Cloud Native Life #1: First public talk, first blog post

Welcome to the type of blog post that can only be written under the influence of Norwegian cider.

TL;DR: I'm Nui, gave my first public talk at Cloud Native Bergen meetup, I won a ticket for ContainersDay happening this September 2025, all of that during my birthday.

First blog post, first time I introduce myself on the internet.

  • "Nui, engineer, born there and super enthusiast about cloud native tech and its community." ~something along those lines.

And today is a special day for me as I gave my first public talk ever during Cloud Native Bergen Community meetup. For context, my first encounter with the CNCF world was 2 years ago where the "click" happened at KubeCon Paris 2024. That conference was an eye-opener; I found a place where most people are passionate about computer science and are curious-minded, like me.

Why did I not know about it before? This question haunted me for a year, until my 2nd KubeCon in London, 2025. There, I met Artem Lajko and Graziano Casto during Cloud Rejekts which transformed my solo trip into a unique community-and-inclusive experience. With them and speakers like Liz Rice, Eric D. Schabell, and Marcus Noble - to name a few - I started to get the "I-wanna-speak-on-stage" fever. Pretty unexpected for an introvert.

Fast-forward 2 months later, I engaged with the local community in Bergen by speaking about Shipwright, a CNCF Sandbox project.

cloud native bergen meetup

What a stressful experience, yet I was full of excitement. Here is the content of my presentation:

I got the floor for more than 20 minutes, where I delivered the features and all the cool things about Shipwright in front of ~60 techies. Unexpectedly, my talk was well received and the topic interested many. Perhaps, because it was my very first talk, I convinced myself that I'd be boring.

shipwright features

To analyze my performance, I collected feedback from my audience to become better. Surely, there were well-rounded speakers in the room such as Hans Kristrian Flatten, a well-known CNCF Ambassador, that I could learn from. So I've asked everyone to criticize my performance through a form.

I had 2 goals while delivering my talk:

  1. Increase the awareness about Shipwright to my audience, to grow the adoption of Shipwright and other CNCF open-source projects.
  2. Get out of my comfort zone and talk in front of veterans about subjects I'm passionate about.

These stats are just wholesome and rewarding. But this is just the beginning; there is room for improvement. One of the feedbacks I got is:

Nice visual profile on the slides and + for demo. Go full-tech without considering the audience, they will adapt :)

My fear was that people would get bored or lost in the technicalities of Kubernetes, so I researched my audience beforehand. It turned out that a minority of them were salespeople, managers, and non-technical individuals. Therefore, I decided to make my talk beginner-friendly to be inclusive. However, this feedback is a reminder that people who attend this kind of meetup love the nitty-gritty, and I shouldn't be afraid to dive into it, at least for some parts of my talk. Thank you, anonymous attendee; I'll remember that for my next endeavor!

This day will stay in my book; at the end of the day, it is one of those "my first time" moments. It seems to be the right time to announce that I've been appointed organizer for Cloud Native Bergen Community and our next big event Cloud Native Day Bergen this fall, joining this incredible team:

cnb organizers

Coincidentally, I'm thrilled to have won a free ticket to ContainersDay 2025, so expect me in Hamburg from the 9th-11th of September 2025 (as an attendee, this year at least)!

On a final note, I'd like to thank:

  • Eric D. Schabell, Marcus Noble, Artem Lajko, and Andres Morey for all the best tips to deliver an engaging presentation.
  • The maintainers and community of Shipwright for reviewing the structure of my talk.
  • Paolo Dettori, maintainer of the CNCF project KubeStellar, for trusting me as a future co-speaker (hopefully) for our upcoming talk at KubeCon North America 2025.
  • The Cloud Native Bergen organizers team and my best friends who supported me during the meetup.

Sincerely - Nui, the speaker with the green hoodie.