 Everybody ready? All right, here we go. Welcome. If you're in the right place, we're going to talk about a roadmap to becoming a CNCF ambassador. Let's ask a few questions first. Who here is an ambassador already? I was going to say, get out. Who here has applied to be an ambassador? Don't lie. I know there's at least one. OK. Who here is a developer right now? Just checking the audience here. Who here is an architect? Yeah, you don't want to say you're a developer, do you? Who here is a manager? Are you trying to get your people to be an ambassador? OK, you're in the right spot. My name's Eric Chabelle. I'm actually an ambassador right now, luckily. Later, you're going to get a section of this talk from Katie, who is basically our queen. She's the one that runs the whole CNCF ambassador program. But first, we're going to get into the roadmap. And the idea behind this roadmap is that I don't care who you are, what you're doing, if you've been doing anything in your space or in your domain for the last year even, you're no longer a newbie. You're no longer an introductory somebody in that company or in that job or in that role, right? So basically, what you just went through to learn that role is worth sharing. You have stories to tell. They may not always be interesting to you, but somebody in the world is going to find those things interesting, right? That's the idea behind this. First thing you have to get over is that you have something to tell, and it's worth telling. Now, how do we do that? So the rest of this talk is going to be about a couple of points that anybody can do. It's very easy, and isn't it horrible when like the ambassadors are late to the talk? Just kidding, how you doing, man? The rest of this talk is going to be about a roadmap to do that. I'm going to give you three or four points. They're really easy, and there's lots of different ways to apply them. So when you hear the word like publishing, there's lots of ways to do that. Speaking, there's lots of ways to do that. So just pick one, whatever works for you. Number two, I'm going to say upfront, get over yourself. When you write, when you talk and look at the video, it sucks, doesn't it? When you read your own articles, sounds like a three-year-old, right? You're the worst critic to review your own stuff. Get over it. That's your voice, that's the way you talk, that's the way you write. Just keep doing it. It'll evolve, it'll grow, it'll change. Who cares? It's you. It's what people are going to expect when they come to listen to your stuff or when they come to read your stuff. You're going to get to a point where you can't use AI. If I generate chat GTP articles and stuff like that, they're probably fantastic, but it's not my voice, right? It's useless to me. Okay, let's get that out of the way. So what's the whole idea of being an ambassador in any way, shape, or form? I don't care whether it's for the CNCF or not. You're trying to bridge a gap, right? There's knowledge that you have. There's people coming behind you that are going to walk that same path in some form or another, whether it's baking cookies, whether it's developing code for a project, whether it's doing videos to show off what you know about Kubernetes, it doesn't matter. They're going to also need that information. So how do you bridge that gap? How do you reach an audience? How do you share your knowledge in a consistent way? So what are the basics? What are the roadmap? Very simple, by the time we get to the end of this, you're going to be able to repeat after me, publishing, socializing, speaking, and something hands-on, right? Coding, workshops, I don't care what it is. Something hands-on that you do, right? Let's start with publishing. Sounds scary, doesn't it? Oh my God, I got a red book. Oh my God, I got to write a big article somewhere. How many people have started a blog post and it got really, really long, turns into like three or four or five, six pages and you're like, holy shit, this is hard. Doesn't need to be, show you why. It doesn't matter how you write, where you write, or what you do with it. Anybody here on Twitter, X, Mastodon, any of that stuff? How many characters do you need to publish, right? Couple of lines. You can be a smart ass, you can be rude, you can be helpful, doesn't matter, right? It's very easy, very low bar. Raise the bar a little higher. Now we're gonna do a blog post, but we're only gonna do one page. Who scrolls past the first page in any article these days? If you're under 20, zero. My son doesn't even read. 16 years old, doesn't read. Even the Xbox instructions, nope. New game comes out, they pop up, he's clicking right through the shit. Daddy, how do I do this? Well, you just closed what you needed to read, right? Anybody with kids can back me up on this. Generational lead, they watch films and they do not listen to anything longer than what is it, TikTok or shorts. So when you set up a story, a storyline, read a book, watch a movie, takes 10 minutes to set up the story, then you're