 Hi all, welcome to our panel. This is about non-code contribution, and the premise of this is that hundreds of people are regularly contributing code, supporting build infrastructure, and collaborating with the fluency of Git and GitHub that's required to contribute to Kubernetes day-to-day, or what is believed to be required to contribute. This panel of people, we all are contributing in different ways. We're doing non-code contribution, and by that we mean, we contribute without needing to use Git or GitHub and are adding value in other ways to the ecosystem, and we want to tell you a little about that so that you're more aware of the broader range of contribution and to inspire you to do so if you're into it. So we've got a wonderful panel today. First, we'll just ask people to introduce themselves. Kazlin, will you kick us off? Sure, so hello everyone. I'm Kazlin Fields, and I'm a developer advocate at Google Cloud, and I'm a member of the Special Interest Group for Contributor Experience, where I'm a member of the Contributor Marketing Group, and we'll get into what that means more in a little bit. Good, and Kohei? Oh, hello. So actually I am from Japan, so I'm from the other side of the world in this group right now, so I'm recording in the morning right now. Yeah, so I'm Kohei, and I go by inductor on the internet, and I am an owner of SIGDOC's localization group for Japanese translation, so I basically translate Japanese, I mean, sorry, English to Japanese, then I also accept reviews and give LGTMs to the translators' contribution. That's amazing. And Kat? Hello everybody. My name is Kat Cosgrove, I'm a developer advocate at JFrog. I'm also a co-chair of Cloud Native TV, which you should have heard about by now, if not, stay tuned. I'm also one of the people responsible for the infamous Docker shim, Conflagration. Oh yeah, I remember that. Yeah, everybody does, unfortunately, and we'll talk about that later, or at least I will. But my contributions to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and the whole ecosystem have primarily been community and social media-based, so I will have a slightly different perspective. Yeah, and I'm Matt Broberg, I'm based out of the Midwest and appreciate, like, we're all in different places, so one of the advantages of this weird and wonderful virtual space is we can all be here together and do this talk. And I'm a red hat working on an editorial called Enable Architects. We write about IT architectures, but I've been contributing to CIG contributor experience for a couple years, and then I helped start the working group, upstream marketing slash contributor comms that Kazlan and I jam on, and we'll talk more about that. So maybe that's a good place to kick off. So how did you get started in this non-code contributing space for Kubernetes? I feel like, Kat, you started to go into Dockershim, and I feel like this is just a great starting place for us. Let's get into the weeds. Yeah, we'll just go straight into the fire. So I've never actually contributed code back to any CNCF project before, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. What I did do is get very heavily involved in the CNCF community. I used the tools, so I felt that it was important to give back to the community and at one point last year, there was a thing, is it last year? I don't, time is irrelevant at this point in the Panera, so it could have been a few months ago, it could have been last year, I'd believe you regardless of what you told me, but so in order to use the entire Docker tech stack as your container runtime inside of Kubernetes, Kubernetes requires a software shim, and we call that software shim Docker shim, its sole purpose is to get at the actual container runtime inside of the Docker stack, which I think is container D actually, but there was an announcement made that the Docker shim was going to be deprecated because it's a separate thing for the CNCF to maintain, that's kind of a pain, it's unfair. We've been talking about deprecating this thing for quite a while now, and the announcement of that deprecation created a lot of confusion initially, so I wrote a like 13 tweet long thread explaining what the Docker shim is and what's happening and why you shouldn't panic about this, and it immediately went viral to an extent that I was at the time extremely uncomfortable with because I wasn't used to having that much attention online, but this was ultimately an extremely positive contribution to the community. The CNCF underestimated the way that deprecation would affect some users and didn't really take into account what people knew about Docker shim. People tend to conflate Docker and Kubernetes a lot when they don't understand Kubernetes super well, which isn't a bad thing, it's entirely understandable, but it created a lot of drama and I helped solve that drama by being helpful and being a positive, non-judgmental source of information in the community, and that's an important contribution that any of you can make. Kat just mentioned about the Docker shim deprecation, right? I also was involved with that a little bit, so I basically saw a lot of dramas over there on Twitter and other social