Live and let Learn

For the past couple of years while working towards my pilot licence, I’ve looked for interesting ways to use my open source software engineering experience in an aviation context.

As 2025 comes to an end, I’ve been thinking about my own journey to gaining my commercial pilot licence and multi-engine instrument rating.

I love learning together with others who are going through similar experiences and working through similar things.

Read the close-call Blundering through the Authority Gap from the Flight Safety Australia website where one pilot describes, as a young pilot, their passenger stepping into the role of co-pilot and navigation expert in a bad weather situation.

I’ve been working in software development for a whilie now and have consistently chosen to stay in an individual contributer role because, among other reasons, I love working and learning together in a team solving problems with code.

I love chatting about science with whoever I find myself with and learning together through those interactions.

For the past year I’ve been working with the people at GoSource around 3 days per week while also working towards my commercial pilot license (more on that journey separately).

In mid 2022 I was presented with an amazing opportunity through no effort of my own: VMware, the company I worked for, announced it was being acquired by a non-remote, non-open-source-oriented multi-national in a somewhat lengthy 18 month process.

The Day 03 challenge involves the calculating whether a character symbol is adjacent to a part number in a two dimensional map, such as: 467..114.. ...*...... ..35..633. ......#... 617*...... .....+.58. ..592..... ......755. ...$.*.... .664.598..

After refreshing my knowledge of the rust parsing library ’nom’ with the day01 challenge, I was keen to do the second challenge without, simply using the standard library’s string manipulation and default parsing for this simpler parsing problem.

It’s been quite some time since I’ve taken time to enjoy coding challenges primarily for the fun of it.

One of the great aspects of working at a larger company like VMware is that there are programs like Take 3, designed to help people who meet certain criteria to take 3 months on a different project to learn new skills in other contexts and bring those ski…

During a career as a software engineer, every now and then you come across a design pattern that becomes your darling for a few years following the discovery.

The recent release of Kubeapps marks a milestone for the Kubeapps team in that we are no longer restricted to presenting a catalog of only Helm packages in our UI and, behind the scenes, we’ve addressed a long-standing security issue to remove the reverse…

This is the second post in a series of two post detailing the steps that I took to install Kubeapps running on a TKG 1.3 cluster on AWS configured to allow user authentication via the TKG identity management: The first post focuses on the TKG 1.3 setup re…

Way back in 2020 I’d detailed how I’d setup a Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 1.1 management cluster with OpenID Connect support (for single sign-on) before installing Kubeapps with single sign-on on that management cluster.

We’ve been able to run Kubeapps in a multi-cluster setup on various Kubernetes clusters for a while now, but this was dependent on the Kubeapps’ user being authenticated in a way that all the clusters trust.

For the past couple of years I’ve been working on the Kubeapps project, which until recently has been a UI dashboard for the Helm project - providing a simple, web-based UI to deploy applications on Kubernetes.

The 8th day of our course was completely blown out weather-wise with no possibility of flying, which is unfortunate as most of us only need to do some ridge soaring hours practising the give-way rules of the air and get more experience doing our reverse l…

There’s some windy weather headed this way for the weekend, so our aim for the day was to get as much practise in as we could, which is exactly what we did - a day without theory classes!

We started the day at 7:45 heading up the hill in the basher to the North launch at Mt Borah again.

The winds just wouldn’t cooperate today, even for learning reverse launches in the paddock.

At 8am we were in the basher heading up to the north launch and ready to go!

As planned we headed out to the training slope first thing this morning at 8am as the wind was calm but would be getting stronger later on.

We started early today, heading straight out to the training hill which sits in the morning sun and so has heated air rising for a nice gentle breeze (anabatic flow).

Starting from the harness attachment loops we worked through the correct names for all the parts of a glider through to the canopy while learning how to identify any issues along the way.

For over a year now I’ve been working together with Andres on the Kubeapps project at VMware and have made various videos of new features that we’ve worked on, but I’ve never stepped back to give an overview and answer the more general question, “What is…

This is part two of a series detailing the steps required to run Kubeapps on a VMware TKG management cluster (on AWS) configured to allow users to deploy applications to multiple workload clusters, using the new multicluster support in Kubeapps.

Andres and I have been doing quite a bit of feature work in Kubeapps over the past months at VMware and one of the key features that I’ve been working on personally is enabling Kubeapps users to deploy applications not only on the cluster on which Kubeapps

I’m currently travelling at nearly 300km/h through the Spanish country-side on my way to Seville to meet some of the Bitnami team, but it’s not the speed which has me surprised, but the willingness of people to engage with total nearby strangers.

I recently purchased a Dell XPS13 (9365) (thanks to Bitnami for whom I now work) which comes with Windows 10 preinstalled.