From Code to Cooperation: Empowering People Through Technology with Hippie Hacker – Techstrong Unplugged EP37

Welcome back to Text On Unplugged. My name is Cassandra Chin, and today we have Ppy Hacker. Hi everybody.

So I know you're an amazing person and I really love a lot of your values. Hello. So like one of your sayings is like, you develop people, not technology.

That's right. Develop, uh, people, not software. Um, I think it's important to, to, uh, when you're meeting with people and trying to work together, it's not just about the technology.

It's about trying to figure out, um, what is they're passionate about. Even with my, my own kids. What are they passionate about?

And try to use that to, uh, help them grow. I know you started your company ii, you can explain the meaning behind it. Sure.

So, um, it actually started out as instant infrastructure. Um, and part of that was the fascination with all the automation that we have to try to bring technology where it was usable for someone, uh, without having to know a lot about how to use it. And that evolved into being really deeply technical about stuff and realizing if, if you just go deeply technical, it's, it's just noise and being able to focus on people.

I started to see eye eyes, two lowercase eyes and a lowercase eye looks like a person. So trying to bring into focus that when two or more people are working on something together, it's much more fun. So we put the two I together and doop instant infrastructure and we registered a do co-op domain because dot co-op is for cooperative, uh, ventures, so that's why it's ii co-op.

And most of our technologies and development are around tools for helping people cooperate on things together. What are some of these tools? io and it utilizes, uh, the, the different infrastructure that's been provided by the CNCF for our projects to set up Kubernetes clusters that on top of that we deploy.

We like to call them, I iPods you remember the iPods was the little music device that you could listen to by yourself. But an I iPod is a an OCI container that has like a development environment inside of it with a desktop and everything. And we use that to spin up, um, working on some source code together or working on the Kubernetes conformance program so that we don't have to do it alone.

So we'll actually spin one up and then we will usually pair programming where II is kind of known for the way that we work together on things. And that's one of the technologies would be sharing io, an II pod. And the other one's been a kind of a passion project over the years is, uh, we went to Cambodia, um, before I was, was around and made Bootle US B sticks for some of the, the kids there.

And, um, that allowed them to have a fully usable computer in their language, their own language. Um, 'cause most of the computers were French and some of the, the, the youths that I taught there have gone on to found, um, organizations that do infrastructure for the bottom bong area and, uh, do stuff with, um, infrastructure for the school. So I'm really excited around making something that the kids were able to boot do some programming or, or music or art.

And when someone would see it, they could make another stick. And so that we, we, when that first seven kids met together, they shared that with each other. Other people would see and they say, can we have one?

And they'd go get another USB stick and make more sticks. So we ended up having 30 kids in bottom bong and sire and an on pants and nearly a hundred kids. And that flowed into those bootle USB sticks kind of floated into our work with the Cloud Native Kids Day, which is how we met.

I have to tell 'em a bit about that. Um, but at the kids day they have a bunch of laptops that they bring in and being able to have the kids experience actually running Linux since we are the Linux Foundation, uh, to do stuff like Raspberry Pie and take that, take that home. So having a classroom environment brought up instantly.

So since the instant infrastructure part, um, and having the curriculum on there as well. Um, what kind of curriculum have you experimented with on the USB stakes? Um, mostly the, the curriculum that we've used are things for the cloud native, uh, kids Day program.

So we've uh, we actually made some of the book on there, uh, and we had some with the Sonic Pie, uh, curriculum. I think the genesis of a lot of that comes from the DevOps for Kids Day, the D-D-V-O-X-X. So you've got the Minecraft hacking class that we did.

So those, all of those curriculums that we've currently done are curriculums that were put together for either DevOps days for kids or for Cloud Native Kids Day. I see. And like you mentioned that you tried putting my books curriculum on it.

Yeah, yeah. Like it's on a web browser mostly. I, so I'm kind of wondering how you made it possible.

Yeah. So that was your, your program was a bit different than the other ones. Um, but the, uh, uh, trying to get the links 'cause we, we, I, we only did that classroom environment, um, as far as using it during kids' day for Sonic Pie.

So we didn't get to use it for your class, but some of it was allowing, like at the end of the class, what we would do after we've gone through the curriculum is to let them take that USB stick home so they could do, have the environment they learned in class at home as well. Um, it's great to have the web browser based stuff too. I think their book really great.

They promote like letting the kids do it at home. Yeah. And I believe you're involved at like your university.

Yep. So in addition to working on hanging out with, um, the Atlas Institute and Acme Lab, uh, I, I work with the, um, college of Engineering. There's a professor there that teaches the Designing for Defense and they, uh, have a two semester curriculum that has a cohort of 20, 25 students that focus on various, uh, defense programs.

And, um, so I, I have been mentoring some of those particularly ones that are useful outside of defense, like in community infrastructure. So there's a router program that's for secure routing that I've been mentoring for the past. Um, well since September.

What is secure routed, Uh, in this case? It is, um, they're, they have, they've been doing studies on the routers that we buy from, like Amazon or anything that, particularly the cheaper ones. And, um, some of that information is collected and made, uh, for, for in aggregation of data so that they can sell that information.

So there's more money being made from the selling of information about what's connected to the router. And obviously if you're in the military or you're in, in some defense and you can become a target for that. So they had, um, have requested that we try to build secure routers like direct secure router, firmware.

