Cloud Native Computing Foundation KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2021, 14 May 2021

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From YouTube: How You Can Tell Your Kubernetes Contribu... Matt Broberg, Chris Short, Kaslin Fields, Peeyush Gupta

Description

Don’t miss out! Join us at our upcoming event: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2021 in Los Angeles, CA from October 12-15. Learn more at https://kubecon.io The conference features presentations from developers and end users of Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, and all of the other CNCF-hosted projects.

How You Can Tell Your Kubernetes Contributor Story with These Tips - Matt Broberg & Chris Short, Red Hat; Kaslin Fields, Google; Peeyush Gupta, DigitalOcean

The Upstream Marketing Working Group began as a vision to connect contributors. It has grown into a set of practices, channels, and bots that unite us all across the Kubernetes community. In this talk, contributors will walk through their experience of learning to tell their own contributor story. In doing so, we will walk through how anyone can write a great story, including key takeaways around narrative, call to action (CTA), structure, and available channels. Along the way, we'll highlight tips to publish a blog, including collaboration with the Blog team, asking for reviewers from Upstream Marketing, and a brief look at relevant SEO practices. Attendees will leave with a formula by which they can share their story of contributing to Kubernetes and encourage others to share their unique and personal experience. Our goal is to inspire the next generation of open source contributors through a broad range of perspectives on what it means to contribute.

A

Hey all I'm matt broberg, I'm the current editorial lead for the upstream marketing subgroup, and I'm here today to kick us off on a conversation around kubernetes contributor stories and how you can tell your own.

A

And let's dig in a bit further: first, let's talk about sig, contributor experience or contrib x. For short, that's the umbrella under which this group of people presenting today are coming from, and sig contrabex is really the front door to your community experience.

A

The whole point of the group is to make sure you feel connected and know where to be who to connect with how to navigate this kubernetes community space. So they run a lot of things. There are great talks in this conference, dedicated to them we're going to go to that bottom line and dig into upstream marketing.

A

We are a newer working group. I've been around for about a year and our sole purpose is to help you connect and tell your story. I like to say that we are the home for non-code contributors if you're a designer. If you are interested in finding stories in producing videos and just being somebody, that's helping elevate the conversation around kubernetes to to highlight its inclusivity and its growing community of all kinds. Then you could find a home with us, but if you are part of the kubernetes community, what does that?

A

Even mean because there's so many things going on all at once, there are thousands and thousands of contributors that are participating in one or more github repositories or online event.

A

There are dozens of special interest groups, just like contribex dedicated to everything, from architecture to security and back again, and that's just the kubernetes project itself- that's not to say the whole cloud native computing foundation, which is full of related and welcome projects. But there are over 900. You could contribute to you there as well, but the what we're really focused on today is you and your experience contributing to kubernetes and if there's anything like mine.

A

This might actually be footage of your first touch in the community, where you stare into what feels like a bit of a black hole filled with many many tweets and slack groups and discourse posts and zooms. You can join the beginning and end of it are not clear and everyone's saying, hey join here, check it out, um but that is one of the things that the upstream marketing team was founded. To help combat that experience of staring into the void, I like to hope that we make you feel more like this.

A

You land on a couch. Everything is fine, even if you don't know what you're doing yet you're welcome here. You are part of this and we do two main branches of things in upstream marketing, and that is communication strategy. So we've done quite a bit to map and connect the dots between the disparate sources of information in the kubernetes community, and that's a really fun topic that we can dig into in another talk today we're just going to talk about the storytelling.

A

There is an amazing documentation, sig and there is a blog subgroup there and we partner with them to tell really powerful stories that are dedicated to different subjects on the kubernetes dot io website, that's dedicated primarily to users and the kubernetes.dev domain, which is dedicated primarily to developers and contributors of that kind. So today we're going to bring you through a checklist if you will of different tips that you can keep in mind as you think about your story and see yourself as a storyteller, no matter where you are in your experience so far.

A

So in short, lots of pictures very pretty, I hope, but what it comes down to is we're here to help you tell your story, and I can't tell you this enough.