medias too. So yeah, Kat also posted the Kubernetes blog post, right? So we were basically in the Slack chat, we were discussing about how do we proceed, how do we post to make other people not panic anymore, right? So yeah, we were editing in the Google doc and collaborating to each other. And yeah, I helped that a bit. And also I posted the blog post in Japanese too because it was a really huge rage in Japan as well. Yeah, so yeah, a lot of people were really, I don't know how to describe this yet, but they're basically panicking, so yeah. Yeah, and you gave them what they needed in Japanese and it sounds like we're also helping with the English messaging, so that's incredible. That's a great combination of your skills and we needed everyone we could get that week in the Kubernetes community. It was an all-hands-on-deck situation for sure. Everybody was panicking and there was a dozen people in that Slack channel trying to cram together a blog post and an FAQ to stem the tide of people who were very scared and they didn't understand why they shouldn't be scared. The six hours were really dramatic. Very dramatic, extremely. We all deserve t-shirts for that, frankly. Oh, Docker Shim Fan Club, I feel like it's a really solid group that we can, maybe it's a new working group we can sponsor. Well, before we get too far down that inside joke, pulling it back up to other non-code contributions, Hazlyn, can you talk about what you've been up to? Yeah, so Matt will be thoroughly aware of the types of work that I've been doing with the community. To get into the community though, I'll talk a little bit about how I ended up here. Well, to start off, I developed an interest in Kubernetes and containers by having a bunch of friends who were just really interested in containers and Kubernetes. So over time, they got me involved in their hobbies, which was great, I always love it when people share their passions with me. So I got more and more involved in it and my career kind of started to shift towards Kubernetes and containers. And I wanted to get involved with the community because I've been to some Kubecons and some Meetups and I saw that everyone was so nice and everyone was always saying how wonderful it was to contribute and how everyone was welcome. So I started trying to find a place within the Kubernetes community. And I first started looking at maybe like SIG storage or SIG testing, because I come from a test engineer background. So I started looking at those, but with my workload at the time and the types of projects that those groups were doing, it kept not really working out, but then I found this contributor marketing group, which might sound a little weird. Marketing is in the title, so people are like, what does that mean? Sounds not that fun. I feel like some people feel that way. I hope this pitch is pivoting, but yeah. Yeah. I mean, engineers maybe not find it interesting. It's so true though. It's so true. Yeah, some people feel that way about it. But what I love about it is I get a really broad view over the Kubernetes ecosystem and I get to help people like Kat was saying. So our goal with the contributor marketing group is to tell the world about the wonderful things that Kubernetes contributors are doing and to help Kubernetes contributors connect with each other and see what each other is doing. So being able to get that overarching view of the SIGs and help them to communicate with the world, all of the awesome stuff they're doing is what gets me really excited about the work that we do in the contributor marketing team which involves things like blog posts. We also helped out with the Docker shim blog posts a little bit. You did, thank you. Yeah. And also the Twitter, we have a Twitter handle at Kat's contributors where we actually have a bot on GitHub so that any Kubernetes contributor who wants to participate in that Twitter account if they wanna tweet something about the work they're doing they can submit a tweet to the GitHub repo and we have a GitHub action that will turn that pull request into a tweet once it's merged into the repo, which is really cool. Oh, I didn't know that. That's so cool. That's a huge motivator for me. I love attention. That is cool. I love that. Please use it. Oh, I'm going to because I love attention, Gazzelin and that. And possibly by the time this goes live we have a PR in progress to make that so that somebody can just comment in a GitHub issue and once it gets approved as an issue it automatically sends the tweet. So you don't even need the PR or you don't need the Git foo that we're part of what we're saying is we're trying to create a home for people for more non-code contribution because there's so many talented people who are tweeting and translating and just and drawing their way into contribution and those are all valuable ways in which we expand our community. Yeah, we still need all of that. Like we desperately need all of that. Like can't just all be code. Then we have no personality and we have no community. So we need the flavor. Yeah, yeah. So Cazzelin, I cued you up a little. I just wanted to say like your artwork is incredible. And I feel like part of what- Yeah, I was about