The rolling in of a new year often brings with it a sense of nostalgia, offering a time for reflection to take stock of what we’ve accomplished. It’s also a time when we resolve to do even better and try new things in the time ahead.
When I look back on 2021, I can’t help but to feel a certain amount of pride in being a part of HPE DEV and all that our Community has accomplished. I specifically use the term Community here, because, without you, these things would not have happened. Without you lending your expertise and sharing your skill sets and talents, we could not have delivered all of this. So, let’s take a look back on our achievements and take a moment to appreciate all the hard work that it took to get here.
The HPE DEV Portal
One of the biggest undertakings was the refurbishment of the HPE DEV portal early in the year. With more and more platform pages being added, including, SmartSim, Determined AI, HPE Alletra , and Data Services Cloud Console, as well as new learning opportunities, it was evident that the site needed to be revamped to facilitate navigation for portal users.
The new portal now offers great ways to engage, new Skill Up opportunities, and drop down menus to quickly find what you need.
One of the newest additions to the site is the link to our new YouTube video channel where you can now find over 50 videos, including many in-depth interviews with industry experts explaining new technologies and offering tips and tricks on how to work with them.
Another reason for the site revamp was to implement a better back-end content management system. From the outside, you might not notice this much, but if you’ve written blog posts for us this year, you’ve undoubtedly noticed the improved method for submitting your posts and the ability to manage them through GitHub.
The HPE Blog Site
To all of you who submitted articles and tutorials this past year, thank you! In 2021, we had about 100 blog posts published. The articles ranged in content from high-level interviews with developers and open source experts to exceptional, deep-dive tutorials helping readers learn how to take advantage of newer technologies to make their lives easier. Data analytics, data/ML/AI pipelines, data fabric, and containers appeared to be the hottest topics, although systems management with Redfish proved to be highly popular as well. We’re hoping to add even more open source and edge-to-cloud articles as we move into 2022.
HPE DEV Workshops-on-Demand
The HPE DEV Workshops-on-Demand were introduced in November of 2020, starting off with just three Jupyter Notebooks. In 2021, Community members contributed and added to that so we now have 23 workshops with more coming soon. While adding 20 workshops over the course of the year is notable, it’s not nearly as impressive as the fact that we were able to deliver these workshops to over 2,000 registrants this year!
The hottest workshops for 2021 were the two focused on Kubernetes, quickly followed by the sessions on Redfish. HPE Ezmeral workshops also made a good showing, as did workshops on Python, SPIFFE/SPIRE, and HPE OneView. The workshops garnered fantastic ratings in the post-workshop surveys registrants are requested to fill out, earning an average of 4.6 stars out of 5. A great addition to the program is our new set of recognition badges awarded to those who take the workshops. If you’re not familiar with this program, it’s outlined in this blog post. Basically, you receive a badge for each workshop you complete and additional badges based on how many workshops you complete. These badges can be shared via social media to brag to your friends on how technically advanced you are!
HPE DEV Munch & Learn Technology Talks
Another place the Community shined this year is in the area of collaborating with one another in the HPE DEV Munch & Learn sessions. These free, one-hour monthly webinars provide an opportunity for industry experts to share their knowledge with and answer questions from the Community. Many of these talks introduce topics that eventually make their way into blog posts or Jupyter Notebooks for new HPE DEV Workshops-on-Demand.
This year we delivered 11 Munch & Learn sessions on some really great topics. The most recent session had a record-breaking number of registrants – over 350 – who all came to hear about Redfish: Past, Present and Future.
For a quick look at the topics delivered and to access their replays, check out the list below:
Date | Title | Link |
| January | What’s a data fabric and how does it work? | Replay |
| February | Explore Containerization and MLOps | Replay |
| March | Data Science Unplugged: Part 1 | Replay |
| April | Building a foundation for zero trust with SPIFFE | Replay |
| May | Data Science Unplugged: Part 2 | Replay |
| June | Microservices Architecture 101 | Replay |
| July | How to make data consumable for real-world data science | Replay |
| August | Kubernetes 101 | Replay |
| September | Digital Transformation.Next: Data & Analytics Workloads | Replay |
| November | The Great Unification: Building Analytic pipelines with Apache Spark Workloads | Replay |
| December | Redfish: Past, Present and Future | Replay |
In addition to our monthly Munch & Learn Technology Talks, HPE DEV facilitated 19 different online gatherings to share technology information and collaborate between HPE engineering groups. The effects of these meetings are expected to result in some interesting new meetup opportunities for the Community at large in 2022, so keep an eye out for announcements soon in this area.
Events
As we continued to struggle worldwide with the pandemic, in-person event opportunities were limited, however we did have HPE DEV Community representation at KubeCon 2021 NA in Los Angeles where Sir Hackington once again stood watch over HPE DEV swag.
We were still able to come together for a number of virtual events, including KubeCon Europe, 3D Data World 2021 (a really cool event where we participated as avatars!), and Discover 2021 where we achieved the highest technology session participation with 672 attendees!
Looking Forward to a Bright New Year!
2021 gave us all a great opportunity to explore and learn more about HPE Ezmeral, data fabric, Kubernetes, and open source projects like SPIFFE/SPIRE. We’ve added more content around data analytics, and ML and AI technologies. We also on-boarded six ISV (independent software vendor) partners to the HPE DEV program who delivered content related to HPE Ezmeral via blog posts and technology talks helping to grow developer awareness around this solution. Because of this, we’ve welcomed more and more data scientists and related personas into our Community.
We look forward to our continued collaboration, diving deeper into exciting new ways of dealing with all this data around us, making it useful, and expanding work in open source projects.