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Darragh Grealish

SocratesCH - First post-COVID in-person event /w 56K.Cloud

After a two-year wait, and anxiety around COVID. The 56K Team was able to finally attend an in-person event it sponsored along with AWS, House of Test et.. After a great turn, with almost 50 developers across Switzerland and abroad that joined for 3 packed days of sessions above in the Swiss Alps. We are happy to share with you a short look at the sessions contributed by the 56K team

This is the 5th Installment of SocratesCH event which we happy co-organization along with 42Talents and myself (Darragh) and Patrich Baurgartner have been happily working together to make it always a great event! This year we had the chance to meet one of the founding members of the MiaEnendaig movement (pictured Jon Erni) which promotes the "my third place" concept where your work, home, and a destination away from both to find inspiration and flexibility to have a work-life balance, founded before COVID, their vision is well in-line with the new-normal! we are very happy for our earlier involvement with @AlpineCoWorking and the MS biz spark program (Info, https://www.startupticker.ch/en/news/innovation-happens-at-the-edge ) which brought the idea to host events up in the small village of Ftan at Sports boarding school HIF since 2016!

But back to SocratesCH un-conference, since 2017 we've been hosting it at the HIF in Ftan, Engemantion, it's a yearly developer un-conferences / open space formate where the attendees bring the agenda and discuss, you can find more about how this works over at Socrates website. This year 56K attendee's with Jochen and Vadim both contributed and myself contributed sessions. and we had quite a challenge to get there on Wednesday before the event,  but what an exciting challenge it was.  Enven

The weather was for sure an exciting part of the trip, for a serious drop of snow awaiting us the next day, check this dump out

But the following day was very rewarding, the weather was sunny and clear with an amazing view!

Introduction to WebAssembly - Jochen Zehender

WebAssembly is something you hear more often. However, leading up to SoCraTes, I only heard about it but didn't know what all the fuzz was about. Even, Docker Co-Founder Solomon Hykes said that with its existence they wouldn't have had to create Docker.

So I asked for people to join the session, who have experience with WebAssembly and can teach me and the others. In order to be at least a bit prepared for the session, I went through the Compiling from Rust to WebAssembly tutorial beforehand. This walks you through the steps to create a rust function and compile it to WebAssembly. This function is then called from JavaScript and itself calls again a JavaScript function.

I kicked off the session by walking everyone through the example. After which everyone had a basic idea of what WebAssembly tries to achieve. We even made some changes and enhanced the example. This allowed us to better understand the interaction between JavaScript and WebAssembly. We then talked in more depth about how the programming language's specific properties are preserved. We also briefly touched on the possibilities of running WebAssembly on the server-side.

The session went by way too fast. However, it was a lot of fun to have a "deep dive" into WebAssembly. The people joining the session, all participated by asking questions, answering them, or researching on the fly in order to learn. I have now a better understanding of the topic. I am also encouraged to propose again a topic I want to learn about. An unconference like SoCraTes is the best place to learn about new things from smart people.

Let's build a Kubernetes (K8s) operator - Vadim Bauer

Now that Container adoption and Kubernetes have truly become mainstream, more organizations appear to be crawling up the cloud-native stack, leveraging Kubernetes APIs and interfaces. Kubernetes sees the similar fate of ubiquity like Linux, which now resides inside so many other platforms and devices: TVs, phones, fridges, and even on the Mars rovers.

The consequence is that "normal" Kubernetes developers who move up the stack also start extending Kubernetes with so-called Operators. So far the common approach is to choose one of the many popular Operator SDKs like the Operator Framework or Kubebuilder. These popular Operator SDKs have, however, a different target audience in mind. Their SDKs are designed more towards product teams, who intend to ship the Operators next to their products or have a wide audience in mind. Hence, the SDKs have a steep learning curve and quite some overhead and aren't the right fit for internal use.

In our session, we addressed specifically the use case of building operators for us and our internal use case. We looked at the shell-operator and even created our own fully functional Operator with Kopf in less than one hour. Given the fact that nighter the attendees nor I had written any Kubernetes Operator before that session shows, it makes sense for developers and operators to create Operators for internal use. Here is a list of other notable Operators.

Here are the notes from the session with self paces examples.

Deep dive into IoT Security - Darragh and Tasio

It's always great to bring hardware to an event, and even better if you can share with others that hardware. I had with me the Qualcomm RB5 a 5G / Automotive focused device that was running Ubuntu Core + AWS IoT Greengrass and PARSEC. I wanted to bring up IoT security at the edge as after working on this topic the last few months and getting deep into a particular part I was surprised that few devices out there actually secure down to a hardware level or use the features provided by the device platform. So in this session, we covered briefly everything from TPM's to SPU, and TEE's (Trusted Execution Envire) and UEFI Firmware

Tasio covered about AWS IoT Ecosystem and what Greengrass is, then I jumped into the tech details and later we had a discussion around the challenges of security on the devices, the array of systems that do security and it's approach from TPM's TEE, SPU etc..

Takeaways:We had a nice bit of attendees as it was back-to-back with the RUST talk and web assembly, one of the fun aspects was showing the Parsec project rust implementation

And it could have been an event without NFT's

This we did in the evening, which was actually quite interesting to over

Group photo to close off the great 3 days!

We got some exposure too, Check out the interview with Jon Erni from MisEngdina with Darragh and Patrick,  did during our stay in Ftan

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Darragh Grealish

Co-Founder and CTO