to say that too. Go for it, Kohei, go for it. Yeah, I love your comicalization. That's really amazing. That's so nice of you. So one way that I know some other people as well have started contributing to open source projects is to contribute their art skills. That's a great point for a non-code contribution. We've talked about blog posts. We've talked about translating documentation into many languages and another way is to help with illustration. I do illustrations for blog posts. I do my own little illustrations for talks and things. And so sometimes people ask me within the community to help them explain a concept and help to do it through visualizations. And that's one way that I really like to help people. So something I wanted to ask you all is like, what's something about non-code contribution that is like bringing a different sort of value to the community that people might not know about? First of all, it comes to mind for me to queue it up is like I'm really blown away at the people that volunteer their time to run events, especially in the year of the COVID. Like there have been people that have spent countless hours to curate experiences for us and to connect us despite us being very far away from each other and yes, very stressed and going through a lot collectively. There have been those moments of either jumping on like a short video or a Twitch stream or in animal crossing for some like just some place where people are getting together and feeling connected. I know that how much work that takes I'm not great at it myself and I'm so glad other people show up and do it. So what are some ways that like people surprise you with their contribution that you wanna give a shout out to? I will literally always give a shout out to Austin Parker for the animal crossing conference for deserted island DevOps, which was a very, very heavily container technology because both myself and Ian Coldwater spoke at the first one, but that was, we caught lightning in a bottle with that conference and it remains the most wholesome, pure, uplifting conference experience of my entire life and it's my literal job to attend conferences. And I really don't think I could give him enough accolades for that. Running a conference is hard. Running events is hard, especially now. So literally anybody who is doing that now in a way that's still very community oriented deserves the biggest hug I'm allowed to give you as soon as it's safe because we're all trapped in our apartments and that is a really, really valuable contribution, right? People learn in different ways and some people need the social aspect in order to learn a new technology. I do personally, I read the docs by myself alone but then I want to watch somebody else hack it out and I can't do that without live events or virtual events or whatever. So big appreciation to anybody who is capable mentally of putting together a virtual event in present day. Also shout out to, I guess, KubeCon because we're doing that right now. That's literally what we're doing right now. Not nothing, it's pretty big. Well said, Kat. Thank you. Yeah, so I was actually really surprised when I firstly got involved with Kubernetes community because I just imagined like there would be just a bunch of a lot of awesome programmers that are considered as experts, right? But once I get involved, I see a lot of beginners, which is also a good thing, absolutely. And also there are a lot of subgroups called SIG, right? For example, SIG docs and SIG Contribute Experience just we were just talking about. And also this seems to be like I've never been involved with there, but SIG naming and SIG release, there are a lot of things that you don't have to necessarily have the great coding skills, but also you just basically need a common sense, right? Yeah. So there are actually a lot of technical writers and project managers, not just pure programmers, which is good. And there are a lot of areas of interest to there, which is so cool that people of different interests have different areas where they can do more contributing so that they can pursue their passions. Yeah, so in a way, it is okay for you to have like a biased opinion about things because there are a lot of people and who can discuss about it. So as long as the discussion is fine, that's fine. So like you don't have to have the whole interest, right? I want to contribute to this, but I don't want to contribute to this, that's fine, right? You can start from the small place. Yeah. That's really great universal advice. Like if you're newer and you're interested in contributing, you might see the list of 30 plus special interest groups, the SIGs, and be like, okay, maybe you'll just show up to each one of these real quick. And then you look at the year calendar and that's 40 plus hours of activity in less time than you have. So the acknowledgement that like you can choose a place and go contribute in your unique way. And we need expertise of all kinds, like product management is an expertise and product marketing and engineering and engineering management and just program and product management is wild. I'm seeing a lot more participation from people with those skill sets