paris, france (and some kubecon stuff i guess)

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j'ai écouté "golden god" by yung lean and bladee et system shock 2's intro music en écrivant ce article de blog

la partie ennuyeuse

last week, i attended the european kubecon in paris with some of my work colleagues. apart from the unexpected ai content deluge, there was a good selection of interesting talks for any given time slot. i mostly attended based on how interesting/entertaining the titles sounded without really bothering with the abstracts or considering skill levels, and i wouldn't necessarily recommend that strategy in hindsight. it's probably much better to chart out a well-rounded journey through many different areas of expertise, lest you fall victim to technical understimulation like i did. on the other hand, i don't personally believe in learning by watching conference talks. much of the subject matter is probably going to be either way condensed or presented in a suboptimal way, and i find the format to be much less suitable for conveying technical information than even largely unstyled html. there's also going to be marketing fluff, historical facts or other superfluous background info polluting the slides which i don't particularly need. i haven't really attended many well-structured, well-presented talks that stuck with me, one of them being last year's playstation talk on hosting game servers on kubernetes using agones, but maybe i'm just a hater who doesn't know what he's talking about and, of course, your mileage may vary

the venue layout was much more straightforward compared to 2023's kubecon at the rai. here, everything was situated in the same giant, multi-storied pavilion at expo porte de versailles whereas amsterdam required you to bounce from building to building, each of which had multiple stories as well. this time, it was a lot easier to understand where you needed to go, and you probably ultimately had a much better shake at securing a spot in the room of your choice as a consequence. in terms of accommodation, drinks of all kinds, from water and orange juice to tea and coffee, were continously provided. the lunch packages were all right, but apart from the now seemingly standard inclusion of vegan options, the culinary experience was nothing remotely remarkable apart from the delicious hummus. i suppose it's just way too expensive to cater properly, so no hard feelings. a neat bonus: some areas provided small, delectable pastries like pain au chocolate or gougères

the corner store housed some corny merch like nerdy shirts, a onesie or kubernetes-branded dad hats which i enjoyed. since i did my best to avoid talking to people, my colleague was forced to have all the fun on the booth floor by himself. from what i gathered, you could play all sorts of games to win swag or just enjoy yourself. the o'reilly booth was particularly interesting as you could talk to the authors of some presumably kubernetes-centric works and even win a book by opening a locked box using one of many keys provided

there are a couple of less than great things worth mentioning. we rang in the event by attending an interactive demo on kubernetes troubleshooting where the speakers ran some aws-provided simulations that more or less subtly introduced issues into the eks cluster and then asked audience members to troubleshoot based on lines on a grafana dashboard. the person providing accurate console commands to shed light on the issue got some swag. unfortunately, some experiments just straight up failed to work or didn't run long enough for the individually picked audience member to provide good-enough feedback in time. it's a great idea for a talk, and i would love to see it executed slightly better, maybe with fixed answers the audience can then vote on to create a "choose your own adventure" kind of scenario. the quizzes inbetween experiments were not all that interesting in my opinion. as it stands, i would have much rather attended the intro to rook and ceph

some of the talk titles were lacking, mostly because they sparked wrong expectations due to their terseness. if you were to attend a talk entitled "the hard life of securing a particle accelerator", you probably wouldn't expect that most of it is about how keycloak is used to provide sso for web apps. a better title would have probably been "how we learned to love keycloak at cern". anyway, it's 100% my fault for not reading the abstract provided alongside the title, but i still felt that this particle-ar (sorry) example was noteworthy

a big, seemingly recurring issue is overcapacity. the talk to visitor ratio is way out of whack, frequently resulting in spontaneous panicked reschedules due to the room that your favorite talk is supposed to be held in already being full. you then trek to the other talk only to find out that this room too is full. to provide an example: 1200 people registered for the fantastic "dungeons and deployments" talk, which is about 900 more than the relatively small room could house on a good day, and it's a bit of a shame that people who didn't camp out in front of the doors way ahead of time and took some minutes off breakouts to actually engage with the more interactive components of the event missed out on that experience. luckily, the talk i attended prior happened to take place in the same room. skill issue, i suppose

all in all, it was a pleasant experience, more pleasant than amsterdam for sure, and i'll give it 3.5 out of 5 kube-aid man stickers. i was in good company for most of the event, and we could have probably watched digital paint dry without it ever getting boring for me. it's also hard to imagine how much collective expertise is required to somewhat smoothly run an event of this scale, so thank you to the people who made it work. i hope you were adequately recompensed, no matter how seemingly small your part

la vie...

