"I want people to be able to access content without too many restrictions" #Noonies2021

Hey Hackers! I’m Vijay and I’m an Entrepreneur, Designer & Engineer based in Auckland, New Zealand.

First of all, a huge thank you to the HackerNoon community and staff for nominating me for a few 2021 Noonies awards!

I’ve been nominated in the following categories so please do check out these award pages and vote:

As someone in the tech industry, I believe that the most exciting open-source technology of the present is Kubernetes because of its general-purpose nature and its ability to manage applications at planet scale. Learn more about my thoughts and opinions on open source and my journey in the tech industry via the interview below.

1. What do you do and why do you do it? (tell us your story)

In the year 2017, life events (workplace politics and corruption) led to what I believe was a turning point for me.

The work I was doing was handed over to consulting firms and I was out of work. So I invested in learning something new.

After a series of prototypes, I settled on Golang. It was easy to pick up, I had a lot of fun programming with it and I soon realised it was an amazing general-purpose programming language.

It helped me solve every problem I threw at it. It naturally led me to the container movement and eventually to what I believe is the best open-source container orchestrator on the market - Kubernetes.

Fast forward to the present day and I use Kubernetes and Golang on a daily basis. It’s amazing that tech so powerful is fully open source and free to use.

2. Tell us more about the things you create / write / manage / build!

I currently spend most of my time working with teams designing and building containers that run on Kubernetes.

Where possible, I contribute to open source projects and open source some of my work.

This year I have started writing tech articles. I have written 3 so far. I published my first ever tech article on Medium and then re-published it here.

I want people to be able to access content without too many restrictions and hence have moved to publish the remaining 2 articles exclusively on Hackernoon.

3. How did you end up on your current career path? Do you like it?

I first saw a computer when I was about 12 years old.

It was the game Prince of Persia running on MS-DOS. I was fascinated and after that was naturally attracted to computer-related courses at my school and university.

I pursued a Computer Science degree, my first job was a software developer and I kept growing naturally in that career path.

I love working with tech and feel that is the perfect fit for a mind like mine.

4. What tech are you most excited or passionate about right now and why?

I like open-source general-purpose tech.

Being open-source means that they don’t have restrictive or expensive licensing terms and being general-purpose means they can solve most problems you throw at it.

Kubernetes and Golang fall into this category.

RISC-V is another area that I am excited about. Like open-source software, RISC allows for open-source hardware solutions. A fully open-source hardware and software stack has the potential to disrupt the market.

5. What tech are you most worried about right now and why?

• Algorithms are designed to increase user addiction or spread misinformation.

  
  

• Software that is not open source and has ridiculous licensing terms, for example: need a different more expensive license if more nodes are added. I call such software “authorised ransomware”. Such software is far too popular in the corporate world.

  
  

• Tech that is advertised as Privacy focused but is not open source.

  
  

• Crypto mining and its impact on GPU prices has delayed my GPU upgrade.

6. If we gave you 10 million dollars to invest in something today, what would you invest in and why?

I can’t think of a single consumer product that I can easily buy today that uses a fully open-source hardware and software stack.

I would start a tech company that builds such products. I would probably start with a simple general-purpose use case and grow from there.

7. What are you currently learning?

I am currently learning RISC-V.

8. What’s the best advice you’ve ever given someone?

Go open source.

9. What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

Never stop learning.

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About HackerNoon’s

The annual Noonie Awards celebrate the best and brightest of the tech industry, bringing together all who are making the Internet and the world of tech what it is today. Please be sure to , nominate, and vote for the people and companies who you think are making the biggest impact on the tech industry today.

The 2021 Noonies are sponsored by: , , and . Thank you so much to these sponsors who are helping us celebrate the accomplishments of all our nominees.