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Insiders Update: 9th May 2020 - Upping your game, The Cathedral and The Bazaar and VE75 discount weekend
Nat Friedman, CEO GitHub launching new updates and enhancements on GitHub Sponsors!
Thank you for being an Insider!
I write the Insiders Updates as a subscription benefit and to keep you up to date with everything you need to know - whether that's new content, offers, or features on the software I'm contributing to.
One of the newest GitHub features is a target goal of $ / mo or # of people in total. You can see that we're currently at 46% of the goal of 300 Insiders.
Technical marketing is a skill that needs to be developed and refined over time. Wherever you go on the Internet, you'll find both good and bad examples of it.
Not relevant to you? Here's a few activities where it could have an impact.
- Do you run a business or consultancy?
- Do you have your own open source or side projects on GitHub?
- Do you have a LinkedIn profile?
- Do you write Tweets?
- Do you work for a company and give a status update?
- Do you write blog posts or speak at meet-ups or conferences?
Those are just a few of the times when upping your game could deliver better engagement, and ultimately more options or earning potential.
Here are some resources that have helped me, but ultimately it takes time and needs lots of practice and feedback.
- Twitter Thread by Marketing Examples - 17 tips for great copywriting - some excellent examples of "do / do not" or "good / better".
- Book recommendation: Marketing For Dummies - I usually do not like this series of books due to the title and the typesetting, but this edition is an exception. Excellent and practical advice on psychology of creating a brand and connecting with customers / users.
- Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth - this book is introduced by the founder of DuckGoGo who explains how he was sitting on a pile of cash and wondering what to do next. Full of practical tips and hands-on information on using different channels and developing content and brand.
So how do you get started?
- Buy one of the recommended books (they are not referral links)
- Re-write the marketing or README file for one of your projects - or the blurb for one of your products
- If you write blog posts, think about the audience and the take-aways or actions you want them to take in response to reading your content. Go and write a post
- Ask someone who is good at technical writing or marketing on how you could improve something you wrote recently
If you're thinking of writing a blog post, but keep putting it off, or don't think that you're enough of an expert, remember my tips from my Insiders Update: 27th Mar 2020 - Learning and living with lockdown.
I paid 150 USD to write an in-depth comparison of the new RPi HQ Camera, so that you don't have to. So should you get it?
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In-depth review and comparison of the Raspberry Pi High Quality Camera
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Running Kubernetes from an SD card has drawbacks
Last week I talked about net-booting and offered you early access to a workshop for RPi3 and RPi4. Reply to the email and let me know if you'd like early access as an Insider benefit.
If you're an OpenFaaS user - whether at home, for internal use, or in production, your feedback is valuable and necessary to further the project.
20 years ago Eric Steven Raymond wrote a paper on The Cathedral and the Bazaar. In it, he compares top-down software development to the Linux-model popularised by Linus Torvalds - many eyes, many testers, users who are also developers.
It's a good read, even today and as a user, you're invited to contribute bug reports, feature suggestions, feedback on user-experience, and documentation.
- Roadmap - see what we're working on
- Start contributing
- Find the right repo for that issue
The same goes whether you want to contribute to openfaas itself or one of the other projects we are developing in the community like k3sup, arkade or derek.
Within the OpenFaaS project the Kubernetes operator failed with Kubernetes 1.17.5 and 1.18 due to breaking changes. A patch has been released, so if you use the Operator and not faas-netes, you should upgrade with helm or arkade before taking the next version.
The OpenFaaS operator enables the "Function" CRD in Kubernetes, so you can run kubectl get functions or kubectl apply -f functions.yaml.
It's usually enabled with arkade install --operator or by passing --set operator.create to helm.
Up until recently, faas-netes and the operator were housed in separate GitHub repos, but now they are both within the faas-netes repo and shipped as a single Docker image.
If you'd like to know more, ask on Slack in #openfaas, or read Insiders Update: 17th Apr - My Mission for 2020
When you are subjecting the system to high-load, or moving into production, one of the checklist items we encourage you to enable is endpoint load-balancing. Once enabled, all traffic passes through the gateway to faas-netes, which maintains a list of Pod IP addresses and balances the traffic between them. When disabled, the KeepAlive settings in Kubernetes and your client can override this behaviour.
Read up today on what we think it takes to put OpenFaaS into production.
This guide enables Kubernetes HPAv2 (Horizontal Pod Autoscaling) with Custom Metrics.
Why should you care? If you want, you can expose your own metrics to Prometheus to be used for scaling from 1 to N replicas and so forth.
You can also use the regular HPA tutorial to auto-scale based-upon memory and CPU used.
Read now: Kubernetes HPA with Custom Metrics
New video tutorial and overview of the use-case for arkade by Saloni Narang:
- Tunnel PostgreSQL or MariaDB with TLS
- Get a TLS-enabled Docker registry in 5 minutes
- Get kubectl access to your private cluster from anywhere
Do you have any feature requests for inlets or inlets PRO? Reply to this email and let me know what would save you time, or scratch an itch.
I hope you enjoyed the feature on upping your technical marketing game. Feel free to reply back with suggestions for future editions of the Insiders Updates.
SWAG that can brighten up the rainiest of days is still available in the OpenFaaS Store
Until Monday, you can get 20% off in the store with code
veday75on any spend of 50 GBP or more. This includes inlets PRO 6 mo and 12 mo.
Happy #VEDay75 and a great rest of your weekend.
Alex