 Hi. Hey. Hear me? Yep. Right. Right, take it away. All right, let me share my screen. Thank you everyone for joining my session. And thank you so much to the speaker before covering how to contribute to open source communities. I absolutely loved your talk and loved all of your enthusiasm around contributing and especially your advice to stay humble. I feel like that is such a actually really big part of it. So I am the community manager for opensource.com which is a publication supported and sponsored by Red Hat. So I am a Red Hat employee. Opensource.com is part of the Red Hat marketing team. But it's kind of an arms length away in terms of like we really try to focus on the open source community at large. Out in the world, global, anyone's welcome. And we've been around for 11 years. So we've learned a lot in that time about working with the community. And really the way that we do that is we encourage our readers, the readers of opensource.com to become writers. And of course you don't have to. Reading is great. That's a great way to participate and learn and be a part of our community. But we're focused on getting user generated content. So people who are actually using the technology in one way or another do not have to be an expert but just using the technology, getting to know different tools is really our focus. So our community internally or our team internally, our editorial team is really focused on connecting with the community. So we've learned a lot of things about that over the years. So to the point of the talk before, I would be happy to talk about that at some point or answer questions about things we've learned. But the point of this talk is about something a little bit different, which is what stories we are seeing really resonate with our readers. So current stories about software development today. So I'm gonna talk to you about what we see as really popular on opensource.com today. And hopefully this will give you some insight into just what's interesting to people, what developers and sysadmins and other open source enthusiasts are into these days. And if you feel inspired at any point to talk to us about writing for us or pitching an idea, please do. So I think it's about learning, but it's also about if you see ways that you could participate, we'd love for you to do that. So let me start with a couple of things. We're gonna talk about what's popular, Linux, Kubernetes, Raspberry Pi, and I'll dig in a little bit to get a little bit more specific about what around those topics is popular. And again, these stories are published on opensource.com. We've been publishing for 11 years. We publish two to three articles every single day, one or two on the weekend, and we've been doing that for a while. So we really have an amazing body of work, a lot of fantastic articles, and we do kind of see what does better with readers and we rank that and we look back at that and we say, okay, let's write more about this because this is really interesting to people right now or these are the problems that people have right now. Let's focus on that. And again, the people who are writing this are users of the technology, people out in the community, this is about corporate, I mean, this is about community, not about corporate topics in terms of the main focus for our contributors and then we have a key group of contributors that we call the correspondence. So a couple of quick stats at a glance for opensource.com is that in 2021 so far, we've had around 200 authors, so people who have contributed an article, around 500 articles, so you'll see that some of those authors are repeats and around two million reads a month of those articles. So this is a look at the, if you applied where the people are reading on the map, so you're seeing a heavy influence in the United States, India, Europe, Australia, in some other places, Canada, and then you can see, you can kind of dive into the different locations there, but it is a global audience. So let's look at our most popular topics. Two categories to focus on here is most covered and most read. So most covered means these are the topics that people write about the most often and most read meaning these are the most popular from in terms of page views and unique visitors and they overlap, right? So Linux is number one. There's no question in anyone's mind on opensource.com that we have a very heavy Linux audience. So anything from how to use commands to a Linux tool to celebrating Linux, the Linux 30th anniversary, which we did recently on the site with some Linux modules. So we really have kind of run the gamut of different Linux type of topics and they're all really popular. We focus on programming. So that can go into frameworks, that can go into languages, that can go into my programming story. We really actually like to write about people's experiences and we try to use that as a tool to share what people have gone through to figure out what to learn first. So great resources for getting started, what programming languages people like to start with, or just experiences that they've had learning those tools and learning those languages. Yeah, you'll see, so you'll see Python in here, Java. JavaScript is another great one, not on this list, but another one that's kind of up and coming in our list. Another thing you'll see here is Raspberry Pi. We have a really large Raspberry Pi