 Let's get going Well, welcome to proud to be a noob how to make the most of your first open-stack summit truly the hottest panel at the summit for warm I'm your host Heidi Joy Troth away I am new to the open-stack foundation and in fact the last time I was at a summit in Vancouver I was actually at the summit interviewing with the foundation So I'm brand new and so that's why I brought together this panel of lovely people who are not brand new and have a lot more to offer and share About how to make the most of your first summit So I am going to first of all ask you to please Participate with us and introduce yourself to someone you do not already know who is in this room So that means stop pause pay no attention to me and please introduce yourself to someone you don't already know classified Okay, and I'm gonna give you one more instruction. Don't don't go back to your seat just yet one more instruction is I want you to tell this person that you're meeting Something you are passionate about and find out about something that they love so I Want you to ask one more question beyond who are you who are you with? Please find that out Hey in 60 seconds, I'm gonna ask you a question about the person you just met So make it good make the rest of your introduction good. I Want you to find out something that the person you're meeting is passionate about Tell them something about you that you are passionate about 60 more seconds. We have a few gentlemen coming in Come on in and take a seat and now I'm going to interrupt y'all and I'll bring Bring your attention back to the front of the room if I may This is such a cool group that we can't stop talking to each other Right Okay, so what I wanted to hear From you is would you tell me something that the person you just met is passionate about? And I'd like you to shout it out and then I'll repeat it just so I don't run around the room with a microphone So tell me something that you just heard that someone's passionate about First baby what else cycling what else? Horseback riding ooh, what else so one more time Nice nice. What else what else are we passionate about in this room? Sorry Linux good good choices. What else? violin What else? the cloud That's good. You're in the right place So my point in asking the question is just to give you an opportunity to think beyond Hi, who are you? Where are you from and then kind of conversation stops or sometimes it can stumble and So my purpose in being here because as I already admitted to you and for those of you who just joined I am a newbie. This is my first official summit that I'm fully attending So my purpose here is to give you a few networking techniques Particularly if you are not the master of small tech I want to send you out into the world with four new questions that you can ask that will help you get more connected to people But first and vastly more importantly than that. I want to introduce you to our esteemed panel All of these beautiful people up here are very passionate about food. So in addition In addition to me asking them to tell you who they are where they're from a little bit about their job, I also want them to tell you what kind of food they're passionate about because One of the things that I noticed is as I get to know people It's not that I just it's not that I can't listen to and absorb the information about them Hi, who are you? Where are you from? But if you give me one more thing one anchoring thing that you're interested in horseback riding or you're interested in cycling I am more likely to remember you and that's going to be better at networking with you in the future So it's kind of like a way of anchoring who you are So if you see me around in the halls my other gig, which you'll find out on Twitter is like I like to write books So that's what I do outside of work for fun And so the next time I see you that might be in your mind to talk about or at a minimum It might help you remember me more so with that I will turn to my lovely panel. Tell us about you Sheila My name is Sheila baby. I work at Comcast. I've been there for about five years. I've been on the open stack cloud team for about Two and a half years And that's it really Oh, this is my fifth summit and I'm passionate about really all food maybe not seafood too much, but um Yeah, gelato desserts fruits watermelon love watermelon. I knew I liked her Gelato, okay. We're okay. We're bffs now Um, so Matt tell us about you a little bit. I'm at time order cable. I'm a principal software engineer working in open stack I've been there about two years I have a big software background before that This is my fourth summit I'm passionate really about Automation and being outside you can tell from my picture there on top of Independence Pass in Colorado You're gonna share my secret about food He's internet famous about something. Tell us more about that. So when I was in college 20 years ago now, which is kind of sad Um, I started a ramen website that was back when we called things home pages So it was called the official ramen home page And it may still be called that actually it's now a blog I don't update as much as I did when I was in college But for a while if you googled for ramen, it was the top result. So I've been running that for 20 years It's my operations experience Hey Awesome. Thank you Matt. Nikki. Tell us about you. Hi, I'm Nikki Acosta Yes, I've been live tweeting of it If you have been paying attention to social media at all during the keynotes You have been paying attention to Nikki. So tell us more about you. You're like, god, this girl