and scrum masters. It feels more friendly for newcomers this way because there are more specific options. You don't have to dive in with both feet this way. And also, if you don't know where you want to start because you're so new that all of this is overwhelming, that's what people like me and Kazlan are for. Like we are the like front facing community part of this. And I guess Matt to an extent too, don't you do that too, Matt? Yeah, I'm into it. So like that's what we're for. And you can talk to us, like just reach out to us and we're happy to answer questions and talk to you about this kind of stuff and help you find a home, like ultimately that's what we want. We want to build a better community which takes all kinds of people, whether you write code or not. And build better tools out of that. Like building good tools isn't just writing good code. And also, good code may or may not even actually exist. So... Yeah, constantly improving is probably the best goal we can set out these days. We've hit a lot of different topics all around non-code. So maybe we'll start going into what some advice you have for people who are interested and may not know how to start contributing to Kubernetes or contributing in a non-code way. Any advice that comes to mind that we haven't covered yet? I think as far as tech communities I've been involved in, which at this point is quite a lot, the CNCF is one of the most social and one of the most welcoming of all of them. So I would reiterate my previous advice and say just talk to us. I don't actually work for the CNCF. I am just a community member who ended up with a voice and stuck around. And that can be you too. And that for me started by just talking to people. And you don't need to be scared of any of us or anything, we're not untouchable. We would like to have you. So talk to us, please. And we'll find you a thing to do because there's stuff to do. There's like so much stuff to do. So we can find you some stuff to do. Should I go next? Yeah, I did it. I feel like the advice that I often give boiled down into kind of a single phrase is contributing to open source is learning in public. Something I was really intimidated by when I wanted to start getting involved with open source was I have no idea how to do this and I'm going to make so many mistakes. Everybody's going to find out that I don't know what I'm doing. But what I learned is that everybody doesn't know what they're doing sometimes. And we're all just doing it anyway because we really love these open source projects in our communities and the technology. And so we all work together and we learn in public. You can see our mistakes. They're out there to see. But we do our best to learn from them and move past them and all work together to make something really great. So you'll be learning in public, but it's okay. That's great advice. You know, everyone makes mistakes. And I think in a way, I would personally recommend as the first contribution, fixed typo is the best. Yeah, so good. You know, that's a known called correction and it's still contribution, right? Even like just removing this A from this typo would be a contribution. And your GitHub will grab the green color, right? We all want the green color. I have something to say on that subject. If you don't mind, Kohei. That's fine. Yeah. Go ahead. There's like this contra... People think that documentation contributions to open source projects are somehow like inherently less valuable than writing code. And I think that is a terrible and destructive and toxic mentality. Documentation contributions, especially from newbies are so valuable because oftentimes the people... Yeah, like oftentimes the people writing the documentation, we're experts, okay? And that sounds great, but the reality is that being an expert makes it really easy to forget what it's like to not know something. So the documentation often ends up written from the perspective of somebody who is an expert. And yeah, that makes it way less approachable. It makes it so hard. I firmly believe that part of the reason why some of these tools have a reputation for being hard to learn is because they were hard for us to learn when we built them, but we haven't adapted the documentation. And so if you are a newbie and you are looking for a way to make a non-code contribution back to Kubernetes or you're looking for a way to like figure out the process for contributing to Kubernetes, please contribute documentation because it really is super, super valuable. I read docs and I love a good doc. I don't try to use a tool until I've read the docs. And because of the nature of my job, I am frequently a newbie on things. So newbie-centric documentation is super valuable and if you are new, I would love to have you, please. Absolutely, absolutely. I love the irony, but I'm going to say it anyway, that being a beginner is an expertise. It is. It definitely is. And being somebody who's continually learning new things, I think you bring an expertise of like, oh, I know what other people are going to stumble upon. Yeah. And if you have the skills to provide that back, amazing, do that. One thing I'd say is that like, when you're doing a