A

You have a great story to tell already, if you are an expert in some software part of the stack or if you are coming with design skills or if you're, coming as a pure beginner in many ways that is in and of itself a value, because those fresh eyes are a form of expertise and what you really only have to do to start making an impact is showing up when I think about um how people contribute significantly in kubernetes land.

A

I I'd like to tell people if you have 20 hours to give give 2 hours a week for 10 weeks, don't pull an all-nighter and run out of steam very quickly, kubernetes as a community and as an ecosystem improves only when each member of that community continues to gain knowledge and contribute back we're all part of this ecosystem together and we grow as one when we keep showing up now.

A

You might not find your perfect place from day one, but you will find a home if you stick with it and keep showing up, keep putting the sweat equity in keep chopping, wood and carrying water, and you will find a really wonderful home and with that fish has a great story related to that. So take it away.

B

Thank you, matt, hello, everyone. My name is pius gupta. I am a senior developer advocate at digitalocean in kubernetes community. I am member of special interest group countrybacks, that's short for contributor experience.

B

I basically contribute to two sub projects. One is the stream marketing group. uh It's the group, that's bringing you this talk and another is apac coordinator. I am also the release communication lead for kubernetes 1.22 release and I usually talk about containers, kubernetes and any and all things cloud.

B

So let me start by talking to you a bit about my kubernetes journey. I started contributing to kubernetes uh way back in 2015. uh At that point, kubernetes was still pretty new and uh a part of my job was to make kubernetes available for pp64l architecture. So most of my work was centered around that uh and naturally I uh at that point of time I talked to relevant sigs like sig architecture, sick testing, say infrastructure, etc, and I found out uh those conversations were pretty amazing right. uh The folks were very welcoming.

B

I understand they were pretty busy with their day job, but they still took the time out uh to help me understand the concepts to answer my silly questions, etc, etc, and I love that feeling. uh So, even if my job rules changed my job function changed. I still wanted to stay connected to the community right and then that's when I found out about say counter backs uh it's a sig that is aimed at helping contributors uh making most of the kubernetes community and it felt like home.

B

uh This is what I was looking for right, so I started contributing there and today, I'm part of, as I mentioned earlier, two sub projects. uh One is the apec coordinators uh that helps contributors in apac region and another is upstream marketing that helps improving communication for kubernetes contributors.

B

I even made the turn in my career and got a community facing job. Now, uh I'm not the only one with a story like this. If you talk to any speaker in the stock, you would realize that they started at some place else, and then they realized that this might not be the right fit for them, and then they moved on to another sick. They moved on to another group and you know found the right fit for themselves.

B

That brings me to my tip and my advice for you to tell a great kubernetes contributor story is keep exploring.

B

Let me expand a bit on that right. So uh one of the thing that almost everyone in kubernetes community would agree on is that it is a huge community right. There are a lot of uh special interest group. There are a lot of working groups. Then there is cheering. Then there is, you know a huge ecosystem where there are multiple projects going in and out right, so it might be intimidating. It might be confusing for new contributors right.

B

But uh if you want to tell a great contributor story, you don't have to be afraid of the huge community, because there is a plus side to it and the plus side is since it is a huge community. There is something for everyone to contribute right: it doesn't matter what domain you belong to right.

B

It might be testing, it might be infrastructure side of things. It might be marketing, project management, documentation, technical writing. It could be anything right.

B

uh There is a place for everyone to contribute and grow, and sometimes uh you might feel stuck at a place or sometimes you might feel that uh your skills or your ah you could be a better fit at some other place, do not be afraid to explore things right because, as I said, uh since the community is huge, there are multiple or there are plenty of like-minded people who would want to work with you or would want to help you grow or whom you would want to help grow right now.

B

Open-Source is all about learning in public right, but it's not just about uh learning or improving your technical skills. uh It could be about where you want to take your career. It could be about what kind of people you want to associate yourself with right, and all of these things could be the part of learning as well. um So basically, learning where you want to be is is a learning in itself. Right, so do not be afraid of uh exploring right and there could be multiple ways to tell your kubernetes story could be.

B

I went to a meeting I liked it and today I'm a maintainer or it could be. I thought I was at the right place, but guess what I found there was a better place for me uh to contribute right. It could be any part of it do not be afraid explore.