hooked. That's why we sit there for another hour and a half and watch it, right? We wanna find out what's gonna happen with the story we just got hooked in. Can't do that. One page, it's not hard, right? If that one page turns into the five I just described, you now have a series of five articles to publish. Cut it. Stop after one page and say, continue it on the next one. Come back next week. Be consistent, right? Be consistent in what you're doing. Because you'll never, never know what you write is gonna hit something. It's like shooting a bunch of arrows. Something's gonna hit the target eventually. I got the strangest stuff. This is my blog. God, I never, never thought I'd be two and a half million viewers. That's not why I started. You know when I started in 2005? I was a developer at a bank. I got tired of searching for solutions, just little coding solutions. So I would copy them onto my blog. Don't have to look no more. I do the same search plus add Chabelle at the end and boom, there it comes. That's how it started. I did 21 that year. 21 coding problems probably that I solved, most likely. Might be a few in there about the Mini Cooper that I was restoring. Somewhere in there is an article about how to make a little nine pocket pitching thing out of PVC pipes and sand and glue. That's for, I played baseball pitching. Nine pockets you try to throw from pitching mount. One of my top articles still every month in the top five is about JBoss AS 4.2. Nobody's using this shit no more. Nobody's using this, I guarantee you. You know what it is? It's about serializing an object, putting it into a database, one Java class using their library to serialize the object and to un-serialize it. Somebody's out there constantly looking for this as like a template to do something. It's weird, but it's not on me to decide what's important. This is open source, right? None of my stuff, my whole blog says it's share, share, like, all of it. I don't care who uses it, who publishes it, where you put it. You can make a million bucks on it, good luck. I wanna help people, that's why we do this. What's the fundamental thing we're doing as an ambassador? Teaching. That's what I mean, you all have something to contribute. How many people here have been working in their field longer than five years? Keep your hands up, 10 years. Look around, 15 years. 20, senior crowd here, right? Of all you people, how many people wrote a blog post in the last month? That's not even close to one fourth. How many people are on social media? How many people posted something to social media this week? That's maybe 40%. Whoa, you're at the biggest conference going on this year for CNCF stuff. You know nothing to share? Come on. You know what I'm saying? Miss chances, right? It's very easy, it's very, very easy. Be consistent, look for things. Look for things that'll trigger content. Both of these are examples of, I went somewhere, I presented something, people got really excited about it, and one they got so excited they did a special promotion online about it. That means to me, go home, take this talk, turn it into an article. There's information in here that they think is really cool, that they took the effort to chase up and publish and push out, go look at this. This was awesome, right? If you're working in an organization, do you have like internal mailing lists or internal Slack channels or internal whatever where you discuss stuff? Trust me, there's stuff that they're talking about that you could help out by providing an answer. Could even be on an internal blog, it's kind of a shame because you get no credit for it. When that kind of stuff happens, make sure you open your own and put it on there too. Just don't publish internal private stuff or confidential stuff, not a good idea. You didn't hear that from me. Find something to talk about and be consistent and on message about what you want to talk about. You don't want to be all over the place. You don't want to post pictures of your kids and then talk about Kubernetes and then put some stuff on about baking. Use different tags, different channels or different blogs if you have to. If you don't want to host a blog, do it on, I don't know, figure it out. There's so many platforms to do it. It doesn't really matter, it really doesn't matter. Whoa, that's why. Okay, there we go. After you do this for a little while, somebody's gonna ask you, can I syndicate that stuff? They think it's interesting enough to do it again someplace else. So now, all I gotta do is come up with an idea and somebody else will publish it somewhere else. Dzone, I got into, anybody know what Dzone is? Kind of a developer blog, right? Pretty good place to go. Been there quite a while. They have this core team or whatever you want to call it. They give us kind of access to editors and it's a little bit quicker than if you just submit stuff externally. I've been doing it for a long time. I've met their CEO. They used to be headquarters in Raleigh's. They got acquired by somebody, but they're