won't shut up Oh, no, we like you. We like so my name's Nikki Acosta I uh was part of the early team at rack space Before the foundation was the foundation that worked on the open stack Then I left there and went to this little startup called meta cloud And then we got acquired three months later. So I'm now a part of cisco and I do a little podcast Called os pod. It's the open stack podcast. We do like a weekly show and we livestream it and then we Make that available on itunes. So if you're curious about a company or, you know, any particular topic There's probably something there that you might find useful Oh as for food so every year I pay homage to the hatch green chili, which is a Chili that is grown in the hatch valley in New Mexico And so I make everything with hatch green chilies drinks desserts. Everything has hatch green chilies in it It's good. Thanks. I'm coming to your house during that season. That sounds great Sure, and you're gonna be hosting us in austin, right? But I will I'm so excited. How many how many summits have you been to? I think this is my ninth summit. Nice. Yeah Nice, okay. It's cool to see it grow. It's most definitely It's uh, the weather here is much nicer than it was in previous years. So that's nice, too So between us we are representing 18 and a half summits attended. I'm half So therefore, uh, you guys are gonna give us some good Good insights. I prepared a few little questions, but um audience I would like you to be thinking of questions as well Because we definitely created the space and time for you to be able to ask more specific questions of the panelists So let's start with this idea that now that we're here And I thank you guys all for taking some time to answer my kind of email interview That we put together in the super user magazine and online That in implored us newbies to really prepare for the summit and plan in advance But now we're here. It's too late to plan So so talk to me about what we can do right now to make the most of the summit And since I started with you Sheila, maybe I'm gonna go skip over to matt Ask him first For me, it is still about planning even though We're already here. So I'm a bit of an over planner just as an engineer So I typically every morning and even at lunch go back and review my schedule for the afternoon And I typically have a talk I want to go to and if it's full I have a backup talk And I have a list of talks I'm going to go watch on youtube on the plane ride home And then I tend to bounce between them If you're here with a team from your company, it's also good to split up coverage for things We have a like five or six people here. We want to make sure especially all the operator sessions are covered That's really important for me And what else is important is if there's one particular part of the cloud you're Passion about or interested in The operator sessions that are here are a great way to go meet people. It's very informal They're generally small rooms pass the mic and you can hear other people that are Trying to do the same thing you're doing or having problems with the same thing you're doing And that's the operator sessions in my favorite place to meet people Nice So nicki tell me a little bit about what you would tell me and us as newbies to go do right now I wish I was as organized as you matt I kind of fly by the seat of my pants. It was like 15 minutes ago. I was like, oh, where am I supposed to be? Looking at a map Pace yourself and drink lots of water You know this this year. I think there are probably fewer events But the events that are taking place the after hours events are pretty large and they usually have tons of free boost so Drink a lot of water and pace yourself I've I have been guilty of losing my voice at about half of the summits And it's a combination of probably not drinking enough water and probably yelling and talking too much Hardcore now. I know right nice. What would you say shila? What do you think we should be doing now that we're here? So download the sketch.org Open stack application and you can go ahead and customize your day to day schedule from there It's not too late to download it now If you have to or you can go online and set that up but also over planning is great, but plan for some ad hoc time Meeting and networking people too You might find yourself deep in a conversation with somebody that you meet Over lunch and you guys are hashing out an issue or sharing stories And that can go on for two hours and then you can meet again at another event And those kind of relationships that are built during the summit are invaluable Cool. Thank you Okay, so let's do a little exercise and for that I need a victim. I mean volunteer, please Somebody volunteer for me. Please this guy right here in front. I want to hear that guy. May I? You're welcome. Oh You're in trouble So so here's what we're going to do. Um, we're going to use one of the four relations Accelerators that I brought for you and um, I'm going to ask him Where are you from? From arcadia, california. Ah, very good. I'm just north of you. I live near portland, oregon Um, so tell me did you grow up into your schooling there? No, I didn't Do you want to get it? No, let's see. Did you notice though? He said no, I didn't And there was more Okay, so I'm listening tell me more. Uh, well, so I grew up on the east coast in washington dc and went school in chicago Moved out to california around 2000 Awesome, so I just learned more about him by asking did you grow up into your schooling there? I didn't say where are you from um from the standpoint