My Experience at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon India 2024

Hi everyone, I recently attended India's first KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event, which was also my first tech event. I am grateful to have this kind of experience and exposure before graduating.

What led me to attend this event?
Well, I've been working remotely as an SRE and have been part of the LFX Internship, working on a CNCF project. This sparked my curiosity to attend the event. I also felt a bit of FOMO from not attending events. My interactions with communities have only been through open source contributions, slack and basically through my screen and I wanted to meet people, interact, and see how they think, which has helped them become leaders in the industry.

There were two types of presentations for companies and open source projects.
The first was the project showcase, where various companies had booths to display their latest products, features, and open source projects. Maintainers were present to explain their projects.
The second type was the classic tech seminars, usually lasting 30-45 minutes, where maintainers explained new concepts, methodologies, and best practices related to their projects.

I prefer face-to-face interactions, so I spent more time at the project showcase than in seminars. I met many amazing people from the industry, including some I already knew through my open source contributions and exploring projects as a hobby. Until now, I had only seen their names and faces on my screen, so meeting them in person was a great experience. I interacted with people from well-known companies like Google, Civo, Intuit, and KodeKloud, and met maintainers from amazing open source projects like Cilium, ArgoCD, Flatcar, Vitess, and many more!
I learned how they communicate, think, approach problems, and what made them successful enough to present their projects in person!

I also attended seminars that I found relevant, such as those on chaos engineering, Gen AI, platform engineering, and building resilient systems, which turned out to be extremely valuable.

Overall my experience has been great and I am looking forward to attending more tech events in the future.

PS - I had to write a blog on this :P
Thanks for reading :)