still running. Also, the Java code geeks came out of nowhere and asked me for my Java stuff. They don't grab everything off my blog. I don't even talk about Java that much anymore. But when I do, they grab it and they publish it somewhere else. Dzone's a great example. Huge developer audience. I wrote a four, actually an eight series blog story. The first four I published within a month had 190,000 page views. What's that mean? Does that mean I'm a great writer? No. I found something to help somebody and a lot of people apparently that didn't have the information they needed on that topic. That's why it turned into eight instead of just four. I went back around and said, hey, let's go in a little bit more detail here. Somebody needs help, right? These are things you touch a nerve. Pay attention to your audience. That's all I'm looking at is page views. Don't go much deeper than that. I just want to see if they're interested if it's traction. Nobody looks at the stuff. Okay, maybe they'll look at it in 10 years. Who knows? Sometimes they come out of nowhere, right? It's just, it's what it is. Do your work and do your stuff. Okay, socializing. That's easy. We just talked about it, right? Any social channel you can come up with. I don't care what your audience is. I don't do anything on TikTok. Maybe you do, right? It's where you find your audience. Whatever you're comfortable doing. I have a colleague who loves to sit down in front of, they're quite funny. We only look at them internally, but she sits down in front of job offers, right? Like the postings for jobs and walks through them in our field and gives comments about them. What she thinks is somebody that works in that field. They're quite funny. It's whatever you want to do with that kind of stuff. The easy part about this is you can talk about stuff you're working on, whether it's done or not. You don't have to write an article yet, right? Think about I'm developing some kind of test class using a workshop. It has to be an example for what I wanna have them build out. As I'm working on this, it might take me two weeks, but every day by the end of the day, I made one step further in this problem I'm trying to solve, share it. Share a code snippet. It's really easy. You might be surprised who reacts about this stuff. Tags are kind of important in a lot of the social medias if you wanna hit certain channels. I'm very keen in this space. Cloud Native is one. Observability that I work in is another one. Oli is another term. K8S, Kubernetes, whatever you wanna hit. Whatever you're targeting to ensure that this consistency in your social media, if you tag it, that means it pops up in those lists that people are following. I want my stuff to pop up about every fifth article that's in that list, right? Being consistent. I'm not saying put 45 things out. Don't get up in the morning and retweet everything you see. That's the first person who's gonna get dropped out of the list, right? It's no problem retweeting stuff. Put some comments, put some commentating in it. What do you think? Why are you retweeting this? What's interesting? That's your voice that I'm talking about. That's what people come for. They come for you, not for the article you retweeted. It pertains to your message to your audience. Now, the really scary part here, how many people go out and do speaking? Not bad, it's more than their publishing. That's crazy. Speaking's the harder part, but it's funny. You don't have to do what I'm doing right now to call it speaking. Remember COVID? We all sat at home in the pandemic and we did virtual things. You got nobody in your room, just a camera. How hard is that to talk? I thought it was hard because I don't have you guys to engage with. I miss the eyeballs. I miss the laughs. I miss the smiles or the person falling asleep in the corner so I know that my message is not landing, right? That's hard. You know what I did? I put a little teeny yellow posted up there with a smiley face on it. It's the only way I can remember to keep, because you see I like to walk around. I like to talk. I like to see what's going on. I was doing that crap in front of a camera. I was like going like this and looking all over. So the first time I looked back at it, I was like, what the hell is he doing? I'm like, it was weird, right? You forget you have to look at a camera. It's about a camera. It's like that thing right there now. I wanna engage with you, not with the camera, but if you're not here, sometimes I go to talks and conferences and it's really important that they record this stuff because it's reusable. It goes online. I can quote it. I can go back and look at it and write an article about it or you can chop it up into little shorts or whatever. But if you're not here, I will talk to that thing and ignore the two people sitting here. This is important that the engagement is there for the people that look at it later, right? Sometimes it's 80,000 people that view those things. It's crazy. Maybe I said something so bad it ends my career, but