About the Rawkode Academy

Starting his career in 2003, David joined a small local development company that specialized in ticketing systems for horse racing tracks across the UK. Working at a smaller company allowed him to gain experience across the entire product stack: custom kernel development (C), backend servers (C & PHP), front-end point of sale terminals (C++ with QT3), and even mobile development (C#) on early Windows CE devices.

As part of a small team, David was also responsible for the infrastructure that ran the company's products, leveraging his extensive Linux knowledge from running Linux on the desktop since his first Coral Linux install in 2000.

Working with diverse technologies early in his career, David developed a passion for exploring and experimenting with new technologies to better understand the problems they solved and the paradigms they introduced. One of the first technologies to capture David's attention was Puppet in 2004. Puppet revolutionized the way the company managed their fleet of servers, which were located at customer sites across the UK, eliminating the need for emergency on-site visits to address server issues.

David was an early adopter of cloud, containers, and cloud-native technologies. As the Director of Development for TeamRock (now LouderSound), a rock and metal media organization, David was responsible for the software, infrastructure, and website during a significant scaling challenge: a massive traffic surge following the passing of Lemmy Kilmister. Thanks to forward-thinking infrastructure decisions, David and his team had already migrated from traditional virtual-machine infrastructure to containerized workloads running on Amazon Web Services in 2014, shortly after the public launch of Docker. This preparation enabled the platform to handle the unexpected traffic spike successfully.

While David enjoyed writing software, scaling infrastructure, and leading teams, he discovered that his true passion was helping others learn and succeed in the field. He began presenting at local user groups in 2016, gradually progressing to conferences, before transitioning to a full-time Developer Advocacy position at InfluxData.

At InfluxData, David worked to simplify the adoption of InfluxDB and Telegraf for Kubernetes operators as their preferred solution for metric collection and storage. This effort extended beyond speaking engagements at conferences and user groups about monitoring Kubernetes clusters; he actively collaborated with engineering teams to improve deployment and management capabilities on Kubernetes.

It was during this time that the Rawkode Academy released its first video: "Last Week in Kubernetes."

After InfluxData, David joined Equinix Metal where he continued to develop and expand the Rawkode Academy. His focus was helping developers and operators learn to run and use Kubernetes and other Cloud Native technologies on bare metal infrastructure, addressing the unique challenges not present when running on cloud providers.

Throughout his work with Kubernetes, David was inspired by TGIK, a weekly live stream hosted by Joe Beda, one of Kubernetes' creators. On TGIK, Joe explored new Cloud Native technologies by working through documentation and examples, often with help from project maintainers and contributors in the chat. This inspired David to create his own format, inviting maintainers and contributors directly onto live streams where they could not only assist with technical issues but also discuss their projects' history, purpose, and context.

In 2021, David launched a bold new educational format called Klustered. The premise was simple but challenging: experts would attempt to troubleshoot deliberately broken Kubernetes clusters in real-time. This innovative approach to learning through problem-solving quickly became one of Rawkode Academy's most popular series, with David hosting the first episode alongside guest Walid Shaari.

Today, Rawkode Academy continues to evolve as a premier educational platform for cloud-native technologies. We offer a diverse range of content including live streams with project maintainers, technical tutorials, problem-solving sessions, and in-depth explorations of emerging technologies in the cloud-native ecosystem.

Our content is designed for developers and operators at all skill levels, from those just beginning their journey with containers and Kubernetes to experienced professionals looking to deepen their expertise or explore new tools and approaches.