of A lot of people can kind of panic because it's like well Do you mean where I was born or where I went to school or you know, etc? And it's funny because um, this is a weird question It's asking a yes or no question, but it really opens the door for a lot more discussion So I learned a lot more about him and I might say oh, where where did you go to college? Because you said you went to college in chicago. So which school? Or oh, you you know, you grew up around washington dc. Okay. Tell me more about that. I have friends out there So um, he gave me a lot of conversational avenues That I can pursue and the other thing I like about that is This whole tell me more is just such an open question. Um, and it really invites great Great engagement. So another question I could ask is tell me about your current role Um, so that one is nice soft and squishy. It doesn't say what is your title or even what is your job function? It lets the person take that question and run with it in any direction they please Um, and so then you can follow up with a really good one. How did you come to that company or position? So, let me uh, volunteer Voluntel, uh, shila, how did you get to your current company and position? um, I was I got approached by a recruiter on lead in I think it was or gmail or somewhere And they asked me if I was looking for something and I Said maybe and then I started working there two weeks later. Oh, wow So so um, you can follow up in a lot of directions with that. Yes. Um, so so this is a great opportunity to Again kind of create an open question for them All right, here's my third favorite relationship accelerator. What's changing in your business? So does anybody is anybody willing to answer that question for me? No one wants to talk about what's changing in their business I'll answer it. Oh good. Good. Good. Go Matt. So, um, shila and I are both in the cable industry And as you probably know cable business, the united states is generally a monopoly, but Um, you don't have to get your tv from the cable company anymore as most of you know, so um, we have a lot of competition on video And I think for us that's changing how we look at things Where we spend money and you know, are we willing to wait? Six months or two years to release software anymore. We have to be way more agile and Way quicker. That's one of the reasons we're doing open stack. That's a big change we have So he has just told me something about how the how the industry is changing And now the obvious follow along is how does that impact your role? And especially being here at the conference I'm going to learn a lot from Matt by finding out how his role is changing and and probably about how your role is changing As a result of the changes in the industry So cool. All right, let's do one more relationship accelerator What did you think of the last session you attended? Can I ask anyone anyone brave? Oh, yeah Tell me tell me So I accidentally launched with Tobias Ford. I sat at a table with no directors there and then he turned up and he was the guy And it was fantastic. He works for AT&T. He's got huge scale issues. They are ahead of where we are. So You know, I'm I'm glad I did it was just a space to have lunch and then turn out to be the best You know personal relationship I made so far any of the conferences What a cool. What a cool and fortuitous connection. That's great. Thank you So now I might ask you, you know, what's on your schedule coming up? And then that gives me an opportunity to also kind of maybe reevaluate and rethink my schedule Okay, four questions. Does anybody see something they could use tonight or at a future session? Yes, okay My job here is done. I'm gonna go take the rest of the session off. Y'all are next Uh, how do we get more involved in the community here in after summit? Give me some direction. Let me start with you, Nikki. Who's on twitter? Who's not on twitter? So twitter is where all the cloud people hang out All the tech people that's where you actually get to communicate with people that you would probably never talk to in real life Um, I have a a small admission. I shouldn't say this on camera Tim bell from cern is my ultimate geek crush so much so that I brought him a bottle of wine from california Because he's in cern, which they have great wine in that part of the world. So i'm not sure why I brought him wine But um, I've I've met a lot of really great people and followed a lot of really great topics because of twitter And it's a good way to just reach out and connect to people I use I used to use this little tool called Tweet deck and so you can set up a column That says show me every tweet that has the word open stack in it And so over time you can start seeing which articles start to trend or you know, uh, which announcements start to trend It's just a really good way to get instant feedback Uh from people if you have a question or if you want to know where to go or what to do at a summit There's always someone on twitter who's listening And so it's a good way to to do uh to communicate without having to know a phone number or an email address So if you're not in social media like I would highly encourage you to use that as a tool If you're if you're in sales and you want to know what your customers are doing I mean, I'm sure matt you probably get on twitter and talk about what you're doing at work all the time It's a good way to find out Kind of where your customers at who the right people are to talk to And who are the right people to engage with and learn from right on And just one thing dad you use the