Um, a lot of our routers are based on open WRT, which is a, uh, a Linux distribution specific for home routers. And most companies, a lot of companies will take that firmware and create their own router that you buy off Amazon and they'll kind of keep track of all of the types of devices that are there and then sell that information for marketing purposes. And they don't want that to happen.

So they want us to have a, um, a a public resource where you can have a secure router at home that doesn't include all of that data getting aggregated. So does that mean most routers at home? Like your information is getting sold?

Not all of them. Um, there's, I I, I don't have the, the research in front of me, um, but they've done, um, they have ident or go through all the firmware for like 300 different common routers that are for sale. And looking at the traffic and what gets aggregated there.

And I forget the numbers, but it's disturbing enough that they're wanting us to try to provide a, an ecosystem, an open source ecosystem for, uh, routers that are easy to access. 'cause most people don't care that much about it or the security side, they don't even don't even know. And for military service people when they're not at work and not, you know, not working for the military, they don't care what they have at home.

And so there's this interesting dynamic of wanting to protect service people at home, but not being able to tell them, you need to do this in your own house. Yeah, that's interesting. Do you wanna talk about how like you moved to New Zealand?

Yeah. So I am, I, I grew up in Texas and then I wanted to go to the mountains because it was cooler, it's hot in Texas. And also to experience a different culture.

And I, uh, met my wife, uh, we were doing SLSA dancing and some other stuff with a group of friends, but she wanted to go to New Zealand to do willing workers on organic farms. And I was real sad that she was going. And when she said she's gonna be going for nine months, I realized I liked her and I said, can I go too?

So that would've been, um, about 16 years ago. And, uh, I think for the first, uh, five years or so, um, I, we, we did a lot of volunteer work and when we finally got, uh, the ability to work, I worked with chef, um, Adam Jacobs and friends. He was actually speaking earlier this week.

And, um, we were trying to deploy some, some of our nonprofit work working with servers to deploy more cruise ships. And that's when I, um, when I was working with chef, I met Bob Wise and Aaron Berger and they, uh, we deployed data centers on cruise ships and I wanted to deploy data centers on, um, on medical vessels. And they, they gave me a server.

And then when I, um, needed the, some resources to import in the New Zealand, they introduced me to Danton Con at the CNCF. And so that's where we've done from New Zealand, the most of the strategic initiatives for the last, I don't know, nine years or so. What are these strategic initiatives?

Um, so in the very beginning, uh, when the CNCF came came about, they were trying to explain the value of it and what it was. So we worked initially on the CCF slash demo, uh, which is an archive repo now, but we were trying to bring up easy examples. This was before, kind before all the, the easier ways of bringing up Kubernetes.

And I think after that it was the CNCF cross Cloud CI or CCF ci, and we would take the head of Kubernetes, the head of the source code, and we would build it from scratch. And then we worked with the cloud providers to deploy the head, the daily build of Kubernetes onto each of the cloud providers and also deploy each of the head of the CNCF projects. We had a matrix of all of the cloud providers, if you will, the, the sponsors and the vendors and members of the CNCF from the sponsoring perspective as a matrix of all of the open source projects.

And if something would fail, we could contact either if it was a line across, the provider says, Kubernetes isn't running on your cloud, or we could contact the project and say, your project isn't, uh, isn't deploying on this version of Kubernetes. Um, after that we did the CNCF credits, cloud native credits. So we worked with the different cloud providers to donate resources for the CNCF projects.

Um, we've done a lot of the infrastructure initiatives for Kubernetes and supporting SIG Kate's info, and the one that's been the longest term one was the Kubernetes conformance program. So we help define what the cloud is globally by working with SIG architecture and def define and, and helping, uh, taking their definition of what endpoints are there and writing the conformance tests. And we just merged that on stage at Monday.

So it's been, um, I think probably six years in the making. It's interesting. Yeah.

I'm real proud of our team. And you work really closely with your team, you Yeah. Developed the people.

Yeah. I mean, I, I, I think in the, in the early, early days of ii one of the, the, the local youth, he was a teenager by the time, was still a teenager when we flew him into Germany to kind of speak about some of the stuff we were doing. But when I met him, he was deploying, uh, his own racks in a, in a, it's like a shipping container on a farm near where I lived in, in New Zealand.

And, um, he just kind of, you look at people doing interesting things and you go, what, what if you could support them and see how far they could go? And all of the, the, uh, all of the people that would've been through, I, I, a couple of 'em are actually at the CNCF now. Reen Klein, Hans is our, was our project manager, now he's at the LF and CNCF.

And, um, it's been fun to see where people go when they're well supported. Think that's really great that you support people. Yeah, we're in an interesting transition now where we've been doing the strategic initiatives for the CNCF for about a decade and, uh, where the, the contract has ended.

So, 'cause we, all of our stuff kind of started with Dan and we've gone through supporting how we can, and so my goal right now is to try to find a place for the team to go, or at least find a place for my, for my staff to find a, a new home as we transition to this new season. Yeah. I hope You guys find a really great home.

Yeah, No, it's, it's fun. You know, it's been a, a good community and, um, uh, we, Steven, uh, Haywood who did a lot of the conformance work, got an award, uh, at the contributor summit, um, uh, for his work with Conformance. And I'm excited to see, I think we, we've got a couple other things coming up and I think Thursday It's all interesting.

I think that you learned a lot today, soon. Thank you. Absolutely.

Thank you for your time.