About the Rawkode Academy

The Rawkode Academy was founded in 2019 by David Flanagan, née McKay; a developer and operator with over 20 years experience in the industry.

Latest Numbers

* These numbers are a rough estimate at the moment and we'll loop in real-time numbers shortly.

The History Lesson

The Early Years

Starting his career, back in 2003, David joined a small local development company that specialised in ticketing systems for horse racing tracks across the UK. His favourite thing about working at a smaller shop was the ability to work across the entire product stack; including custom kernel development (C), backend servers (C & PHP), front-end point of sale terminals (C++ with QT3), and even mobile development (C#) ... which wasn't like mobile development today; have you ever tried a Windows CE 4 device? 😅

Given that this was a small team, David was also responsible for the infrastructure that ran the company's products; primarily due to his extensive Linux knowledge having ran Linux on the desktop since his first Coral Linux install in 2000. Is it the year of the Linux desktop yet? 🤔

Working with all these technologies from early on in his career, David became a bit of a technology magpie; continually exploring and experimenting with new technologies to better understand the problems they solved and the paradigms they brought. One of the first technologies to capture David's attention was Puppet, back in 2004. Puppet revolutionised the way the company managed their fleet of servers, which were all located at their customer sites across the UK. No more 3 hour drives at 4am in the morning to fix a server that had crashed due to a power outage. 🙌

First Real Scaling Challenge

David was an early adopter of cloud, containers, and cloud-native technologies. During his time as the Director of Development for a rock and metal media organization called TeamRock (now LouderSound), David was responsible for the software, infrastructure, and website during its biggest test: the unfortunate death of Lemmy Kilmister. Fortunately, due to his desire to experiment and play with new technologies, David and his team had already migrated their slow to provision virtual-machine centric infrastructure to containerised workloads running on Amazon Web Services the year prior, 2014, not long after the public launch of Docker.

The Educator

As much as David enjoys writing software, scaling infrastructure, and leading teams; he quickly realised that his passion was helping others learn and be successful. David started presenting at local user groups in 2016, slowly working up to conferences, before eventually moving into a full-time Developer Advocacy position at InfluxData.

During his time at Influx, David was a driving force to help make it easier for people operating Kubernetes to adopt InfluxDB and Telegraf as their stack of choice for metric collection and storage. This didn't just involve being at conferences and user-groups speaking about monitoring and observing Kubernetes clusters, but actively working with engineering to ensure the project was easier to deploy and manage on top of Kubernetes.

It was during this time that the Rawkode Academy released it's first video ... "Last Week in Kubernetes".

Let's not forget the first live-stream too ... 😅

After moving on from InfluxData, David joined Equinix Metal where he continued to work-on and grow the Rawkode Academy by helping developers and operators learn how to run and use Kubernetes, and other Cloud Native technologies, on bare metal; which comes with a whole host of challenges that are not present when running on a cloud provider.

Throughout his time working with Kubernetes, David was a fan and keen watcher of TGIK, a weekly live stream hosted by Joe Beda, one of the creators of Kubernetes. On TGIK, Joe live streamed himself exploring new Cloud Native technologies, by working through the documentation and examples. Often, he'd rely on the maintainers and contributors to those projects being active in the chat to help him out when he got stuck. This is when David decided that he wanted to carry on TGIK in his own way, by inviting the maintainers and contributors of said projects on a live-stream with him, where they could not only help him when there were issues, but also talk about the project and the problems it solves while sharing its history, flavour, and context.

Fast-forward to 2021, and David had the worst idea of his career; but through hubris and in the name of edutainment, David hosted the first episode of Klustered, along with his guest, Walid Shaari.