everybody watches and gets a million views. You never know. So, one of the things that's really nice about our job is often you can get creative, right? We're generally, I live in the Netherlands and they talk about A and B type of people. You have A and B math. A math is like a little bit more creative. It's the economics, it's the bankers, that kind of stuff. And the B math is like physics, engineering, computer science. We're generally not artistic, right? But here you get to be artistic. You can not only do your speaking, you can also come up with swag. So, if you guys look around, I've passed out some stuff ahead of time. Anybody got a t-shirt, hold it up. We are involved with what you see on these t-shirts. We come up with these ideas. I'm pretty sure that Katie would love it if somebody came up with a really cool idea for a CNCF t-shirt somewhere for a KDC or for some other event they have out there. Stickers. Socks. Anybody have socks? Hold up the socks. Check that out. If you all would have got here earlier, you would have got socks. But it's, that's the fun part of it, right? Being able to pass out stuff, being able to reach people, being able to teach people. That's what this is about. And then the hands-on content. Not everybody has a lot of faith in their ability or wants to see their code out there. I was lucky enough to start early enough and just happened to be under one of the professors that was teaching Linux, which is then Linux when you go home to play with it to do your homework. And I was in open source from the beginning. So all my code that I've ever done is online. All of it. So when I do a job interview, if you didn't Google my stuff, thanks for the coffee we're done, you know? It's, there's nothing to hide. So I can't be embarrassed anymore. My good code, my bad code, it's all out there. But when you're putting stuff together and this is more focused on when you're doing workshop content or demo content for maybe a talk, you're also publishing that for everybody to use, right? You may not even use it for a talk, but you might wanna demonstrate how to do something. You put this stuff together. This is my experience over about 15 years of doing this kind of stuff. You gotta keep it simple. It's easy as possible. The one-on-one content that you can make to get people started is so valuable because somebody goes through it and then next month there's a whole bunch of new people that also need to go through it. And then the next month, there's more people that are coming into this space and need to go through it. Don't worry about making really complicated stuff. That's hard to maintain and nobody gives a crap. That's a very small, small user group that's gonna use that. Getting started with Kubernetes, how to set it up and make an app run in a node. Super easy. It's gonna get tons of people looking at it, right? Getting started with, I don't know, hotel or whatever, same thing. Getting started with anything is so valuable. Keep it simple. And anytime you're making stuff, make it all the same. Try to make it as consistent as possible. So when I come to your stuff, I know that the login's always gonna be Bob and the password's always gonna be one, two, three, four, Bob, right? Don't make it all complicated in 15 scripts and all the stuff to get it started. Make it one script. Boom. That's all and ready to go. Again, I can't say this enough. Keep it simple. People get so complicated so fast they wanna show how smart they are. It's an initial mistake you'll make and wonder why people are struggling to complete your stuff. Make it easy. The easier it is, the simpler it is, the more they're gonna use it. It's also easier for you to maintain. And if you're doing demo stuff, you're gonna get up on stage, who here likes to talk about demo gods? I think that's complete bullshit. That's a lack of preparation. I don't care if the internet goes away. You should have accounted for that, right? I've been in a workshop, the whole internet went away. Okay, you can't do the workshop and download stuff like I want to, but I had it all up here. I turned it on and I walked through it step by step and you can go home and do it all yourself. It's all gonna be there when you have a connection later. Great solution, right? Anytime something you wanna demo might crash in the middle, be able to spin it back up within a minute. So all I gotta do is wave my hands when it's re-spinning up and say a few things and then we can continue where I left off, right? Think about these things before you get up here and try to do it. Because if it blows up in your face, what are you gonna do? It's horrible. Bad feeling. You want some examples of this stuff? Put together, me and my team have put together workshops, they're online, they're free. I believe the Prometheus code is up there, but if you take the URL at the top, it's got links to all of them. There's an open dashboard thing from Percy's in there. There is Hotel, there is Prom workshops. Great examples are embedded in all these