audience. Not all open hardware is a great, is popular, although it is definitely a topic that we love to cover. There's a lot of really neat at home projects, weekend projects, that kind of thing that people do with the open hardware. We cover Kubernetes extensively, so that's a great angle for us. And we're focused on the open options, the open source options here, of course, opensource.com. So we say focused in that lane. We also do things around careers. This kind of falls into the what's been your experience category. So we like to hear how people got started, what their journey has been, where they are now, advice they might have. We often do a five, top five questions that you might get asked in an interview if you're interviewing for blank, whether that's to be a sysadmin or a developer or lots of different options in that space. So we also have a great category here for open source alternatives. People use proprietary tools, and that's great. We're not trying to pretend like that is not reality, but we do like to present our readers with options. If you're an open source enthusiast, you're looking for open source options, open source tools. It could be an alternative to other things that you're using. So that's a really fun one. People will write in with like, hey, I started using this new tool. It's an alternative to Evernote. It's alternative to Trello. So that's a fun one. And if you have any ideas on that, we'd love to hear it. So you can peruse this list, lots of great stuff there. And then this third column is around our most wanted. So these are things that we're looking for people to write, ideas that we have. And again, you're gonna see a lot of overlap, but the top two bullets here wanna focus on, bite-sized tutorials and Linux commands and tools. So we often have people say, I could write a tutorial about how to use this tool or how to use this Linux command, but it's been written before or I'm not the expert, but the truth is, is that every time somebody new writes about how to use something, they bring something new, usually, right? Not all the time, but usually true, is that they bring something new in terms of they have some insight into how to use it or some idea about how to get creative using the tool or they use it in a way that no other tutorial has ever talked about using it. Or they just share something about their experience using it. So we really love to share those and they do very well. Google does not care that it's been written about before as long as it is well-written, quality, and on a reputable site, which opensource.com is. And the other great thing is that our editors are here to help you. We have an editorial team that is available to help you write, so we'll take your draft, we'll review it, we'll give you some feedback if we think that it can be improved and we'll try to be as specific as possible so that you can improve it easily. And if it's just something that we can't publish, we try to give you feedback on why it's not publishable, but the great thing is that we do have that editorial team to really help you out. So if you've never written before or you're just not sure, how do I write a tutorial or what does that look like? We're here to help you. We have lots and lots of really good examples that you can use as templates as well. So this is diving a little bit deeper into what exactly are the articles? So those are the topics. These are some of our most read articles and we have the original publish date on the right-hand side. So you'll see that even some articles written in 2017, 2018 are still very popular today. And so these are great articles if you're looking for templates and you're looking for, okay, if I wanted to write something similar to an introduction to Bash Arrays, here's one that I could look at for what makes this a quality article? What did they do with the introduction? What did they do with the format and the structure of the article and what did they do with the conclusion? And I don't think that these are clickable to you all that you can bring them up, although you could copy paste or type it into Google and find it, but I'd be happy to share any of these with you as well if you're interested and you wanna reach out and I'll have contact information at the end here. So we're covering things from how to use Git, how to use Python, again, how to use Linux, Bash is a great topic. You'll see lots of Linux in here. We have GitHub, which is related to Git and more Linux. And then this is a list of top articles written by our correspondents. So our correspondents is a key contributor group. It's about 20 people from all over the globe and they write 10 articles a year for us and they're in a special program and we meet with them once a week. We talk about article ideas with them and we share stats with them. We have a discourse where we talk and hang out and it's really like a special kind of writers group where if you're interested in writing that much, 10 articles in 12 months is definitely doable, especially with our editorial teams help but it's not a simple task either. It's close to one a month. So it's quite a bit of writing but we try to nurture those relationships and those groups as much as possible. So they've written some really interesting stuff. 