Another year of confidence. People ask me what the real superpower is after a decade of writing about cloud-native infrastructure and AI. It is not a certification, and it is not a single tool. It is the discipline of staying up to date with the latest trends worldwide — and letting that discipline show up in person, not just in a feed.
This pile of badges is the receipts. It is my year in review, spilled out on the floor: dozens of lanyards, every one of them a conversation, a lesson, or a trend I spotted before it went mainstream.
What strikes me is the spread
Notice the range. This is not one conference repeated six times. It is the whole map of where production infrastructure is actually moving in 2025 and 2026 — and I was in the room for all of it.
Cloud-native and Kubernetes. The pink badge on top is Cloud_Native Rejekts EU ‘26, sitting next to KubeCon / CloudNativeCon and the CNCF ecosystem — Talos, Portworx, ClickHouse, and Kubernetes.Love. If you run Kubernetes in production, these are the rooms where the hard problems get argued out loud.
DevOps and the build pipeline. GitLab Epic Tour Amsterdam, DevOpsDays, Platform Con London, apidays, ARCHCON, and TechTalk Tech Day Netherlands 2025. The tooling debate — GitOps, platform engineering, internal developer platforms — is where the real operational maturity shows up.
AI, from hype to production. The Microsoft AI Tour, Databricks, Snowflake, and airia. This is the part of the year that changed fastest: the conversation moved from “should we use AI” to “how do we run it reliably, securely, and at scale.”
Open source, the foundation. Red Hat (many of them), SUSE, the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit, and Intel. None of the cloud-native story works without this layer, and it is why I keep showing up.
The vendor floor is the real curriculum
The lanyards tell the rest of the story. Dell Technologies, BMC, ABN AMRO, Elements Grid, DeepComputing, TrueFullStack, MongoDB, Snowflake, Platform.sh, mediacity.qa (Media Qatar), Chipdays, AI House Amsterdam, TechBricks, IBC2025, SailPoint, SIDERO, RoachFest, TalosCon, Summit Connect, and TNW Conference 2025.
Some of these are talks I gave. Some are analyst and press passes — you will see MEDIA + ANALYST and PRESS badges in the pile, because the fastest way to learn what a company is actually shipping is to sit with the people building it. Others are VIP and CISO passes for Open Empower, the company I founded and run.
What I noticed walking that floor all year: the gap between a vendor’s keynote and their docs is where the real engineering lives. The badge gets you in the door. The questions you ask once you are inside are the superpower.
Confidence comes from being there
Here is the honest part. You do not build “another year of confidence” by reading recaps. You build it by standing in Amsterdam, London, and Doha, by arguing about Talos at a Rejekts hallway track, by watching a Databricks demo fall over live and hearing how they fixed it, by trading notes with a CISO who has the same compliance problem you do.
That is my superpower: being up to date with the latest trends worldwide, and bringing that back to my readers, my students, and my clients before the trend is obvious to everyone else.
Every lanyard in this pile is a trend I spotted early. That is how I keep you ahead of the curve — and how I keep myself honest about what actually works in production.
Here is to another year of staying curious. 🌍
Want the production-angle take on any of these events? Reply and tell me which badge to pull out of the pile first.
