 It will be about our journey through cloud native as a mentee and a mentor as well. So my name's Brad McCoy. Today, Miha couldn't come unfortunately. So Shruti's gonna come and give the talk as well. And cause she's done a lot of mentoring as well. So we thought it'd be nice to have both the mentee and the mentor perspective of it as well. So yeah, Miha and I worked for quite a while together, we'll share our journey of all the different projects and mentoring programs that we worked on as well. And Shruti and I have also worked together from the city foundation side of things as well. So who is Miha? She's a senior student of computer science. She's a intern at Red Hat in India. And she's just become the community's CI signal lead for the next release, which is the 1.28. She is a GSOC 2022 mentee for the captain project. Also, she did another mentoring project, which was the Linux foundations one, which we'll talk about soon also. And she's now become a member of the captain project, which is an open source project that was born at Dynatrace. And Miha, I'm a board member at the Continuous Delivery Foundation, where I spend time working on strategy around mentoring and contribution as well and getting people in. I'm the comms lead of the community's release team for 1.28, which is the next release. Maintainer of the captain project and also on the technical steering committee of that. CNCF ambassador and then I also do the admin for the GSOC. So in terms of cloud native mentoring programs, this is some of the ones that we have. So the most common one that people know about is Google summer of code. So this one is more around for students. It's if you're already working or want to do a career change, the LFX mentorship program, except anyone, the GSOC one is a little bit harder to get into if you're not studying, which is a bit of a shame in my opinion. And then you have the Google summer of docs as well. So that's similar to a technical program, but it's for writing documentation as well. We also have Outreachy, which is for helping minority groups get into tech. So whether it's in a region that doesn't have much tech or most of the tech is in US or Europe, so it's trying to be focusing on diversity and inclusion for those groups. And then one that people don't really know about is the Kubernetes release team. So this one is like an apprenticeship for going through the release cycle of Kubernetes. You don't have to be an expert and there's real structured program that will help you with roll handbooks and mentors that will come and go through the cycle. So you could go through this for you shadow and sub teams and then you become the lead. And then you can also become the release manager one day as well. How can you get involved in mentoring? So the CNCF have a mentoring select channel, also the CD Foundation. Did anyone go to the mentoring sessions at 10 today? A couple, yeah. So at KubeCon they have mentoring sessions as well which is quite valuable. I know Anna and Bart here, they have done them before and mentored people. So I highly recommend for the next ones you get grouped with six people. Not only do you get to meet nice people, you can see the mentor and you can focus on career, education, coding. There's lots of different sort of subgroups there which are really helpful. And open source projects. So a lot of people think that you need to do GSOP to do a mentoring program but actually you can join most open source projects and they will mentor you. If you start to come in, you say that you wanna start contributing, you can be at any level as well. So you could be, you don't even need to code. You could do documentation, good first issues. And that's the really important part to do that community bonding because you can't really just go to say I wanna do GSOP for this project and they don't know you. They like to, the mentors like to know the people first and sort of gain a bit of trust and then they will accept you into the program. And all of this information that I talked to and much more is at the CNC of mentoring, repository and GitHub. So you can go there and that will give you very detailed of how to get involved. So now I'll talk a little bit to set the scene of the journey that we've gone on and if yous would like to go down this journey as well, it's a pretty good formula of how to get involved. So this is an example of Mae has one. So she started off contributing to the Kubernetes project was the first one. She then worked on a lot of docs, worked on some good first issues and then become a member. And then started working on the captain project as well. So one thing that was good is she became a mentor as well because all the new students coming in, she would actually guide them in the right direction, which is really good to see. And then she started a GSOP project with us. So we did one on GitOps with Argo, Flux and captain integrations. And she then joined the Kubernetes release team as the CI signal shadow where she did that for two releases. They mentored her and then she went as the lead for the next release now. She then successfully finished the GSOP project. So that's a paid project as well by the way, which is quite lucky for students especially. They can give you some pocket money to maybe attend events like this. And then after all of the work that she did, she then become an official member of the captain organization. Then she got a scholarship to go to the open source summit in Dublin to talk about it. Got an internship. So you can see that all of these small milestones leads to the bigger picture. So after