distribution or contributing through GitHub, the whole pull request system is something we undervalue the complexity of. And it is a language to learn. It is painful. And there's very funny YouTube videos of people struggling through it. I've made some myself. So don't feel discouraged if you're not great at Git. Partner with somebody who's willing to help you. And that's what we're building in upstream marketing subgroup. We have a bunch of people that if you have a great idea of what to write, you've already written something up and you don't know how to get it into the system. We have a bunch of people that will help you get it into the system because you're right. Those ideas are needed. And it's okay to suck at Git. Like, I think everybody sucks at Git to some degree, but like not knowing it yet is totally okay too. Oh yeah, I suck at Git. Like big time, big time. I don't know what I'm doing. And it's like. That's a must have item. I have to buy that because I need it. If something goes wrong with a commit or a merge, I'm lost. I'm going to have to Google it. I'm going to have to Google it. If I have to reset, God help me. You know? I still have some trouble with the Git rebase too. That can be overwhelming. Oh yeah, those get messy. And it's okay to make these mistakes. We all do. We weren't born experts. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Some of us are just more comfortable screwing up in public. It is my job to screw up in public to an extent it's Kasselin's job to screw up in public. It's Matt's job to screw up in public. It's Tony's job to screw up in public so that you don't feel as bad about screwing up in public. Learning in public. Yeah, it's good. It's fun. It's fun down, but so it will definitely be an organic conversation. How do you all manage your time when it comes to contributing to Kubernetes? Because for some of us, it's part of our day jobs. For some of us, it's only volunteer base and there's going to be a mix of people that do that. How do you set those boundaries when there's just so much to do and so many places you could be communicating? Kasselin, do you want to kick us off? I can start. Time management is such a challenge for me in all aspects of managing work. There's so much work that I want to do and that I have so much fun doing. So that's a pretty good problem to have. Of course, there are also the things that are not as fun, so you've got to work those in there, too. But time management is actually something that I enjoy quite a bit. Like a lot of people, I think, I hop around between different tools and methodologies for managing my time for an open source contribution. Being on Slack is really key to being able to do that because being able to see what people are talking about and being involved in those conversations throughout the day helps me to keep in mind what my tasks are and then I have a lot of different tools that I use to manage those tasks like my planner that I have right here or my post-it notes all over my desk and sometimes I use online tools. It's a variety of things, but the main thing that really keeps me excited about the work and keeps me on task is talking with other people in the Slack. Cool. So you keep it present to keep on task. That's a cool strategy. Others want to jump in? So some parts of the way I contribute are time boxed and others are not. The way I contribute back to the community socially which is heavily through Twitter usage that's not time boxed. I will do that any time of the day or night. If it happens I will respond to it because it's low effort for me and also because I genuinely enjoy it. Other contributions this varies based on what you genuinely enjoy. What do you think is fun? What makes you happy? Other things I do time box really, really aggressively you will not see me making a pull request at like 10 a.m. on a Sunday or at 9 30 a.m. on a Wednesday. I don't do that. I'm very defensive of my personal time which I think is actually an important thing. You can't make something like this your whole entire life or you are going to burn out and we don't want you to burn out. We want you to stick around for a long time and help us out. But as for like managing what I do when I agree with the like actively talking to people aspect is really, really important to me because I believe that you do you need all of the context you can get like I said earlier you can't assume what other people know so there has to be an exchange of information so Slack is super important Twitter is super important for me at least it might not be for you but definitely you need to be hanging out in Slack and again please don't burn out because we love you and we want you to stay. That's a really important point of view. Thank you. You're so nice. This is the first time the four of us have hung out and we're really enjoying it and we're planning trips to Japan. Yes, we got to get drinks. So, Kohei, how do you think about this? So from my point of view I will start by providing a different context so everyone, I mean if you're interested in contributing to a Kubernetes project or any like cncf project that means also means like that at some extent you want the badge on