Well. It happened. There was a whole plan — flights, a monorail-adjacent hotel shortlist, a badge, a village hit list four bullet points deep. DEF CON 34 is cancelled. Not a security incident. Not a budget thing. Just real life stacking up faster than a conference notebook: back in the office more than expected, and it’s the first week of school. Something had to give, and it wasn’t going to be either of those. ...
Different kind of trip on the board: a work one. I’m headed to KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2026 — the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s flagship conference — in Salt Lake City. It’s four days of Kubernetes, platform engineering, and the whole cloud-native circus at the Salt Palace. But a work trip doesn’t have to be all badge-and-ballroom: my rule is fly in the day before and out the day after, which buys two easy evenings and a free morning to actually see the town. Here’s the plan — logistics first, then the fun. ...