her red hat internship, I'm sure she's gonna get a really nice role. And then that will just lead to opportunities going further. And then this talk of the CubeCon that she couldn't attend to, but I'm sure there'll be much more that she'll talk about. And then promoted to the release team. So would you like to talk about your experience about your GSOP projects as well? Yeah, sure. Hi everyone. So my journey was kind of different than Mayhose in the sense that I didn't really start contributing before getting into like Jenkins GSOP. For me, I was using it as a user and I was like, huh, you can contribute to this really cool project? That's awesome. So there were a couple of cool projects that were listed down. And for me, for some reason, what I worked on was interoperability with CD events and Jenkins like creating a plugin for them. And again, it was just kind of an abstract idea for me and I was just so fascinated by it. I was like, okay, let's do this. So initially I just got in touch with the community and shout out to CDF community. They're amazing folks. Everyone was just so welcoming, so encouraging. So they were like, okay, this is how you write down a plugin and gave me a lot of opportunity to explore also. So I had a lot of space to just kind of see what I wanted to do with this. So the whole plugin we created, that was really cool. And then when we had a talk about it at CDCon at lastcubecon and a lot of people would come to us and they said, wow, that's a really cool plugin you worked on is interoperability with CD events, which is like coming up within the CI CD space, like interoperability through a common interface and a standard. And the articles that we had written for GSOC, they are publishing it internally in their companies and all. So it was really cool understanding the idea of how to get into a bigger community of like CDF is a very big community, a lot of cool projects. And just getting in there, like just dive right in. And I guess the good thing is sometimes, you have these amazing mentors so you are diving to the deep end, but they're still there to make sure you're not gone astray. And as Brad mentioned, it does open up a lot of opportunity in the future because my future employees, well, my current employees through the project I'm on, like just working on open source and contributing to like a project that has a lot of other components, like technically and also just like the community, very supportive, very, yeah, very fun. So some of the challenges along the way, we had different things with communication, different cultures. One thing that the GSOP project that we first did was that we didn't plan it very well. So we'll talk about that a little bit later as well. Goal setting, time commitment, and then just some boundaries as well. One of the biggest problems I think is imposter syndrome, do you think, so? Yeah, for sure. I think that's special, like that's true for the mentors and the mentees. Particularly true for the mentees, I feel, because they are like relatively younger students who are coming in, might not have so much experience. And then you have these, that was also true for me because I just really thought, I, yeah, this is an extraordinarily large project. And I don't know nothing about this. Like yeah, with a Java maybe I can do maybe like Hello World and a bit more complicated stuff, but a Jenkins plugin working with another interoperability tool to make a CI CD workflow really fun. That was just out of the scope for me. But yeah, again, that understanding that the whole community is there to support you and your contribution is going to be valued and to value the mentor, mentee, or the mentors and their help, that's very, very helpful. Yeah, and it can be from the mentor side as well. So a lot of people think that they can't mentor or you need to be really advanced on the project or that anyone can be a mentor as well. So like I was saying before, Mayha, when she started she was, she started off like really simple things, but she was mentoring everyone coming into the projects because one thing when you're going into open source projects is it's really difficult to, you sort of say hello and unless you get like some response or engagement, you sort of bail and go try something else. So you got to try and match the right projects as well. That's one thing that I've bailed from a few projects so I didn't feel the right, it wasn't a good fit, but yeah, focus on the projects that you want to work on and then the community will help you with that as well. Yeah, and one thing I do remember on that point is when I started working on the project, I was just like, okay, here's what I have to do. So I started exploring and I did a lot of exploration and I remember a part of it was like I started pinging the Jenkins API to get a certain response back, but then the mentor, my mentors they were so helpful, they were like, I think you can do it in a much easier way. And the good thing was that they were actively exploring. So when you do have a new project come up that is that a mentor or like the community is like, okay, it's a school, let's build this, let's develop this. Sometimes there's not very clear directions on where to go, so it's like a journey, both the mentor or the mentors and the mentee is on, you're actively discovering, okay, this seems viable, we can do it this way, the other part, okay, we can explore other different. So it's a good point that you don't have to be an expert, you just have to be like moving together and like mutually helping in a way, yeah. Which will, the next slide, this