I have recently been doing a lot of travel for work. I know that for some, this amount of travel is routine, but for myself, it has been pretty awesome. In the month of October, I have visited 2 places I have never been to before. But before I start with the picture show and going into the cool thing that I saw, I think I need to start out with how all this happened.

The adventure first started out with an acceptance of a speaking proposal at ContainerCon EU 2016 in Berlin. Yes, you read that right! I was pretty dang stoked to be selected to speak at the event and also to help lead the Apache Mesos Hands-on Lab at the Open Source Storage Summit. The experience was unbelievable and was also a big validation on some of the things that I have been working on; namely a ScaleIO Framework for Apache Mesos which just so happened to be announced at the conference. I was definitely a little nervous about the date/time of my speaking session, last day and last time slot, but the turn out was still fantastic! For those that are interested, my talk focused around Software Defined Storage and Container Schedulers. You can view my slide deck on GitHub here.

Now on to the fun stuff! Before heading to the conference, a few of my coworkers and I stopped in Munich. I got to check out a bunch of stuff ranging from museums talking about World War 2 to sampling local cuisine (as in eating a lot of freaking sausages). Nothing was cooler though than going to the original Oktoberfest in a legit beer tent. The place was freaking amazing and although I am not a beer fan, I partook in drinking and had a blast.

Interesting side note, Oktoberfest isn’t technically an event… it’s actually a place. Mind Blown! When we picked up our tickets, we asked the concierge “How can we get to Oktoberfest?” They looked at us like we were complete mouth-breathers and smiled. They explained and pointed out where Oktoberfest actually was on the map, explained significance of the area where Oktoberfest takes place, and just told us we could get into any cab and say “Take us to Oktoberfest!”. We found that super funny… a little too much, but it was epic!

We then all took a train from Munich to Berlin, did the conference thing, and then hopped back home. We kicked back for less than a week and flew to Hawaii for work. Yes, that isn’t joke. And also not a joke, I have never been to Hawaii even though I live in the Los Angeles area which is just a small jump over the ocean. Our team, {code} by Dell EMC, was actually sponsoring the World Drone Racing Championships in Hawaii. Super cool! In all seriousness though, drones are emerging into a multi-multi-billion (yes, with a B) dollar industry with commercial applications like performing land surveys and the amount of data being collected by these drones is growing exponentially which is where Dell EMC comes in. Putting the business stuff aside for a second, after having tried it first hand using my Inductrix beginner drone with a cam and the Marvel Vision FPV Googles, flying drones is pretty cool!

What’s up next? I will be continuing the work that I have been doing on the ScaleIO Framework and will undoubtedly have additional surprises in store hopefully fairly soon! (With a blog post to accompany it!) If you happened to miss the launch of the ScaleIO Framework, you can find more information including a demo on the official {code} by Dell EMC blog.