your GitHub right? You want to be a member. In order to get a membership of a project you have to keep contributing at some extent. I cannot say how long because it's different depending on which organization you want to get involved but yeah, so in order to keep contributing as just Kat said, you should not run out. That's something that you have to manage by yourself. So like time management is such an important factor to do that because personally I both I basically contribute for my work and not for my work because I didn't introduce myself as in I belong to Hewlett Packard Enterprise as a solution architect so I sometimes contribute to open source project because my clients are having issues right? In that case it's part of work but I also enjoy tech stuff by myself so like especially improving documentation such as like this getting started doesn't work right? Those things that's part of my hobby so thank you I'm trying to be so basically those things I think it's different from Kat because it's also part of my personal time so I do that on Wednesday in the very early morning or it could be really like middle of the night or it could be weekends but it's just my personal preference so you don't have to push yourself to do that you can just do it whenever you want right? Yeah if it's something you enjoy that's why the social media thing for me is like if you ask me a kubernetes question on twitter I'll just answer it because I enjoy it. And for some people we'll be exhausted by that yeah so like my best way to manage the time is not to manage the time just do it when you want to do it that sounds ironic but I think it's the for myself it makes the best you know efficient. Yeah it takes time to manage it to do this so like if you can trust your intuition on and just play like kubernetes community as a playground I think that's a beautiful way to use it and be part of it. Yeah I use it as a toy. Yeah and that's cool we appreciate it and you know I wanted to ask this question because I find it so complex for people and it's the most common thing I hear is like how do I contribute when do I contribute and for me like I found that so my job is not directly to contribute to kubernetes but I'm at a huge vendor and it's a lot of value from people like me being in this type of community so I found like many people, I can't say most many people have enough flexibility in their week where they can carve a few hours and choose what to do with it and for me that is kubernetes contribution it is a few hours a week it's no more than four during the work day occasionally sometimes out of the work day just to banter with people much like cohe but because of that I've been able to slowly integrate it more into my day job because lo and behold when results show up people are excited about what I'm doing so at first it was just for me but I pitched it well enough that it's now for us as well and I think if you're at kubernetes and you're listening to this you might be in a similar position where you could maybe grow your role that way if it interests you we'll take that first initiative of just carving off time and asking for forgiveness instead of permission and just doing good work and being a community member getting that little badge and then celebrating that afterwards so very cool it's cool to hear how all of you do it and I definitely love the social media aspect too I'm way too active on twitter or maybe just active enough just active enough all right well we're just about to run out of time let's do a quick wrap up anything let's just do around the horn say like one thing you're thankful for or no what do you want to do final advice I guess there we go that's a much better conclusion final tldr too long didn't read advice I'll start you have valuable contributions everybody like listening to this watching this you have something to contribute that we find valuable you might think to yourself oh you know I don't know I don't know anything I don't know what I'm doing that's still valuable the fact that you don't know what you're doing and we do like we need that perspective too so you're all valuable in some way so if you want give it to us Kohei please fix our typos and also if you ever speak any other language than English it's another way to contribute too so localization projects has a lot of languages such as Spanish Korean also Japanese being myself that's where you can contribute as well because you can actually communicate with other contributors in your language which is advantage it's huge yeah that's such a great one yeah so please fix typos and my final word of advice would be don't give up there were a couple of times where I tried to get involved with the community when it just didn't work out it wasn't the right timing and that's okay I still wanted to be involved and I still eventually got involved so if you're struggling to get involved right now that's okay we'll still be here for you just keep chugging and we'll try our best to help you get involved oh that's beautiful alright with that thank you so much from this noncode contribution panel thank you to Kat to Kohei to Kazlin and thank you for watching see you out there bye bye