is one of my friends, Happy Hacker, he works in Kubernetes. He's been in there for quite a while and quite renowned in the community. He gave me this mentoring book the other day and what he was emphasizing was that there's three things that you should worry about and it's you have value, we succeed together and others matter, so it's probably, it was a really good conversation I had with him about it and he pretty much devotes his life to mentoring and he takes it to other countries. So I'm from New Zealand originally, so it's funny that we had to come to Amsterdam to talk about this as well because the book is actually from New Zealand too, so that was an initiative that I'll probably go back home and read to my daughter, I think it relates very heavily, so you have value, so like anyone can be, as we said, a mentee or mentor and you shouldn't be scared to get involved, like you can do it in so many different ways because the gap from contributor to maintainer is very big now, so we do need to start having mentees come forward to close that gap, so there can be more maintainers to make a sustainable ecosystem because we all love open source and one day it would just be too much, you have just a few maintainers and we won't have enough velocity to drive innovation, which we're doing in cloud native. So, yeah, like I said before about the structure of planning, I think when you're working with a mentee and mentor, you should spend a lot of time planning upfront, so break your tasks down into really small milestones, don't go for like a big milestone and as you solve these small milestones, you can celebrate them and that's like sort of cascades through, you get excited, you wanna do more and that would lead to the bigger picture, so when we do it next time, we're gonna spend like two days just planning out the whole program of work and then you can see where you're at, like if they need help, et cetera as well. Yeah, I do agree, it's like bringing in the concept of like software delivery, you're just like doing smaller iterations and well, not doing them rapidly, but doing them at a speed that works for both of like the mentee and the mentor, right? So you are like, you set small milestones, that's just also gonna help both, especially the mentee, like in my case, it helped me understanding, okay, this is a smaller milestone, this is what I'm gonna do rather than just like having a really big goal to achieve, to be able to break down into smaller tasks, also help be more open with the research part of like working with the project, so that's a good point, yeah. And communication, I think communication's like one of the biggest factors because everybody's different, we need to have more empathy around people and really understanding how people are different, like for example, when I'm in Amsterdam, where we were walking around last night and there's all these people on bikes and there's, you know, when you walk out in front of a bike, I'm sure, I mean, is anyone walked out in front of a bike here in Amsterdam? Yep, yep. And they were angry birds and like, they were pretty angry and if they understood that I'm from New Zealand where there's more sheep than people, we don't have these trains and trams and these crazy things, maybe she would understand me more and then not be angry and, you know, she would treat me better and be happy with life and that's one thing that we see as well. So I've had mentees that are quite shy by nature so they don't engage as much, but it's not because they don't want to, it's just because they're shy and there could be like many other reasons of why people are different. Yeah, I have a similar story from Valencia last year where my mentor, now friend, we were just like walking together and we were like biking and we accidentally stepped into the taxi zone, wherever they were gonna, and this guy just looked me with so much anger, he's like, you guys are on the taxi zone, get out of here. I was like, sorry, man, I'm from India, that's what we, we don't have these designated zones, we just go where we want. So that's really true in the essence to understand that how culture shapes you so differently and for others to understand, maybe it's not what you're always seeing, like face value, like there's more depth to how someone is perceiving things, someone might be communicating, like another thing I have seen with cultures is, in certain cultures, there's more of vertical like relation aspect where there's like big difference between okay, I'm a mentee, this is a mentor, yeah, respect should be there, but not in a sense where I'll only take instructions from you and I don't have a place, I shouldn't come forth and maybe express what I think. So that is also part of culture and communicating is, especially with open source projects is on a wavelength that can work for everyone and maybe making it a bit more horizontal so everyone can come out and contribute because as we said, like the mentors are also in this journey together, it's just not, they're not just like leading you, you're like walking with them in a way, right? Yeah, like some of my achievements would correlate to Me House as well, so as she stepped up, I would step up more as a leader as well, so if you do what a mentor that can be really good for your professional, both in the open source game and your work as well, so as a mentor you'll rise up as well as a leader and then you can even mentor the mentors and go very far, but in the culture we talked about, I think it's good to bond with community projects first because there's some countries that do like