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From YouTube: Lightning Talk: Beginner to Maintainer Journey of a Student - Debabrata Panigrahi

Description

Don’t miss out! Join us at our upcoming hybrid event: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2022 from October 24-28 in Detroit (and online!). 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.

Lightning Talk: Beginner to Maintainer Journey of a Student - Debabrata Panigrahi, National Institute of Technology Rourkela

The session will highlight my learning as a student during the journey as a new contributor starting to contribute after attending a New Contributor Workshop during KCD Bengaluru to becoming an approver recently. I will share the nuances of working together in the community and will focus on areas that need a lot of contributors now especially with the "chop wood and carry water" kind of work that could be easily done by students. I will further focus on how various sigs runs mentoring cohort for contributors to grow up the contributing ladder and learn stuff necessary for taking leadership or helping the leadership, I have been part of such mentoring cohort under sig-contribex and now I'm a moderator of the k-dev mailing list. Also, I will try to focus on how new contributors loose interest while looking for good-first-issues, and I will try to emphasize the importance of regular sig meetings and discussions and help they have helped me to come up with solutions to help the project.

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Hi good evening, everyone uh before we start a short introduction about me, so I am a finally undergraduate at national institute of technology, raul, keller, majoring in biomedical engineering.

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Basically, my background is non-cse and I am a self-taught programmer and it's been one year since I have been contributing to kubernetes, let's start so how it started. Basically, uh it all started with lfx mentorship, which happens in three quarters a year where I was a mentee under one of the cncf sandbox project uh called cures, mess where my work was to add more features to the aws chaos feature that is already present there. But the caveat was when I started with this mentorship.

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I had no idea what does kubernetes and what is a content container orchestration so, but I had to work on a tool that uses kubernetes as an end user, so I started learning it and at that, during that time, uh that qcon eu happened and I met a lot of folks. I knew where the community thrives. I joined the slack channels, the place where the developers of swim devs interact, but the problem I had there was.

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I wasn't able to understand much of the conversation that is taking place, though I tried to ask questions, but there were a few jargons that were quite unclear for me and then this kcd bengaluru happened where there was an amazing session uh on the code walkthrough, which is still relevant for me. uh Whenever I find any doubts with the source code of communities, I go through that video and you uh get all the jargons like capes prr.

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All this I got introduced to that and met some amazing folks with whom I work day-to-day now and we meet weekly basis in the community. So the key elements that I found as a beginner was mentoring.

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Second, was perseverance and third, and most important was the courage to ask the right questions in the community and get your doubts cleared as a beginner when we start contributing, we usually ping, the reviewers, the approvers uh and we ping them in the dms, but why it is discouraged in the community is when you ask a question in the group: not only it gets cleared swiftly, but also, uh if any other person has the same doubt gets help, and it people know that you are active and you are working on something and whenever we need help you we could get on to you and it also develops a sense of trust for you in the community.

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So uh when I talked about how mentoring is important, we talked of lfx mentorship that I was part of where I learned about kubernetes as an end-user part. I love the project, then I started contributing to it. But when we come to kubernetes in the upstream part, there is something called group mentoring that I was part of south of paris for mentoring there.

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I was part of this mentoring cohort where uh our work was basically uh to help with the community management part, and we were given tasks every week to go through the issues in the case last case last community repository trash them and help them so then comes one such issue, which was you know uh it was opened by dems on february 27.

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I put this four picks to show you the timeline of how issues get solved in communities, and uh so this all uh this issue was regarding uh developing a catacora scenario that would help newbies who are coming to community but are not able to clear the threshold of setting up the kubernetes code in the local system.

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So we wanted to give them a more real-time power view of how this thing work, how to set up a uh how the setup how to set up the code that lies in the caseless k in your local system and start contributing. So I assigned myself uh to this uh to this uh issue on august 30th, I worked myself. I worked myself and we did a cross-collaboration.

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uh We took help from quantum comps and sick contrabax to do the copy editing and we came up uh with a contributor catacoda and I I hope I want you all to check out this contributor category repository that is present at uh kubernetes six repository where we are trying to develop scenarios that would help upstream depths the devs, uh the people who are contributing actively to kubernetes and who don't have enough resources at the beginning to get the feel how things work.

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So all all through this uh all through this journey. One thing I learned is you know before assigning an issue, try to understand the subject of the issue, because what happens when you start?

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We look for good first issues, but the problem is most of the people try to solve the issue rather than comprehending what the issue is and what is the larger picture of the issues and that's where most people the journey of most people stops as a contributor when we don't comprehend when we don't try to understand what we are solving, they don't clear the threshold of good first issues, so whenever stuck do ask for help, if you are not able to understand the issue forms we have in uh throughout the kubernetes repository is very intuitive.

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For someone to understand what that issue is saying and if you're trying to solve it uh do do communicate itself with the with the community members, and when I say communication is the key. There is an advantage we have is in every communities uh community meeting the first five minutes goes uh as a session for introducing new contributors and that that comes as a very good ice-breaking session for anyone new uh to gain confidence and ask questions.

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Ask your doubts in the community meeting and don't burn out and be regular, since this uh this whole talk was for any students. Any uh grads like me, who are unlike uh the people who are doing day-to-day job, have more bandwidth.

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We could spend more time and if you come regular to community meetings at least listen and uh you you, you become a part of the flow and that helps that helps you in identifying issues in identifying parts where you could help so shout out to all the people uh with whom I work with who have mentored me, and it has helped me immensely in my career and thank you, everyone for helping me and motivating me to contribute.

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That's it. Thank you.