hashtags um that they provide for the summit So this summit for example is we are open stack if somebody has um tweet deck set up for that They'll find you you can find them you guys can connect Yeah Matt, what do you think how can we get more involved in the community? I'm definitely on board with twitter, but I'll give you a couple other ones too. Um The community is really important to me before this I worked canonical on a bun two which is very community based and The the biggest takeaway Is that if you contribute and that could just be um, you know Us starting a discussion on the mailing list or Even asking a question or going to an IRC meeting Any kind of contribution even in that way is is Is like a currency in a community like that. So you contribute you you put something in and you'll be able to get something out and That's also part of meeting people here You're much much more likely to get someone to answer your question who you've had a beer with or had a coffee with Or shook hands with them across the table I know that to be true. I've seen that happen. Yeah, it was definitely true. Um, Even at my job at conical where everyone was spread out It was way better to meet people and then you had a just a connection with them It's pretty faceless on IRC or on email. So Yeah, cool speaking of IRC the mailing lists too are really really great There's a mailing list pretty much for everything under the sun like women of open sac have a mailing list You know Various projects have their own mailing list and the IRC meetings are great operators the working groups That are here. You know if you're in the telco or enterprise Or if you're an operator, there's specific People who are in those groups that probably share a lot of the same Challenges and concerns that you have and so that's a great way to come together every six months and actually get stuff done Yeah, the other thing I I would encourage people to do if you're if you think you can is to make a contribution back Um that actually goes through the whole process of how open sac works through the code review process And it doesn't have to be code. I guarantee you you will find a problem in the documentation if you look You go in there you download the docs you change a few sentences You push it up you follow through the process and you see how Open stack is created and I I felt that was very powerful for me Um to do in the very beginning and it it's not always the most fun process because you might have to discuss with people the right terminology if it's a doc change that kind of thing, but I I always thought that was very important So I always try to get atc by doing the least one change. It's usually way more than that now But um, I think I think everyone should try to do that Actually, I'm going to try that. Um, I'm a non technical person But I um, I was just talking to Lana Bradley who runs our docs project Um a little while ago and uh, I'm telling her okay lady I'm I'm on the hook for for getting an atc from doing some docs developers are always You know docs is kind of always the last thing on a developer's mind. So there's always work to do there so Lots lots of spelling errors. Is that what you're saying? All kinds of stuff and complete sentences and ask.openstack.org to you can go there and answer some questions. Um, oh, yeah That's good Yeah, okay, cool. Well, um, I want to give us some time to get questions from you folks I have to run the mic toward you so we can hear you answer Or ask questions, but I want to know what do you want to know from the panelists? And these were just some example ideas the professional development tips sessions coming up How to get involved more specifically with projects or work groups or resources So would you raise your hands and I will come to you and find out What do you want to know? Yeah Great sessions coming up. I didn't plan as well as on that maybe suggested What do you guys suggest what are you looking forward to? It really is going to depend on what you want to learn about But I'll tell you that my colleague's going to give a great upgrades talk tomorrow If you're running open stack now already and you haven't upgraded it before that's going to be a very valuable talk It'll be a for kilo not for liberty That's going to be great talk and I'm looking forward to some of the keystone talks because that's an area I focus on But those aren't those are maybe specific to what I want to get out of it. So cool Good. Let's get another question I'm doing user sessions. So there's a user panel my mic on yes, you're you're on there's a user panel with With PayPal, Deutsche telecom and workday and they're all at sort of various stages of open stack adoption But there are folks that are really transparent about Their sort of journey through open stack and I think one thing that you'll learn from folks like this is that You know the technology shift is actually a really small part of open stack adoption A lot of what companies are being challenged to do is actually change their culture in the process And I think it's one of the parts that's probably most often overlooked Because you think open stack open stack software like it's just a technology shift and it really is and it's a cultural shift I mean the days of you know submitting tickets to get a virtual machine are Coming to an end people want self-service access to resources You know, we're a generation that doesn't want to wait for things We want it right now And so there's a there's a lot of really cool things that open stack is is helping to drive and that's part of