KubeCon + CloudNativeCon is the flagship cloud native conference. It happens multiple times a year on different continents, and every edition is massive. It is many things at once: a learning opportunity, a social event, a job fair, an open source gathering, and an industry showcase, all compressed into a few busy days.

More than anything, though, KubeCon is an experience.

I've been using AI for coding for quite a while now, but mostly for isolated tasks: writing functions, debugging, explaining code. I wanted to see how far I could push it. Could I build an entire product from scratch?

The catch: I wanted to build something I'd dreamed about but never attempted, partly due to time constraints, but mostly because I lacked the skills. Specifically, I'm terrible at frontend development and design. I can barely draw a straight line, and translating what looks good in my head to something real has always been a struggle.

The result? I built and launched TalkPulse in two days, with an extra day for hosting, performance tuning, and refactoring. I can't remember the last time I enjoyed building something this much.

Today I received a pull request in a project that I haven't touched in over five years. It was a simple change, but it made me think about the state of the project and ultimately led me to archive it.

This isn't the first time I've gotten rid of something I no longer need, and I've realized that cleaning up old stuff is a good practice—not just in general, but also for keeping the open source ecosystem healthy.

A question I often get from people—both from beginners stepping into the world of programming and seasoned developers alike—is about how they can start contributing to open source software projects. In this post, my aim is to provide practical advice that will guide you to become not only an active participant in the open source community but also a significant contributor to it.

Certificate management has significantly simplified over the past decade, though the tools used, DNS provider selected, and the Certificate Authority (CA) chosen may introduce complexities. In this article, I will guide you through the process of setting up ACME on NixOS for a domain hosted on Google Domains, using both Let's Encrypt and Google's own CA (called Google Trust Services).