We are mostly known for our open-source SDN – Weave Net. While we haven't stopped working on Weave Net, we've been focusing our attention on other layers of the stack, including the GitOps pattern for deployments as well as Prometheus.
Any favourite cool new technologies you’ve been looking at lately?
We have seen many new things recently in the Kubernetes space. I am really excited to see Envoy adoption growing, especially with Heptio Contour and Gloo. I am also pretty pleased with the contributions of my colleague, Stefan Prodan to OpenFaaS. I am also hoping to see more innovation around container build tools, Box is one of my favourites, but I also like BuildKit a lot. Also, LinuxKit, of course.
Wrapping up…
If you are planning on attending Kubecon EU this year please visit the Weaveworks booth, register for our workshop, “Your Path to Production-Ready Kubernetes” or join the Live Kubernetes Office Hours at KubeCon on May 4th, 11:55am
For more information about Ilya Dmitrichenko you can find him on Github and Twitter.