what I want to dig into in this session because I think it's it's one area where Where I think a lot of companies, especially in the enterprise are are doing it wrong You know, you've got to change your culture if you don't change your culture And you just try to take open stack and force it and try to apply your old way of doing things It's not going to be a positive experience That's true. That's the hardest part for us too is the culture cultural change Yeah, I'm going to the talk by ann gentle from xbase. She's so great I'm using personal medical data from type one diabetes and and aggregating that with open stack I'm looking for another couple questions Yes, sir. Just a minute. Let me get this to you Hello, I'm interested in involvement into working groups mostly here on summit not in projects Yeah, there's some really great working groups and they all have sort of I think they all have like formal sessions most of them do anyway The product working group just released today the roadmap For open stack and they're trying to get a little bit more crisp and trying to convey that roadmap During the keynote you probably saw some of the work that's being done with the project navigator That helps companies kind of look at the whole landscape of all the projects that are happening and try to give Users and adopters and operators a sense of which projects are mature and ready to be sort of deployed at scale And then which projects are kind of new and investigative and if you are a risk averse Then you know, you may not want to adopt projects that are still brand new You might want to wait a little bit for those to mature You may want to contribute to them to try to make them better. So the product working group is is pretty great There's some folks here that are involved If you just go on twitter and and look up product working group I'm sure you'll see you need more a ton of tweets. Yeah, the product working group is great And never before have I seen an open source project that has such an awesome roadmap For an open source project. It's it's a really cool thing that they're doing and I think they have a mailing list as well They do have a mailing list join the mailing list and find out where They're reading up and go sit at the fishbowl session Yes, and they're and they're all open and they're published on the schedule. So I know you'd be welcome I've got time for one more question of the panel smart people. Yes, sir. Just a minute As you were referring to the smart people, I'm sure you were talking about the people up here I am here for the non coding working groups And was wondering what your thoughts were. I'm going to be involved in the app ecosystem working group It's been fallow for some time And so I'm working with Tom Fifell to get that Some momentum What would you suggest as far as my best experience not being a coder or a technical person per se In my best use of this summit So where do you go to hang out with the pointy-haired business dudes? Is that what you're asking? No, I actually think john wants to wants to play he wants to get his hands dirty Yeah, it's a really good question. So the the marketplace boosts You can usually find usually in the booths There's like one technical person and then one sort of business person and the app ecosystem As you know is growing like crazy In fact, most of the startups that started developing sort of core infrastructure service platforms have all been For the most part, they've all been acquired at this point and what we're starting to see is Momentum happening above the stack In terms of the the ecosystem that plays there So I would visit the marketplace to talk to some of those folks there and find out what sessions are going on It seems like there's a pretty good balance in the schedule between technical sessions and non-technical sessions And even some of the techno technical sessions that I've been to people are pretty willing to answer questions that are non-technical in nature but you you should probably be I'm trying to figure out the best way to say this but a little careful about going to some of the design sessions Where my first summit I went to a bunch of keystone design sessions and those are Very deep very fast It's discussions. They've already been doing for six months. They're already like looking through code and Those aren't the sessions you want to go to and ask a basic keystone question to those are Sessions where they're planning their work for the next six months So if you go to the design session and you're it you know possibly in over your head or maybe in the wrong room It just no it's not the place to you know ask a how does keystone work kind of question That that may be a little different than the product working group kind of things you're discussing But just just a caution because this is essentially two summits right now Um, I will encourage you to come hang out the operators sessions, which I'm a big fan of I feel like even if you're new you can pick up stuff from there You'll hear us complaining about things that are going to cause you problems Um, like rabid mq and you'll know when you go back. I've got to worry about this thing called rabid mq Did you want anything she left? Just to um his point yep go to the the main sessions are probably really good For for that. Yeah, and speaking as a non-technical person I'm going to work group after work group and getting my hands dirty and not really attending design summit But definitely in the weeds at the user committee For the product work group at the diversity work group at the marketing