labs. It's lab for labs, step by step, from installing to going through different exercises. And several of them include some kind of install project. Download and take a look at that. They're exactly the same as I've been doing them for 15 years. They include one init script, one bat script. I don't promise anything on the bat scripts. Not a big Windows guy. But I always get somebody in Windows that's interested and gives me feedback and I fix it. If you can make it work for me, great. That's the whole open source thing, right? But all you do is hit the init script and installs everything and off you go. I don't care what your platform is, it's my problem to make this simple, consistent and easy to use. This is all 101 content. I'm not gonna do 102, not for a long time. I got so much more 101 content to do. Any questions about that? Can you ask them at the end or you can ask me afterwards and buy me a beer? That makes me even happier. All right, I'm gonna give this over to our queen. Come on up, Katie. Does it work? Yeah, it works. Hi, everyone. I'm Katie Greenlee. What an awesome job Eric did right there with his talk. I do want to touch base on a lot of the stuff he talked about before I jump into my slides. Consistency is absolutely key when you wanna become an ambassador. So that's the number one thing that I can say and having an authentic voice is the other. Being true to who you are and what you're passionate about is what makes you a great ambassador. If you're not passionate about what you're doing, it's gonna show in the things that you're sending to me. It's gonna show in the things when you're applying to be ambassadors. It's gonna show in the content you're creating because you're not invested in it. When you're invested, it's gonna shine and people are gonna engage with that. So a little bit about the program. I know that I saw some hands go up. Can I see again how many people have applied to be an ambassador in the past? Okay, great. So we have requirements to become an ambassador, right? Just like any program there is, you have to be at least 18 years of age or older. We have a standards of excellence for ambassadors to stand by. This is like an ambassador code of conduct within the code of conduct ourselves. And we encourage you to read through that and ask yourself if you can abide by it and then agree to abide by it before you apply. And then we ask for you to at least one of these areas to be doing something. You don't have to do all of them. It is great if you do all of them. It is great if you do two of them. It is absolutely acceptable to do at least one of them. So those things are DevStat scores, content and blogs, talking, creating events, right? Putting on things within your own local community. Whatever you're passionate about when it comes to how you're contributing to this community, what you're creating growth in this community is what we want to know, how you're making it better and bringing people together, right? That's all about what an ambassador is. Expectations, as you heard from Eric, it's about being consistent. It's about being active. And when I say active, that means being consistent in the things you're doing. Are you writing one blog post a year and you're saying you're a blog content writer? Or are you writing 15 blogs a year? Are you hosting one event a year but you've hosted it several times over the last several years? That's consistency. If you're hosting meetups and you're hosting it on a monthly, bi-monthly or quarterly basis, that's consistency. If you're talking consistently and you're being asked consistently to come talk at other events or you're being consistently accepted at other events because you have meaningful content to share it because your voice and what you've contributed to the community is being accepted and engaging and is something that, as Eric said, people want to hear and you've noted that, that's consistency. And being active, right? And advocating on behalf of the CNCF, we want people who love to be a part of this community. Are there things that we're doing that you like? Is there, like he said earlier, a story that you have tell your story. How did you get started in CNCF? What has CNCF done for your career? What are you bringing to your community because of CNCF? How is it enriching your community? Provide monthly updates in your efforts. So when you do become an ambassador, I do expect people to tell me monthly what they're doing. I don't expect every month people to be active because that's crazy, we all have lives. But I do expect you to tell me why you're not or that you weren't active. You don't have to tell me why because I don't need to know why. But I want to know what you're doing because I want to highlight that. That's part of this program is being able to highlight the cool things that you're doing so you get more of a platform to do more of the things that you like to do. Providing feedback from the community. This is a big one, right? When you become an ambassador, I want to hear how