Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #120, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland.
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I went to Oodi this Sunday, even though I tried not to. I was trying to push Prerna to come here, so that she could study. She had a similar goal. Eventually, I relented.
Oodi was full. On the side where Prerna usually sits, near the south end with the steps that go up closer to the roof, musicians were sitting with instruments of different sorts. There was a music concert happening there. When I reached there, the orchestrator, who I assumed was some professor at the music school, was thanking people for coming out, among other similar things.
I thought I should sit here and listen to them. But then I remembered why I was here. I moved to the other side, past the lift and the escalators, in search of a place to sit. Eventually I found one.
I pulled out my Mac and started studying. I had originally planned to continue my DevOps Learning Plan. I was behind on it. What I did instead, and I had thought about doing this when I was getting off the tram, was to renew my AZ-104 certification for another year.
What followed was me posting about it on LinkedIn, after which I started with my Learning Plan.
A bit about the Learning Plan
I asked Claude to build me a 100-day learning plan, based on the market conditions in Finland, and my experiences. One goal of mine has been to get more hands-on and in-depth knowledge of Kubernetes.
The plan is built in a way that by November 22nd it would be over.
As the saying goes, if you want to make God laugh, show him your plans.
Well, I did, and God laughed.
I am behind on the plan. Still on Day 4, while I should have been on Day 14. But that’s OK. Life has a funny way of throwing curveballs. It did. I’m reeling.
And so it goes.
Last week, I went to two awesome meetups - a DevOps Finland meetup on Tuesday, and a FAUG meetup on Wednesday.
The first talk in the meetup was about a team’s experience migrating from Ingress to Gateway API. It was a deeply technical and highly specific talk. If you were planning such a migration, the talk would have been super helpful. I’m not planning such a migration, however.
The second talk, by Lucas Käldström, was about access control in Kubernetes. I loved that talk.
The thing with meetups is, if you’re not going into the meetups with a goal in mind, they’re useless. Sure, you get pizza and drinks, but what’s the point really. I used to go to meetups for fun, still do, actually. I’m interested in these platforms. I never had a goal, though.
As I heard Lucas talk, though, I got a goal. I will ask him to be my mentor. And I did.
After the talk, I went and shook hands with him, complimented him on his talk and asked him if he could mentor me. I was interested in Cloud-Native technologies and would love to talk more. He said sure.
And that was that.
We met and talked in Ravintola Taulu about contributing to CNCF, about being paid to do it, about how Lucas had started off with porting k8s to ARM because he wanted to run it on Raspberry Pi’s and there was no port available. We talked a bunch more. I showed him my learning plan, which he said looked OK. He shared some links which I’m still going through.
I finished reading Atomic Habits and The Courage to be Happy this week.
Atomic Habits is a much more tactical and practical book. It talks about atomicity - habits are small and they stack up to build a better life. And then how to go about building systems, so that you can do the thing you want to do. It is an interesting book - super dense, but there are quite a few things one could use to build habits.
The Courage to be Happy is a different sort of book. It continues from where The Courage to be Disliked ended. I wanted a practical guide to Adler’s philosophy, and this book had that, sort of.
In it, the youngster returns to the old philosopher and wants practical steps on how to implement Adlerian philosophy in his teaching career.
I was not super into the book in the first few chapters. That changed when the philosopher started talking about the three types of life tasks in detail. See, I’m not an educator, so I was not able to connect to the first few chapters. But when he started talking about work relationships - about how before you get a work, ability may play a part, but after you get a job, it’s your sincerity and the way you do your work that counts, I got hooked.
It was a nice read. Maybe not as shocking as The Courage to be Disliked, because I was already familiar. But like the first book, it gave me plenty to think about.
If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄
Until next week.
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