Yesterday evening I travelled downtown for the Canada East CNCF Birthday Bash at Google uber cool building smack in the middle of downtown Toronto. They warned us to bring government id and the security was pretty tight. They are not playing solitaire down at that office that is for sure. 

It was a hot day so opted out of cycling downtown so as not to arrive sweaty and smelly, after all this it was a birthday party. The subway was packed and I spotted some Kube hipsters in the car by the swag they were wearing. 

Google have a whole building and they made sure that you could not miss it

The elevator was high tech and it took a few minutes for me and 2 other developer looking types to figure it out, but in the end we managed to simply hijacked a google employ who used his badge to send us on our way up. Turns out that Google have their time sync really precise and we were 3 minutes early so the elevator had not received its oauth token yet maybe. We lectured about the time by a concerned security guard who was on the ...th floor. We explained what happened and told him that we always go early just in case there is limited swag/food etc. 

Luckily I one of the Canada East CNCF leaders who recognized me and they let us in early. I had just spoken at KubeHuddle a few Months before and had made an effort to get in good with the big shot crowd by commenting on how cool his cloud jacket was. 

The Google office on this floor was everything that I expected it to be. High tech hipster stuff and I made sure to get in a bunch of camera shots.

There was a lot of beer that I don’t drink anymore so I took advantage of the Pineapple & Rhubarb spa water 

It was good that I got there early because soon enough because later on it was jammed

Could not resist playing the Veeam/Ootbi agent

The talks were great as well, mainly focusing on GKE and some very interesting advancement with troubleshooting by leveraging AI.

In the end, I decided to cycle back and brought some shorts to change into for the ride on the bike share. I went to the google washroom and started to get changed but then heard a strange sound. Terrified, I wondered if it was some kind of new AI terminator that thought I was a weird Kubernetes nut head taking off my clothes in the washroom. However, I fought off the conspiracy theory thoughts, and later realized that it had just been a misbehaving soap dispenser! It just goes to show that don’t think or make too many deductions about things you have zero idea about, i.e., that you are clueless about . 

Since i was cycling all the way back from downtown anyways (playing the courtroom lawyer with my food intake conscious inner judge) I decided to devour a few (3.. and a half) cupcakes for the road.

The bike I got at the bike station was one of the new, really fast ones, and I was relieved as dark clouds were forming in the distance. 

I joined the hoards of 20-—and 30-something bikeshare riders and realized just what a cool hipster I had become. Better late than never!