Tag Archives: Personal

Anything personal that might not necessarily be tech related

Let’s have a Conversation!

Hello! How are you doing? It’s been a while since we last chatted. Since you’re stopping by, you might notice immediately that I revived my blog (obviously). I took a break from it for a good couple of years while COVID did its thing; it made sense since we were locked indoors, unable to attend meetups, conferences, or events. Unfortunately, it seems like I did lose a couple of blog posts leading up to the shutdown, which I thought I had backup, but here we are. It’s all good… It’s just great that I can talk with you again!

Welcome back

What’s new with me, you ask? Well, as I started to get back into the open source world again by attending meetups and conferences, I even had an opportunity to speak at a pre-conference event during KubeCon Europe 2022 about Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery systems. I had a chance to be a part of an incredible team that created a Kubernetes distribution from scratch and was well received.

But… change was brewing at VMware and I found myself taking a new and exciting opportunity with a great and sharp group of people at Symbl. What is Symbl? Symbl is a rapidly maturing startup focused on the Conversation Intelligence space providing a platform to help other developers integrate conversational context into their applications and services via APIs. If you’re interested in learning more, watch this presentation below by our CEO and co-founder, Surbhi Rathore.

I have enjoyed my time working on application infrastructure, Kubernetes, containers, and everything virtualization, but this is a welcome change for me. Throughout my career, I have always taken on bold, engaging, and areas in technology that represent the unknown to me. This definitely qualifies. Conversation Intelligence is exponentially growing, and we are just scratching the surface in terms of its potential applications and what new features all of us can dream up.

Sky is the limit

If you’re interested in learning more, I will invite you to visit and read through my first blog post at Symbl. The blog is the first in a series that details my perspective as a new developer in the Conversation Intelligence ecosystem who is learning how to bootstrap themselves to become a power user. I aim to become a force multiplier who helps others in their journey to make their application and services conversation aware.

Like what you hear, follow me on Twitter at @dvonthenen to keep up to date on my adventures. I hope to see you out there!

Oct Recap: It’s Been a Trip

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.

CC Berlin

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!

Oktoberfest in Munich

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!

Drones

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.

LinuxCon ContainerCon Japan: Extended Edition

My recap of LinuxCon ContainerCon Japan just went live on the EMC {code} Blog and it talks about some of the things that happened at the conference as well as talks about some key takeaways. I definitely encourage you to go and take a look at the article. This happens to be my first blog post on the official EMC {code} Blog. Yay!

On to the Fun Stuff

It has been some time since I have been to Japan, but going back was a lot of fun. Below is a not so serious look at Japan outside of the seriousness of the conference.

Walking through one of Japan’s many multi-story electronic stores, I found a $1300 Rice Cooker. Yes, that amount isn’t a typo. I hope that thing washes my car too for that price.

The $1300 Rice Cooker

We found this Okinawan restaurant and found this guy parked outside.

Dragon Holding Some Sake

And in that bar, I got an opportunity to try Habushu which is a Japanese Liquor made with a snake in the bottle (picture below). Yes, there is a snake inside. No joke. Habushu is named after the habu snake, Trimeresurus flavoviridis, which belongs to the pit viper family and is closely related to the rattlesnake and copperhead. (according to wikipedia)

Habushu Liquor

On our last night, we visited the world famous Golden Gai in Shinjuku. It is roughly six alleys connected together that has over 200 tiny shanty-style bars. Each bar is large enough to hold 5-8 people max with most of the ones we saw being about the size of a 5ft x 7ft room.

Golden Gai in Shinjuku

Last but not least, when you are tried of eating conference bento boxes everyday and you need a change… you get KFC. That also isn’t a joke either. By the way, KFC is waaaaay better in Japan than in the states. Just saying!

KFC