10 Raspberry Pi projects. Raspberry Pi is in here. Let's see, at least three times. Lots more Linux. Home Assistant. So we started writing about home automation a few years ago and it kind of did okay. Kind of saw some interest in it but not a ton. Recently we have seen a lot of interest in home automation articles. This is anything from how I use Home Assistant. This was a whole series on how Steve Evans used Home Assistant for his home automation. So that was a really neat series and he showed the different ways, he had some pictures and some details there. So what's really interesting with our readers is how you take a tool, a command, a project and you use it in your daily life or just in your life doesn't have to be daily but just in your own way. So there's a lot of great things there too. And so this is a list of the most downloaded content that we've published lately. So we have our articles that come out on a certain day and they live on as long as they live on depending on how popular they are with readers. And then we also have these downloads. Some of them are e-books, some of them are cheat sheets and these are really great for kind of a different format for sharing your expertise. So we have Linux commands, we have Python, we have Raspberry Pi, this curl cheat sheet is fairly new that's done very well, some get in here. And again, our audience is very focused on developers, sysadmins, Linux enthusiasts, open source enthusiasts. And so that can, it's kind of specific and then it gets more broad. So there's a lot of different people that can fall into those buckets. But we find that those are the folks that are mainly using our downloads as well. So I wanted to leave some time if there was any Q and A here or in the chat, but I'll end on, write for us, learn with us. Learn with us through reading, through connecting with us in other ways. We are on Twitter and Facebook. But then also if you're interested in writing for us we're here to talk through ideas to help you write, to help edit, to revise, just to really be a guide. So you can email me directly, you can email our editorial team. And then I also wrote an article that's on the source page about why it's important to write and how to get started. And that's really focused on, well, what's the whole point of writing? And I really like to share with people that if you are interested in meeting other like-minded people who are interested in the things that you're interested in, if you want to become kind of known for a topic in the community, writing about it is a really great way to let everybody know that you're into that thing. And then another great thing is if you're interested in or looking for ways to get a promotion or move into a certain job or change tracks, that kind of thing, then writing about the things that you know and the things that you're trying to move to, if you know about a subject, but you're not working on that topic right now, but you'd like to, let's say you wanna work on Kubernetes in your next phase of your career. If you start writing about it and get your name out there and have a body of work really to show a hiring manager or a manager or a team that can really, really, I mean, it's just like an automatic, like, okay, yep, they know what they're talking about, they get it, you know, yes or no to that opportunity. So writing could be good for a lot of different reasons and a lot of different things. And again, our team is here to help with editing. And so hopefully you got a good idea of what is popular on opensource.com. And again, we get close to 2 million page views a month. And so that should give you, like to me, it's not just what does well on opensource.com, but that's a good reflection of what is popular in the community globally at large in the world right now. So let me know if I can help in any way or share any of these direct URLs with you if you're interested in diving deeper into the actual article itself. Yes, I will share the link for the article on the source. And if anyone has any questions for Jen, feel free to leave them in the Q and A chat. And it looks like we have one question in the Q and A, it's from Oleg, I don't know who that is, but it looks like they asked, how did you start writing? How did I personally start writing? Okay, sure. Like, how did I start writing? I don't have to think about that for a second. Well, I mean, I've always kind of been a writer, so I don't really know a time when I wasn't writing, but I would say in terms of writing about skills, so if you wanna share expertise that you have, skills that you have, experiences that you have, I've really first started doing that when I started my own blog. I live in Raleigh, North Carolina, and used to go to the Red Hat Tower before everything got shut down. And I was really into going to different places in downtown Raleigh, because downtown Raleigh was changing a lot and growing a lot. And so I, and this is before I had kids, so I had a lot more free time on my hands. And I started writing about things, places that I would go and things that I would do, and that was kind of my outlet for practicing writing, like really practicing and doing it consistently over time. I was a team of one, so I didn't have an editor, and I didn't have a lot of feedback, except for kind of how many reads I would get on the site. But that led me to the career that I have now. That connected with me with some people at Red Hat. And again, kind of to the point of writing to advance your