B

Thank you for listening and with that I will pass it over to keslin.

C

Hi, I'm caslin fields and I'm going to tell you a little bit about my story of how I got started, contributing to kubernetes and I'm going to tell you a little bit about how the upstream marketing team does our work. So, let's get going.

C

To start off a little bit more about myself, you can find me on twitter at caslin fields. I'm a developer advocate at google, where I focus mainly on google kubernetes engine, I'm also a cloud native computing foundation. Ambassador, a member of the special interest group for contributor experience on the marketing team, the contributor comms team. We seem to have many names.

C

I focus on mainly containers cloud native, devops and kubernetes type topics, and I love talking about them and I also like to illustrate technical concepts. uh So I have a little website where I do some little comics to try to explain technical things.

C

So you'll see a few illustrations in this. I think that I did at least this one is one of mine. So to start off, I'm going to tell you a bit about my story of how I got into kubernetes, and essentially I got into kubernetes. By talking to people.

C

A friend of mine was really passionate about containers and wanted to teach anyone who was willing to listen. I happened to be a willing ear, so I started to learn from him and his passion really grew on me. So over time, as I got more into containers and kubernetes, I noticed how friendly and welcoming and fun the kubernetes open source community seemed. So I wanted to get involved.

C

It took me a couple of tries to find a place in the project. I first tried uh six storage and sig test, but between workloads at my job and trying to find good projects to work on as my first kind of tasks to get involved as a contributor.

C

The first couple of attempts just didn't really work out, and I wondered if I would ever really find a way to to find a place within the contributor community in kubernetes, eventually through making it known that I wanted to be a contributor and making connections within the kubernetes community.

C

A friend who was a contributor told me about this marketing team. That was spinning up. It sounded like all the things I wanted to do and that I really love about the kubernetes community.

C

It gave me a broad scope where I could learn about many aspects of the technology it involved supporting the contributor community and it also involved using tools like blog posts and social media, which I was already very familiar with, since I had started going down the path to become a developer, to become a developer advocate, and so it involved using those tools to help make uh contributors awesome work more visible to the world.

C

So here I am now speaking to you at kubecon eu virtual in 2021 as part of the upstream marketing group. So let me tell you a little bit more about what we do here. You can see a screenshot of the github repo, where the contributor marketing team keeps various resources like guides to the roles within our group and the the roles that our contributors play and a few other resources that we use in our work.

C

I mentioned earlier that this team aims to support the kubernetes contributor community, often by helping to make their amazing work more visible through various tools like blogs and social media. Any contributor can request help from our team to promote their work within kubernetes contributors can do that by submitting an issue in the kubernetes community repo on github there's a template available called a contributor comms request.

C

So this is what that template kind of looks like. We have a lot of different ways that we can help make awesome. Kubernetes contribution work more visible, but the most important thing is that you tell us what you need as the contributor who wants us to tell your story.

C

If you have an idea for a blog post, if you want to maybe tell people about your story of how you became a contributor, you could go ahead and write a draft or just kind of tell us the general idea of what you think you want to do, and we can help you figure out how we can help you do that what the process is like if you want to do something like a blog post, if you want to tweet about something really cool, that's happening in your sig, we can help you get going with that.

C

We also have some slack and mailing list capabilities. So it really depends on what you want to do. We just want to help. You tell your stories of contribution, so speaking of that, to give a bit of an example, I want to talk about twitter, so we have a twitter handle called at k8's contributors.

C

If you haven't followed, it yet definitely follow us, but our goal with this twitter account is to provide a twitter that is by contributors and for contributors in a sense, so we want contributors to be able to post the really cool stuff that they're working on and any particular things that are going on that are relevant to other contributors and then have contributors. Follow this account and be able to see that kind of news. So how do we make this? Really? A contributor involved community involved twitter account, so we use a bot.

C

We have a repo in github, kubernetes, sigs, slash, contributor, tweets, and this repo has a github action running on it, such that the pull requests of tweets into this repos tweets folder will then be posted from the atkids contributors account when they're merged.

C

So this way anyone from the community can tweet making it truly a twitter account of the community. This also means that tweets go through a review process similar to any other contribution to kubernetes. It also means we have a history of archived tweets from the account that are all conveniently available.

