This will be both an in-person and online meeting.
Link to online meeting:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/89410205410?pwd=RUFQM3JIT1kvblNpbmo0dktUaU9GUT09
6:00pm - 7:00pm -- Meet & Greet
7:00pm - 8:00pm -- Speaker Presentation
8:00pm - 10:00pm -- After Party
Topic: A Guided Tour of the Open Source Projects that Quietly Run Kubernetes Everywhere
I began a graveyard shift job in 2019 for Covenant Health in their data center. I showed a curiosity in learning more, so a dayshift mentor emerged. It started with a Raspberry Pi and a dream, but it quickly took on a life of its own.
During COVID-19, there was a huge surge in creating home labs and home offices, so there was an abundance of up-to-date content to watch and read. What started as a single Raspberry Pi grew into a home lab infrastructure that, at its peak, included 32 computers running 17 different operating systems and 6 external devices.
Using the home lab, Alex taught himself Linux, basic networking, Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible, and much more. During this talk, he will discuss his journey, his successes and failures, and the decisions---both good and bad---that shaped his path, with the hope of encouraging others to embark on similar learning adventures.
About the Speaker
Alex Franklin is a self-taught IT professional that has worked in television, healthcare, and now a National Lab. After 2 brief stints in 2 different colleges out of high school, Alex hung up the books and classrooms temporarily to become a Martial Arts instructor in 1999 and opened his own school in Maryville, TN in 2001. In 2005, Alex went back to school and graduated with an Associates of Applied Science in Design before teaching himself IT. It was a long, twisting road to his current position at Oak Ridge National Laboratory as a Kubernetes Platform Engineer, but those experiences allowed him unique perspectives that he brings with him to both his professional and private life. Outside of work, Alex enjoys the creative endeavors, such as art, writing, photography, video and photo editing, sighing heavily as he builds and often destroys things in his homelab, and the occasional glass of Bourbon, Mojito, or Amaretto Sour. He loves exploring technologies that are TRULY open source, riding in his Jeep Wrangler with the roof off, and spending time with his wife, children, and pittie best friend, Brom.