boring tech shit out of the way, let's talk about the main attraction: paris. the weather was consistently great (shoutout climate change) and adequately paved the way for me living out my personal parisian fantasy, namely sitting outside a neat little cafe on a busy, disgusting street and doing nothing in particular for hours as we released our iron grip on the concept of time. if you order five small dim sum and expect them to be served within two hours of you placing said order, are you even hedonismaxxing? order another expresso, talk about the sickness unto death and bask in the diluted sunlight barely able to penetrate the smog cloche. slow living is easy to embrace when it's already seemingly being practiced by the people around you

despite my strong dislike for the french mandated by german law, i found the few parisians i got to interact with to be very pleasant and communicative. this might just apply to me and may not be representative, but if there's one thing i learned in german debauchery central aka berlin, it's that pleasantries are entirely optional, including greetings and acknowledging someone's existence. this might not seem so bad, but apparently i'm sensitive to feeling like i don't belong to society, so these simple, casually thrown-around bonsoirs or mercis reduce the build-up of frustration caused by that. it definitely felt good to return to a more life-affirming environment

since i'm a european man of culture, i also did not fall victim to paris syndrome. people say the place smells bad and is full of trash, and while there are some dirty corners, my steps mostly took me through clean streets. the little strewn-about heaps of junk here and there were not nearly noticeable enough to ruin my good mood

as big jesus admirers, we also made it a goal to visit as many catholic churches as we could. due to time constraints, we made it to about three, with the most impressive looking one being off limits due to mass being held when we entered. definitely coming back for you, church whose name and location i forgot

since paris is a city of roughly 2 million heavily caffeinated artists on the come-up, you also don't really run out of stuff to see, no matter what time it is, and the place never really feels dead (as long as you stay within the inner city, i presume). as a small big town resident, not encountering empty streets after 10 pm is a great improvement to quality of life

...et la mort

not all is well in the land of under-arm baguettes and tabac restaurants, though. i didn't necessarily enjoy the homogeneity plaguing the french capital. pigalle, a legendary former red light area located in montmartre that i was looking forward to visit due to my "bob le flambeur" obsession, previously perhaps comparable to de wallen, doesn't look any different from literally any other corner in the city, and this drastic, presumably gentrification-driven diminishment of character (i.e. infamy) harms the overall feel of what could be a much more intriguing metropolis. i want to make it clear that this sentiment is not driven by my desire to return to prostitution. all i'm saying is that maybe not everything needs to be neat to be enjoyable

i suppose, though, that gentrification woes are normal for any half-decently populated city in these parts of europe, and to be fair, i barely had time to leave what i presume to be only the most thoroughly boring inner parts of a sprawling city. the areas i did get to see practically all looked the same to me from every angle you could possibly view them from. you know, those flower-adorned cafes are charming only until you leave the proximity of the very first one you ever see since you're very likely to stumble upon three more of their kind one street over. on our first day, my colleague and sometimes-friend pointed out a brasserie called "au chien qui fume" which translates to "at/to the smoking dog" and is a funny name for anything until you discover another cafe in a different arrondissement with the exact same name. what gives, brasserie owners? i don't want to sound the dread alarm quite yet as more research needs to be done, but how far humanity is from complete cultural collapse might be inversely proportional to the number of smoking dog cafes in paris. anyway

parisians also seem to have a very different understanding of traffic regulation. street lights and zebra-style crossings do indeed exist, however they seem to serve more of a decorative purpose as cyclists, drivers and pedestrians selectively disregard their meaning in a seemingly educated manner, like they know something you don't as an outsider. as the city is very car-heavy and appropriately built for such traffic, you often find yourself in some very sus situations based entirely on "trust me, bro". navigating this jungle probably comes naturally after some time of habitating in paris, but for a german tourist spending a couple of days at most, it's definitely uncomfortable and, as a fellow netherlands enjoyer, triggers a strong desire to liberate these people from their oppressors. literally ban cars from cities, i beg you. you're dying of stress

