Internal Workshop: Kubernetes

"It would be good to give an internal workshop on all this that Kubernetes has been working on"

Me! a junior! To give a workshop, I couldn’t believe it. I have colleagues with a lot of career and experience.

Yes, Kubernetes and Fluxcd, GitOps, something basic to explain how it works and how it is composed, package it with Helm, and finally deployment automation using flux.

Yes, me.

At the age of 27, I acquired teaching experience by teaching music, since I was 19 more or less. And if something left me and continues to leave me teaching, it is a path of constant learning. One does not simply "finish learning to teach", it is worth the beautiful tangle of words.

In my head, it was generated as a paradox because on the one hand. I thought from what place someone who is just entering, who is learning, who is adjusting to a new world, can come to teach anything to people who have a lot of knowledge and experience. But I also argue that anyone can teach and anyone can learn because it has nothing to do with the level of expertise, but rather with contributing.

Having to teach colleagues who have many years of experience, people who are ultimately my reference throughout this journey is at first a beautiful internal mess of uncertainty and insecurities. So with all that, we started the workshop: “What if I start it like this, if not, that I'm going this way, but I don't know and see what command you are going to throw in the terminal, check it and re-check it 30 a thousand times, that you notice how you express yourself ... and be careful, and also, that something does not fail you there live…. The hecatomb! " And so I could continue writing many, many more questions.

However, little by little I made more room for the interesting to contribute and help. Not only for contributing and teaching per se, beyond insecurities, but it is also something that is good. If not, because if there is something positive that teaching co-workers has, it is this feeling of being included in a world that at first is a little alien to you, but that gradually ends up incorporating you, it begins to give you a meaning of belonging.

As the days of the workshop went by, I assimilated it more and more, and little by little I was releasing loads of insecurity (and "nervous earthquake") because I also realized that we are all learning, starting with me, that I am just starting, even those who have already been in this universe for countless years, which is why it also helped me to break that vice of "dehumanizing" knowledge and also stop idealizing people who have such a high level of knowledge.

On a personal level, the most remarkable thing was the last thing I mentioned. I think it is one of the most important obstacles that appear for a junior, even when asking for help for something that may not be working, and even more so when teaching. The fear of "looking (even more) ignorant" ends up weighing more than gaining knowledge based on doubts that can be answered by colleagues with more experience who went through the same thing, or worse.

This is also reflected when teaching, underestimating one's knowledge and skills are very common vices that usually appear hand in hand with these insecurities, and even more if we add the fact that I am just taking my first steps.

That is why giving this workshop was also like a breakdown of fears and insecurities since there is nothing healthier than facing what puts us to the test. Little by little, one stops recriminating mistakes and ignoring successes to go on to learn and build from mistakes and appreciate successes.

When they told me if I wanted to write an article, the first thing I thought about was what to do it, if the topic to work on in the workshop, or what I “learned about teaching”. I think that on the web there is a lot of technical sections of Yamls and container orchestrators, of architecture design, based on AWS and containers, Kubernetes clusters Amazon EC2 compute instances and runs containers on those instances with deployment, maintenance, and scaling processes. So I preferred to elaborate on how my experience was, about how I felt so that I can serve other people who are just starting out and feel that at times they are a little frustrated, or that what they can contribute does not have the same validity as a colleague with more experience.

In short, teaching in this workshop left me with certain important points:

• Don't belittle your skills and knowledge.

• Teaching is independent of the amount of knowledge and experience you have

• We all have something we can contribute, and it is important to know how to recognize it.

• Teaching is also learning, and more between co-workers.

• Do not be afraid of error.

Entering Teracloud was an opening to a world of people with a lot of camaraderies and a great desire to learn. The fact of having been given the possibility of being in a workshop with so little traveled by myself speaks of the way of working and the human simplicity of those who are part, because essentially, rather than people who work, we are human, and making mistakes is part of this, and accept the error and build from there, even more.

Leandro Mansilla

DevOps Engineer

Teracloud