career, I had a body of work. So when I came to the interview for working on a publication, I had a body of work to say, I can write, I can edit, I can produce content on a consistent basis. And I think most people that would join this talk are not gonna be applying to a job at a publication. But the point is, is that if you have something to show that shows your expertise, that is getting you towards a goal, then that's huge. I mean, you're not just talking about it in their interview, you have a portfolio, you have something to show. So that's how I got started and still here today. Oh, I think you're muted. Oh, okay, yeah, I was. I was gonna ask, do you still face WritersBlog? Do I still have my own blog? No, I mean, do you face WritersBlog? Oh, WritersBlog, yes, for sure. Yes, I love that question. Yes, I do. I think that that's just part of being human. And if you're a writer, then it's just kind of part of the deal. I don't write nearly as much as I used to. You know, so much of my job now is related to nurturing the community of contributors. So helping them get unstuck, helping them find topics to write about and focus their work. But they go through WritersBlog, our key contributor group of people who write 10 articles in 12 months. I mean, I think part of the pressure of that is, okay, what if I go through WritersBlog and I have this commitment to write 10 articles in 12 months? And so that's why our editorial team is, I think so critical, you know, to really have a team that can spend time with the contributors and help them get unstuck and talk them through things and constantly be throwing ideas out there. I mean, we have a writer's list of over 500 people and I try to send out writing prompts and ideas once a week. So I think kind of keeping that flow going is important for helping people kind of stay in the flow and get it back in the flow when they need to, but also taking breaks. I mean, WritersBlog is maybe a sign of needing to take a break, so that's okay too. Yeah, and I think it's very human to not always wanna be writing 24 seven. Yeah, for sure. All right, do you think that there are any skills that someone can learn that aren't exactly writing but kind of go hand in hand with it? Yeah, that's a good point. Like I definitely, I don't wanna say public speaking and make anybody feel like they need to do that, but I do think that it is similar in terms of part of the challenge obstacles with writing is getting your thoughts together. And so you're like, okay, well, how do I do what I do? Okay, well, I need to start like organizing my thoughts so that I can write them down or if you're gonna give a talk, organizing my thoughts so that I can speak them out loud. So I feel like getting organized is huge and I like to, I do have some, I should have linked this, but I do have some, first of all, I have a worksheet for helping you think through what you could write about and getting granular about writing about it. And then I have a, yeah, the worksheet is related to like sort of how you would map it out. And so using some sort of document to, I use Google Docs for most things. And so some sort of document where you start to do an outline and break it down into pieces so that you can say, okay, well, I'm gonna, this is how I'm gonna organize what I do and my thoughts and then write it out. Because I mean, I think even people who do public speaking write it out, right? You have a presentation and you're writing it out and getting it organized. So public speaking does help with that. And we actually reach out to speakers at conferences and say, hey, you know, you did the work of turning what was in your head into something you could speak about. The next easy step is to write about it. You've already probably written about it. You just need to put it in article form. Yeah, just making it accessible for other people to read. Yeah. Yeah, and that article that you were talking, the worksheet, that sounds super useful. If you wouldn't mind linking that, I would personally find that really useful. Okay, great, yeah, it's on GitHub. So I just need to, I think I just need to log in there and grab the link. I know that like for most people, probably writing is something that, I think it's a skill that kind of goes neglected because when we go through school, like you're kind of forced to write and then once you get to college, it's no longer a requirement, maybe for a couple of classes, but it's very easy to forget that. And I think lately I've just been feeling like, wow, I really need to improve my skills because it's not something that I practice every day. So whenever I'm writing stuff, like maybe to friends or putting together ideas, going through that process of saying, okay, well, what is the thing I'm actually trying to think through and actually like forming that outline, that really helps. And I think it's more than just writing, it's like a thought process and it's the thought pattern of materializing what's in your head. It is, and I think it can even, have a positive feedback loop to the work that you do. It's not just about getting it out for other people to see whether it's for their benefit or your benefit, but it also like, oh, I thought through that. Now I'm like sitting down to go do that thing and I just feel more clear. Yeah, yeah, you can really go into things with confidence because you've extracted it out.