C

So let's take a quick look at the process to submit a tweet to the at kate's contributors. Twitter account. You would have to fork our contributor tweets repo, add a new file and make a pr.

C

So it's a relatively simple process if you're familiar with source control or git, but if you're not, we want to make sure that this is a welcoming process for you as well. I know that when I was getting familiar with contributing to open source, kubernetes git was a a bit of a hurdle for me.

C

So if it's a bit scary to you, uh don't worry about it. A lot of us are here to help, which brings me to my last tip that I will leave you with today and that is to learn in public. I mentioned that I was not very familiar with git when I came in as a contributor.

C

I'd used other source control tools, but not really git before so that was a bit of a learning curve for me and something that I learned about working with the kubernetes community is that everyone really is just learning in public. Together, we all make mistakes.

C

The community is built of uh of people who make mistakes, and nobody does it right 100 of the time, but we all learn together and others will be able to learn from our past mistakes and with that I'm gonna transition over to someone who has really helped me as I've gotten started with the community, especially as I've started. Learning my way around git and that'll be chris short.

D

Hello, everyone I'm chris short, I'm gonna tell you a little bit about uh the work we do on the upstream marketing team and gonna. Tell you my story, because I think it's an interesting story and it's one that we're actually working on as content for the upstream marketing team and that that idea that concept of a story is something I'm gonna touch on multiple times. As I discuss uh what we do so just keep that in mind. Good marketing content is technically a story of some sort. um So who am I? Chris short?

D

I think I mentioned that uh I work at red hat uh marketing is in my job title, but that does not mean. I know nothing. uh Just think of me. You know, like there's dev advocates. Think of me as like an ops advocate, I'm also a cncf ambassador. I have been for a while now I'm a member of sig contrib x on the marketing team. I'm a youtube admin. Slack admin try to just help wherever I can.

D

I also contribute to the cncf newsletter cubeweekly and I have a newsletter of my own called devopsish.

D

If you want to follow me in any other particular place, there's a qr code, you can scan on screen and you can follow me on the twitters or the linkedins or wherever you find people so yeah. What do we do? On the upstream marketing team?

D

We mean great stories right about amazing contributions shared with intention and imagination. So we don't make things up obviously, but we do get somewhat creative, sometimes in the way we tell the stories that we tell um it's specifically, you know about, or for kubernetes contributors to have an outlet for a wide range of content.

D

All content is technically a story. Stories come in all shapes and sizes. How did we do x? Why did we do something in a certain way in the kubernetes community, these pieces telling the story behind features and deprecations and all manner of topics or how we show the world how things get done?

D

We work very closely with a lot of sigs, including sig docs, where the kubernetes website lives and sig contribex. We are a sub project underneath that so that's where the contributor site lives- um and we have you know- have had since our inception representation on the release team. um Hopefully we can keep that up. We are a small group. We are looking for more people I'll touch on that a little bit later, but basically, all content from a marketing perspective is a story now.

D

Sometimes that story can be big and bulky right and it might need a very technical kind of hand to write that story and then.

A

D

We'll review that content- and you know edit it for grammar and anything else, and you know size it up and beat it into shape and github and make sure everybody's good with it, and you know we'll, take the story and run with it for you, but we need to know what the story is to tell that's, basically it right. So if you have some event coming up great, you have a day zero event at cubecon, hey.

D

We have a process to send the tweet out about that right, like caslin touched on that uh in the previous section, so you know about that now make use of that as best as you can, um but we can write longer form pieces and that's kind of the gist of it. Right, like my story, is a long form piece we're actually going to be putting it up online here pretty soon. But let me run you through my kubernetes story, which is one of you, know fun and also um career progression.

D

Right, like I didn't start off working on kubernetes when I started contributing to kubernetes, I was doing devops by day and kind of kubernetes by night. I was working on devops, uh devops engineer, I think, was my title at some point. uh During this journey um I had a little newsletter that had just started out and I was covering all things.

D

Tech learned about kubernetes very early on obviously took me a little bit of time to find my place, but I realized kubernetes was huge, so finding a place to live in this community would be vitally important, so I went from docs kind of bounced around and then I met george castro at cubecon austin in 2017, where it snowed. If people remember correctly- and he told me about sig controvex and I've been in contrib x ever since, so that's pretty wild to think about.