micromanagement which is a lot different in their sort of, you might think that they're not doing anything but they're just waiting for your instruction because they're used to telling you every single thing to do. Yeah, and with open source that's what different because it thrives on contribution, it thrives on ideas, so unless you're just waiting for someone like, okay, I'm just waiting for instruction, like what should I do? You're not allowing creativity, you're not giving a lot of space to explore, that's something I loved about my GSOC project was I had so much of space to just explore and do like the post that I wrote, like the paper that we have to write on how you would accomplish or achieve this project, it was just deeply all over the place, like the things I researched and written down, but it was interesting because I got the freedom to see, wow, this is something that you can do and build, so for open source specifically, it's important to practice the culture of collection. Yeah, and we all learn different as well, so it's important to understand that mentees and mentors learn different, so some learn visually, some learn by doing, so I think that's important to try and understand that as well, right? So it's not like the old days in school where the curriculum is very set and they'll only teach one way, like there's a lot of advancements been done in this space. Yeah, and as a mentee too, for me, sometimes when we would have these milestones to sort of communicate it to the community, it was also very different because a lot of people understood it very differently, some needed more like a technical POC done and for other members, they needed more like something that was visual so they can just help understand how we are gonna go through with this, so yeah, that's an important point to take care of. And also neurodiversity, so this is, I've spoke with Bar a lot about this and people's brains work differently as well, so people with ADHD, you can't have like, do you wanna have an hour session? They're not gonna pay attention for one hour, like having short meetings like 15, 20 minutes would maybe be more effective there, so if you haven't really heard too much about neurodiversity, that's an interesting one to understand people as well, like you don't wanna be that angry on the bike that was angry with me, you know? So yeah, neurodiversity is, this is what I love about this community too because they're doing so much work and community work and it's really nice to see people saying so that employers that they have ADHD as well, like, before they were probably scared about it and that's very open because of this community is helping them do that, which is amazing to see, you know, it's celebrating that everyone's different also. Yeah, just a quick point there, like in terms of the mentee too, we need to create a space for them to feel comfortable to share, like how are the different and like we need to celebrate that, right? Because as we said in the last slide, we are all really different and that's something that we really need to sort of like celebrate and especially with open source, yes. Commitment as well, so I think it's good to be up front if you can't commit to things because some of these things, it's quite time consuming, right? Especially mentors, they have big jobs that sometimes they have to go to, they might take on too much work, so I think just being honest about your time is fine and it's always worked out. Yeah, I haven't seen much problems, what's that? As long as you communicate it. Yeah, yeah, the point comes to communicating, right? You like, I remember with like the CD, one of the projects, I think some of, like one of the mentee maybe got really busy and they just kind of dropped and the project was just like hanging out in the open. So what's important then is like communicating, hey, like I might not be able to commit for, which is totally all right, but the mentors community also need to know what's your commitment like and it's okay if you cannot commit, but it's still good whatever work you have done, the communication, that's important. And I think having the awkward conversations is good to have fast as well, so there's a bit of a trick to when you have awkward conversations, so you should talk about like how you feel. So like for example, I feel sad because I thought that we were gonna do this project together and would spend more time and then they can sort of relate to that more and it stops it from being this awkward. For sure. And this is experience not coming from G-Sog but from another project where I had to tell, like my mentor and I were just talking as like, I would maybe like to talk more and have ideas and I was like maybe we can do more if you can. So it's important to be open and as regarding commitment. And we could talk all day about it, like positive feedback, like don't give negative feedback. It's sort of management 101, yeah. And I guess we have time for questions. Would anyone have any questions about programs or? Yeah. Yeah, I got the mic. Well, feel free to come up and yeah, if you have a question just line up. Thank you. First of all, thanks a lot Brad for being a mentor. I think from my point of view, it really a lot of work being a mentor. It drains lots of energy. It requires lots of commitment. What motivates you to be a mentor? Yeah, I guess a little bit what I talked about before, like I have a big passion for open source and I want to see it sustainable and I want to see it grow. So my focus is not, I've been a suffer engineer for a long time and my focus now is to help