IIt took a while since my last post, but there was so much to process! Having visited San Francisco after half a week of touristic sightseeing, the GitLab Commit buzz started to fizz at the speakers' dinner. The actual day started early with a walk down market street, passing the Twitter headquarters and Uber HQ on my left side conspicuously. Being part of the Agile Transformation track, I stayed most of the day at presentations given by my fellow track mates.

In preparation for my talk at GitLab Commit, I have asked several people about their experiences with GitLab in larger organizations. It seems it is installed in a lot of cases by developers or system administrators themselves, creating a grassroots movement pushing CI/CD. If you are using GitLab in your company, what are your experiences? I would love to hear from you and created a questionnaire. It is anonymous, and the data won’t be used commercially.

One of my dreams has come true! I am going to San Francisco in California! And also for an excellent reason. I am allowed to deliver a talk at GitLab Commit in January 2020! The talk will be about the easy acceptance of GitLab in startup culture versus the more tough environment of the enterprise. GitLab is very popular on the internet and has an excellent reputation amongst developers. The CI feature has been ranked as top of it’s class.

The last couple of years I have teached some Minecraft and Scratch programming at the elementary school my kids are attending. Together with one of the other fathers I am trying a new concept today. Let’s see if we can teach them to build basic websites. I have found some great courses at Skillsdojo and we will use those. Update: It was a great succes! We have learned the kids how to create a basic html page with paragraph and header tags, images and video embedding.

Now that my book has been published I have more time to think. It crossed my mind today that my earliest encounter with GitLab was in 2014, when we needed an on-premise git server, and preferably open-source. GitHub was already very popular back then. I remember how smoothly the install was using the Omnibus installer. We were with only 4 developers, and we did not even use issue management or any kind of CI for that matter.

After more than a year of hard work (besides the daily job), my book about GitLab has been published! Somewhere in the summer of 2018, a publisher approached me with the question, ‘Can you write a book about GitLab for us?’ At that time, we were migrating GitLab to a private cloud at the ING bank. I had a lot of inspiration for explaining how to scale GitLab in a corporate environment.

So, this is 2019. What is changing for me? Wel.. I am not going to spill al of my life over here, but I am planning to blog more. I totally agree with Jaron Lanier that the current social media are flawed. They are based on the ‘freemium’ model using adverts. He argues they are not ‘social’ anymore as we tend to see them but they have become ‘behavioral modification empires’.

Last 2 weeks it was ‘ateliermiddag’ again at the Prins Mauritschool in Rijswijk. These events are organised multiple times per year and the pupils of the school can do various small workshops. Together with other dads I’ve lready given a Scratch ‘programming’ course a few times in recent years. With an emphasis on the creative side to ensure that the younger pupils could join as well. It’s always been a great success.

Working professionally everyday with Gitlab has made me think twice of hosting my blog on an isolated Digital Ocean Droplet. Especially as we are promoting Devops and Continuous Delivery (for which I’ve been attending a training by Jez Humble last week!) So I’ve converted my blog to use Gitlab Pages. This means my entire blog resides in texfiles in Gitlab(.com) and whenever I push a new version of the code, the Gitlab runners build my blog using a Static Site Generator (Hexo).

Als je er op gaat letten, is het opvallend dat kinderboeken zo vol staan met stereotiepe rolpatronen. Stichting Zo-ook heeft hier onderzoek naar gedaan en wil kennis en bewustwording vergroten en ook het aanbod niet-stereotiepe kinderboeken vergroten. Daarom zijn zij pas geleden met een crowdfunding campagne gestart om het uitgeven van een boek met niet-stereotiepe rolpatronen mogelijk te maken. Zij willen hiermee laten zien dat het ook anders kan. Niet met het argument dat het ene rolpatroon goed is en het andere slecht, maar om ervoor zorgen dat kinderen meerdere rolpatronen zien, dat ze andere rolmodellen zien.