D

What's that's kind of like stage one of my conversation, this was 2016-ish stage two, which is like 2018 2019. I wanted a job at an organization vested in kubernetes. I was contributing so much time to the project that I needed my time and my work to be a little bit more aligned.

D

um So I did something crazy. After 23 years of carrying a pager and being on call, I said enough is enough. I don't want to be on call anymore, but I do want to still work in technical positions, so I jumped into marketing.

D

Why? Well because there was an opportunity on the ansible team to do a little bit of marketing and there's a lot marketing and devops could learn from each other. Is what I've learned over the years? um It's it's pretty wild, but that's!

D

That's probably for another talk, um the I ended up as a highly technical product, marketer, partly working on operator framework, which is now actually a cncf incubating project, so that was pretty cool and- and this left me with a foot in both open source projects right like ansible and kubernetes, and it to be honest with you towards uh the you know towards the end of 2019.

D

I was having a lot of you know, struggles just managing time, and you know: okay, things are one way in one community and another way in another and that's difficult to kind of live in two worlds. So come 2019.

D

I moved over to a kubernetes focus team as a technical marketer, which I've referred to as operations relations, I might have had to move out of operational roles and into marketing roles, but this is very much working for me. I'm still doing technical things, I'm still talking about kubernetes, I'm still working upstream and my work now matches my hobby right and you know if contributing upstream is my hobby.

D

I have work hobby alignment, which is very rare, and I'm very fortunate. I understand that, but that story is real and it could happen to other people right, so I'm happily plugging away in the ambassador community and the upstream marketing team, and you know wherever else I need to be, but I started off not touching kubernetes at all. On my day. Job and I've worked my way into this role that I'm in now, which is pretty cool.

D

So we should tell that story stories get fed to kubernetes.I o through cooperation with the kubernetes blog subproject, which is under sig docs. The process usually goes from a discussion within a sig about what needs to be communicated. Then the team works. The marketing team works with all the parties that need to be involved because oftentimes, something about um a particular project or component um needs to be vetted between a few different sigs and work groups and so forth before solid pieces worked out. So we make sure everybody sees it.

D

Everybody uh has their say and you know can you know, speak their piece and then we edit it and you know, check it for grammar and all that stuff that you know is hard and then we put it together and release it as part of the kubernetes website release process, which is managed by sig docs, um so we're kind of the the storytellers in this scenario where sometimes the communication needs to be short, but we want it to be formal and have some pretty good vetting so like.

D

If we want to send something to k, dev about process, change or hey, you know: hey the shadow applications just opened for the release team, you know, go apply, we'll work on a message like that. We have boilerplate. Now, I'm pretty sure four messages going to the kubernetes developer mailing list as well as tweeting it out on kate's contributor.

D

So both of those things are stories right like hey. This is why you should volunteer to be a shadow. This is how that's a story, and that can be an email that can be a tweet. That can be a blog post. It could be all three there's millions of stories like this in the community. You don't have to go very far to find them, so we all have a tip in this slide deck.

D

The best tip I can give you is that you're, not alone right so caslin says you know, don't be afraid to learn in public. I like to remind people you're, not alone, while you're learning in public.

D

If you don't know anything about git, no problem, we can teach you if you don't know anything about github or how that works or even github actions. We can help you. We can give you resources that will help you get quickly spun up whatever the issue is no problem, we'll figure it out together, so join us. uh Marketing is a great way to contribute to kubernetes, um come to our meetings that are held every friday at 1700, cet, uh 11 a.m, eastern tag, us and slack at contrib comms.

D

uh You can tweet us at kate's contributor on twitter and we look forward to hearing from you.

D

Please don't hesitate to reach out, and finally, thanks to images from undraw and caslin icons from phosphor and contribution to the working group by paris, pittman, bob gillen jonas roslin, myself, karthikayan pyush, suresh taylor and many more past present and future contributors. Thank you very much. If you want to learn more about us and what we do head over to the marketing upstream repo and you can see us there and join us on fridays, look forward to seeing you then.