with like strategic initiatives. Like, so mentoring gave me that leadership now. So I now focus on strategic initiatives around communication channels for mentoring and other open source projects. So I guess it accelerates my career as well. So I do it for, first of all, because I like to help people and I've had mentees that mentor me as well. So I have had multiple mentees that, because one challenge of mentoring is that I could go do all this really technical stuff and be the best of the best. But because I have to mentor people, I don't get to spend that much time doing, you know, the advanced stuff. So that's the sacrifice I have to make, but definitely to go more to the leadership role in the open source community. I hope that answers your question. Thank you. Okay, I'll just do it from here so I can just pass the microphone to the colleague. My question is around the slide that you had keeping providing the atmosphere, the environment for people to actually come forward with how are they different? And that like really for me makes so much sense. And I try to do it in a way that actually I am first one to say how I'm different and how now knowing that I can do something and the team works better with me and stuff. But I see that like especially in younger people it's very hard to actually come out and say some stuff like that. So can you provide some more like tips how to do it, how to actually create that environment in which especially young people but everybody can actually come forward and feel comfortable about who they are and know that there is gonna be better once they know and the team knows about it. Yeah, it's a very good question as well. I think this community is very inclusive. So pretty much any CNCFCDF project that you go into a really good way to start meeting people is just to say hello. You could say like, hey, my name's Brad, I like surfing or you can relate to those people and you don't have to, some people give a live story like they pretty much give their CV and I'm like, whoa. But if you just say hello in like the general chat of a project that you might wanna work on, you will see that everybody will say hello to you and then it will, it's not like a work environment. Work environment's a little bit harder because the culture's very hard. It's gotta come down from the top but hopefully one thing that you did see about this time at KubeCon is that it's a very inclusive community and the only way to get involved is to get involved and talk to people. Yeah, I'll talk about my experience with my mentors and the environment they created with me, like for me it was so compassionate and they were so open that I didn't have to, like I was not reserved in the sense, oh, I should not talk with them and I have these deadlines, I must meet it. For, I think for us it's creating that community where people feel welcome and it's okay that it's really a contribution that matters more than like getting it done, getting it right because again, people learn differently and all of that so we should create that space, that compassionate space for the mentees to feel comfortable because as you said, they're young folks, right? So they might not feel very comfortable especially when you have mentors like much experienced and so you feel, oh, is it okay if I, you know, would that be okay? But yeah, we, from the very like start, we have to sort of as mentors or as a community just be inclusive and tell them, hey, it's okay. I like, I had amazing mentors, amazing community and everyone was very welcoming and very, very kind and accepting, yeah, it's okay. Even if you come at mistakes, like write a paper that's totally off, it's not, it's like, you can do it easily but it's all appreciated, like it's all appreciated, yeah. Okay, thanks, that helps. Yeah. Thank you, this is the last question by the way. Yeah, so starting off from where like how I feel about this talk, like I'm very excited. It's my first QCon, so it's my first approach. I always try to understand how this open source community works. It's like a huge mystery for me and I try to like look it up from different angles. And then like yesterday I decided to join this mentee called like, yeah, the event that was today. And like we were speaking about visions, smart goals and like, because like basically I don't know where to start from. And yeah, like have the feelings I would like to ground all that I've taken this like week into something solid, like built on rock and not like let it blow away. I'm still like looking forward on how to do it. I would take any suggestions at this point. Where abouts you from? Where abouts you from? Where am I from? Yeah, like what country do you live in? I live in Germany. Ah, Germany, yeah. So there's lots of, they have KCD Germany as well and they have meetups there. So meetups can be a great way to feel more inclusive as well. So there's a CNCF community groups website. Europe is, you know, in Australia there's not too many but that's why I see where you live because Europe is very, they have meetups all the time. So it's a really good way to make friends and you know, through your interest through technology and other things as well. So like most of my mentees were friends now as well. Maria's here too. So really easy to make friends. Yeah, thanks. Okay, so thank you everyone. I hope you got something out of it and you're always gonna chat to us as well. Yeah, yeah. And thanks for coming and helping me with the talk. It was really nice, yeah. Yeah, thank you for coming and staying with us for 30 minutes. Yeah, I love it. 35 now. Yeah. Yeah.