your community is engaging with the CNCF. Are they able to easily get involved? Do you need additional resources? Are you, was there something that happened that you feel that we should be aware of on how we can handle it better because this is a global community, right? I want to hear those things. So being an advocate on the behalf of your community and being a resource with a solution-oriented mind, so come with feedback, but also come with how we can make it better and work with me. That's part of being a great ambassador. And then willing to help the CNCF in many different projects. So we have lots of things going on. There's lots of people in this community that have great, really cool ideas. Finding those people and being willing to help them, being active in the things that they're doing, showing you're active in them, being willing to help the CNCF when we need help. Those are all really great ways to get into this role and what we expect from you as well. So when it comes to what we're looking for, we're looking for someone who's been in the community, I say at least two years, right? It takes some time to navigate this community to get a footing to feel like you have a consistent voice that you found what things that you like to do. There are always exceptions to that, right? There are people that come into the community and they just are rocking what they're doing and they're engaging and people are engaging back and it just comes really simply and easily for them. But two years is kind of a good kind of benchmark for yourself when you're thinking about your career and where you're at, right? You've got a good grasp of the community itself. You've got a good grasp of what you like to do, what you don't like to do, where your voice is and you've got a good grasp of what areas within the CNCF you like to provide content on. Is that content on Wazem or AI or is it a specific project like Flux? That's kind of where we wanna see your engagement when that comes to that portion of it. We want someone who's actively contributing to areas within the CNCF. Again, not all these areas you have to actively contribute in when it comes to the things that you're doing but I want to see the tie back to the larger community. So if you're writing blogs, are you able to get posted on the CNCF blog? Are you hosting a meetup on the CNCF-CNCG site? Are you hosting a KCD? Are you talking at KCDs? Are you talking at CNCF-supported or hosted events? Are you participating in our mentorship program? That's another really great one. We have mentorships, it's hosted through LFX and Google Summer of Code and Outreachy. We have all these different areas. Are you kind of participating in those areas? I want to see the tie back to the community. There's a lot of people who are doing cool things in cloud native space in general but how are you enriching this community? How are you giving back to this community? How are you tying back to this community? And then lastly, someone who's willing to help and learn and grow and contribute to the community, right? We are, no one is ever at that high expert level. We're learning together. Everyone's being helpful with each other. That's kind of what I'm looking for. Are you providing things that are giving people the chance to grow with you or the opportunity to grow their careers? Are you looking for ways to continue to make an impact by providing mentorship opportunities to people so they can go on somewhere? Are you providing content that people are finding useful to provide in their everyday work? It's things like that. So finding ways to be helpful and useful and really being assured in that, that's where we're what we're looking for. And then lastly, the QR code to the program. I always welcome people to scan this. We will be accepting applications for 2024 in January of 2024. I was informed today to not call it spring and fall because of the differing seasons depending on where you're located. So I'm looking for a new terminology for that. So if you have a terminology and you wanna share it with me, I'm open for it. Again, just like everyone here, we're all learning together and working together and making changes as necessary. And as I said before, I'm Katie Greenlee. I'm the senior community manager at CNCF. I run the ambassador program. This is Eric, who's gonna tell you about a little bit of his thing. Also be sure to scan that code and give us feedback on this talk. See if I wasted your time or if you're gonna all go out and do what we're asking you to do. Yeah, and I wanna be mindful that we're at time. So if you have questions, I would love to meet you out in the hallway and answer them. I have temporary tattoos of FIPI that I'd love to give to anyone who's interested, as well as my business card. I do want all of you to come and ask any questions you have, whether it's right now in person or you can reach out to me on email Slack or Twitter, I think I have up there, but one of those different ways, all right? Thanks everyone. Lovely. Lovely.