Milwaukee Code Camp

This most recent weekend (November 16th) I attended the Milwaukee Code Camp and was pleased with the content. There was plenty of food, coffee, and give-aways.

§The Talks

I attended five talks:

1. starting an open source project (link) ¹,

2. how to manage work life balance as a software developer (link),

3. getting started with Docker and Kubernetes² (link),

4. introduction to Terraform for cloud infrastructure management (link),

5. and accessibility (a11y) on the modern web (link).

   I am pleased to say the open source fellow recommended GPLv3, MIT/X, and Apache 2.0 (and choosealicense.com), so I have a lot of respect for him. I think a lesser open source evangelist would recommend one license, or strongly recommend one license. It really does depend on your project.

   I was able to get Minikube set up during the Docker/k8s talk in five minutes. No surprises when installing it from the official Gentoo repository. Just follow the installed readme, run the commands… it’s really quite easy to do. A friend commented it wasn’t so simple on their system to install Minikube and get it working.

   While I don’t think I would use Terraform at this point, I have a good appreciation for when I might use it in the future. In addition, I found a Terraform provider for libvirt, so one could in theory provision their own cloud infrastructure on a simple libvirt cluster with Terraform. I believe this might be my first use-case for Terraform.

   It was refreshing to see people talking about accessibility and the web. I am personally not a fan of the web stack for various reasons.³ But the reality is the technology won’t go away, and the browser is the greatest common denominator both reaching users and simplifying the a project’s platform support matrix. It was great to hear from somebody in industry “your website should be somewhat usable without javascript”. I am really pleased to hear this; perhaps there is hope for the web ecosystem yet.

§The Food

Sweet pastries, water, soda, coffee were available in the morning ad throughout the day. There may have been more comprehensive breakfast items (cereal?), though I was late for the first session. Lunch was Dominos pizza and brownies. There was no shortage of pizza. The coffee was catered from Panera Bread.

§Conclusion

In addition to learning about Terraform, Kubernetes, and accessibility, I met a lot of cool people. I think this event was an overwhelming success. Thanks to everybody who organized this event.