another pain point is shopping. i'm not sure i understand the idea behind the neighborhood layouts. on my travels, i didn't really encounter many supermarkets, the kind you'd normally find on almost every corner in comparable cities like amsterdam or berlin. instead, i did most of my very minimal shopping in these small, späti-style cornerstores that stock a wide array of random garbage. i'm guessing the idea is that you buy your stuff in specialized spots, like fruit at the grocer or a market, baked goods at a bakery, and antipasti at the antipasti store(?), which i'm not really used to, making the whole process feel immensely awkward and unwieldy. faced with these realities, you hold onto what seems most familiar for dear life: carrefour

without educating myself further on what exactly carrefour is, i'd call it the rewe of paris. take this with a grain of salt, as you'd be correct in assuming that i'm just a babbling buffoon blindly bumbling through life, but much like rewe in germany, carrefours come in two sizes: market and express. the former seems to be what you'd expect from a "traditional" supermarket while the latter is a lot smaller and offers a more narrow selection of goods. the express ones, much to my disappointment, seem to be much more ubiquitous than their market counterparts, at least in montparnasse, and don't quite measure up to their german or dutch counterparts in terms of, well, everything. you can take five steps and see everything there is to see. there's just something to a well-lit, spacious and, last but not least, well-stocked albert heijn that fills my heart with the kind of joy these stores just couldn't

the one time i came close to really hating the place was when i visited the lovely basilique du sacre-coeur in montmartre which was aggressively being besieged by tourists from all angles. i practically sprinted up the somewhat intense climb (my hour-long daily walks really are starting to pay off) and quickly left again after taking some mid photos. the street leading up to the base of the hill was also lined with those cheap-looking gift shops where you can at best get ripped off but not buy anything of worth. it was a truly horrible environment and definitely ruined my day. i also got impatient waiting for an older couple to climb the stairs, so i tried to squeeze past them, only to slip and fall in the process. my iphone screen has some small en vogue, made-in-paris scratches now. very embarrassing display all around, and i will never set foot in montmartre again

by far the worst thing about france (and europe in general) is a complete and utter failure to embrace english. while i love languages, and slowly learning to read/speak/understand a new one provides an unmatched sense of accomplishment, i do think that the least we can do in the year of our lord 2024 to make the world a slightly more accessible place for rich people speaking from a point of privilege like me is get more comfortable speaking the most ubiquitous and easy-to-learn language in the world. on more than one occasion i felt that forgoing english for my hands and feet would have eased a lot of friction, and that just feels pathetic considering that paris is literally the number one tourist destination

épilogue

on our final evening in heine's place of exile, we dined at the granite par tom meyer, a michelin restaurant, which was an interesting experience to say the least. we decided to take the rer to the hotel and sought out the station where some semi-sketchy folk frenched in my general direction. the only thing i could distinguish was "putin" or "poutine", and without thinking about it, i repeated "poutine?" at one of the men with a pensive squint on my face. that was pretty much the end of the "conversation", so we took the similarly sketchy elevator smelling strongly of weed, sweat and piss to the lower floors of what i presume to be a shopping mall that also serves as a train station. my head hit the mattress at two in the morning. three hours later, my alarm failed to ring, resulting in an unshowered mad dash to denfert-rochereau. fortunately, i reached all my trains on time and even managed to snap a portrait of a majestic dog during my layover in frankfurt. you'll never read this, but thanks for the pleasant conversation, dog owner from muenster

my personal highlight was meeting the "dungeons and deployments" speakers and managing to overcome my social anxiety for once to grab a selfie with most of them. to the ones who got away: prepare to be politely asked for a photo on sight

i hate to be a pessimist, but i don't think whatever the rest of the year brings can measure up to this event, and i literally have stockholm lined up. the main takeaway for me is that it's truly amazing how short-lived the joy induced by these significant experiences ends up being while all the negative stuff is omnipresent. it almost feels like you need to sprint from one exciting thing to another, so that the bad shit gets permanently blocked out, but who has energy for that? maybe the wall street yuppies were ahead of the curve with their coke habits

anyway, now that the trip is over, i can safely go back to living in misery and not ever getting over the loss of the love of my life. thanks to noah abrahams, seth mccombs and anarcho-syndicalist goose ian coldwater for being noah abrahams, seth mccombs and ian coldwater respectively

goodbye

I’m a negative of a person. All I want is blackness, blackness and silence - Sylvia Plath