Introducing codeAbout Livestream Series for the Harness User Community

Good day everyone! I’m Kevin Poorman, developer advocacy director at Harness! Good to ‘meet’ you. I’m relatively new here at Harness, but I'll be seeing a lot of you soon on codeAbout! What’s codeAbout? Oh, heavens to Siri! Forgive me, I’m having a race-condition morning where everything is out of order. Let me try that again!

What’s codeAbout?

I’m excited to tell you about a new livestream series that we’re kicking off called codeAbout. Yep, a livestream. If you’re new to that idea, just think about it as a webinar with a three bug minimum. 

I’ve created codeAbout because in my 25 years of software development, I've learned (the hard way) how I learn best. And of all the things I've tried, I learn best when I, (ahem) “code about and find out.” 

On the livestream, you’ll get to join and interact with your’s truly, guests, and the extended Harness community. While everyone’s invited, this content is tailored to developers and engineers. We’ll be exploring all the nooks and crannies of the Harness ecosystem from CI to CD to Chaos. We’ll have guests (wanna be a guest?) to build real-world solutions to unique and fun problems engineering teams are facing. 

Some of our content will be for those developers who barely know what CI is. Other content will be by and for the grizzled veterans of the DevOps world. 

What can you expect from a codeAbout episode?

I remember back in the 90’s (yep, I’m an elder millennial), there was this zeitgeist of must see TV! Look, I don’t want to over promise and under deliver, but I think codeAbout is the must see stream you’ve been looking for. Like your favorite hits of yester-year, codeAbout has a defined, regular schedule. We’ll be live (most) Thursdays at 1pm Eastern. That's 10am Pacific, or 18:00 Her Majesty’s time and 22:30 IST. Can’t make that time because you’re in the middle of your weekly Yak-shaving or walking your pet butterfly? That’s ok. The cool thing about streaming is that the episodes will live on for you to watch on demand.

Like any great thing, there are some rules, and like all rules I’m sure we’ll inadvertently break them. Let’s go over those rules, so you all know what to expect.

1. Failure is always an option. We learn by doing, and that means sometimes failing. We don’t give up, even if and when we run out of time.
2. codeAbout is not a product pitch, and it’s not scripted. It’s more like Running Wild with Bear Grylls, than Friends. This is to say we’re not presenting known solutions. It’s not like we’ve practiced this stuff and have a polished demo for you. We’re truly coding about and finding out. That also means that we’re honest with you. If we get into a bit of (@#$@#$) UI, you’re gonna hear us talk about how we wished it worked this-other-way. 
3. We want you to take part. And there’s many ways you can do that. Be the life of the party, and set up watch parties with your colleagues. I like to call this the “lunch-n-laugh” option. If you’re able to join us live, you can always interact with us via the chat system. That’s right, codeAbout is open for questions, comments, and snide remarks! Finally, wanna be internet famous? Let’s chat, and we can have you on the show, on camera! Hit me up on Twitter at @codefriar, or email me, and we’ll talk about how to get you on!
4. We’re going to model sustainable development and operations practices. This means that we'll bang our head against a problem for a bit, but the time will come where we crack open the docs together. It means that we’ll file bug reports when the Harness ecosystem doesn’t work as expected. Like that one time when my pipeline failed with the error ‘PC LOAD LETTER.’ It means if you’ve got a request, a problem, a frustration, or if you’ve found warts in our ecosystem, then we’ll discuss them. We’ll look for work-arounds, fixes, and unorthodox solutions. 

So what are we going to cover?

Oh, such a great question! As you might imagine, we’ve got quite the number of things we could talk about. Rather than bland promises of covering everything, I thought I’d share our first six episodes. (Note: These are subject to change if a guest has to reschedule.)

1. Getting started with Harness Continuous Integration. We’ll talk about what continuous integration is and why you need it. We’re going to focus on a 0-60 setup of a mind-numbingly-boring MERN stack app in Harness CI.
2. Getting started with Harness Continuous Delivery. We’ll focus on setting up pipelines in Harness CD to deliver our MERN stack app to a Kubernetes cluster. Along the way, we’ll draw a hard boundary between CI and CD, and we’ll discuss why you’d want to continuously deliver. Note: There will be typos.
3. That’s my monkey – an introduction to Chaos engineering with Litmus. We’re going to take our MERN stack app and break it. We’ll talk about what chaos engineering is, why you want it, and why you should set it up so the tests only page the newest member of the team.
4. It’s all fun and games until someone loses a drone – Introduction to CI using the incredibly popular Drone.io. We’re going to discuss how Drone is different from Harness CI. Plus, we'll dig into some fun, amazing and unorthodox ways of improving your code’s quality with Drone. 
5. Serverless Drone. We’re going to pick up where we left off with Drone. In an exciting twist of events we'll set it up for our app without having to set up infrastructure. 
6. GitOps vs CIOps – a steel cage match. We’ll implement CIOps and GitOps and discuss what the difference is, which you should choose, and how. There will be opinions.

Let’s recap: Mark your calendars for codeAbout

Mr. Bainbridge, was an ex-marine drill sergeant who ‘retired’ to teach me 7th grade English. I’ll never forget the way he drilled into us that for any event, we need to share the:

Who: You. Yes you. The sharp dressed person reading this. (Existing and prospective Harness users! )

What:  The (carnival barker's voice) must see live-stream of the decade!

Where: Twitch and YouTube

When: Most Thursdays, from 1-2pm ET 10am Pacific, 18:00 GMT and 22:30 IST.  Starting on July 28th. (Go make that calendar appointment!)  We’ll have the lobby open with some uber chill music about 10 minutes before we start.
Why: For fun. For learning. For Glory. In all seriousness, the goal here is to have fun learning together (say it with me now!) by coding about and finding out! 

I’m looking forward to seeing you there! Dying with anticipation? Go over to that Twitch channel and the YouTube channel and mash those Like and Subscribe buttons for me. It’ll inflate my ego in the run-up, and it’ll allow Twitch and YouTube to notify you when we go live. I can’t wait to see you all on the livestream as we codeAbout and find out!