Meeting so um a lot of there's lots on the calendar for those of us who can count binary on our fingers But not much more if you're interested in the app space too There's a lot of attention right now obviously around docker and kubernetes Any talks that you can go to that are kind of talking about those topics in particular, you know, there's this sort of Threat happening where people are saying are these technologies a threat to open stack? Do we play nice to with open stack? But back to the matter is there's a lot of adoption happening above the stack with platform as a service and some of the containerization Tech so I would hit definitely hit some of those Sessions because I think they're fundamentally over time. They're going to change the way that people think about developing apps and deploying apps at scale Right. Thank you Um, well one of the the things that um I find when I'm at a really big event is that I tend to gravitate toward people who look like me so Women in their 30s who are white and who speak English seem to be the easiest people for me to talk to So one of the things I tried to do is play a little game in my head that forces me out of that comfort zone So that I'm talking to people who do not look like me or who do not think like me So that I'm talking to people who code for example And so one of the things that I like to do is say say Okay, who am I going to approach? I'm going to approach everyone with an open stack t-shirt If I see you're wearing an open stack t-shirt, you're going to get said hi to by me And and I I make it as simple as hi. I'm Heidi Joy. This is my first summit. I work with the foundation I'm brand new. Tell me about what you do here And and really emphasizing the fact that I'm new usually gets me some points kind of like Back in the old days when I was a waitress I would tell people I would would be new They forgive a lot more and they're also generally a lot nicer So so you could play a game in your head. You could say Everyone carrying a backpack everyone wearing orange everyone sitting or standing next to me Like if you're waiting in line for something Force yourself out of your comfort zone to not just talk to people who look like you or seem to think like you or Who happen to maybe do the same thing that you do And so one of the things I wanted to give you before you leave today is We have some fun little Smiley face buttons that will help you kind of notice each other as you're walking around the summit And I'd like you to take two or three of them and give them two fellow newbies that you meet I'm putting mine Right here on my name tag And if I see any of you wearing these I'm going to make sure that I come up to you and say hi to you So I'm going to pass those out and this is my TLDR for For this for the who should I meet who should I approach? Which is everyone so I'm going to ask you nicely to pass that around I'll give you one to pass kind of toward down the middle And we've got another one over here for the right hand side Final thoughts you guys Sheila. I'm going to start with you All right. Uh, yeah, it can get really overwhelming. Just hang in there drink the water as nicky mentioned earlier Get some rest and just have fun. Have a really good time. I'm having fun so far already. Yeah, I'm having a blast Matt, what do you think? I'm actually going to just echo something Sheila said because I said I do like to plan everything a little bit too much but You can always watch a talk on youtube if you're in the middle of a conversation with someone that's Going to be more valuable to you watch watch it on youtube on the plane, right? Yeah, um, you can't recreate the in-person conversation on the plane probably so Cool nicky, what do you think open sack has grown so much? I mean, I still have my old piston T-shirt where it had the five core projects on it and now It is so massive that not one person can be an expert in everything And so use this time to to meet new people there's always a tendency when you go to these things to Hang out with people that you work with because those are the people that you probably know the best but Step outside of your comfort zone and meet new people and it's cool Once you start attending summits you'll start to see a lot of the same people and meet all kinds of new people I work at Cisco There's like 70 000 employees and every time I come to one of these things the last two I've met a bunch of people that work for the same company that I didn't know so Definitely try to try to branch out and have a good time go to the parties like You know meet a meet a bunch of new people and keep in touch follow people on twitter So you can keep those conversations going long after the summit ended. Yeah, so I wanted a show of hands Who's going to a party tonight? Oh, come on. They should all be up All right, well, I'm gonna be looking for your smiley faces I also sent out a note to the entire open stack foundation Staff asking them to make a special effort to meet you and greet you knowing that you're wearing the smiley face button So, um, if you took a few for some friends who are new, I hope you do I hope you pass them out Um, it makes you just that much more accessible Um, I was just going to add when I go to the party is even though it's totally annoying I wear my name tag Yep Because I really want people to feel like I am accessible that I'm easy to meet And my first name Heidi joy is kind of like it's a little strange because it's two words one name So by having the name tag it just kind of helps reinforce Or for somebody maybe who's a non-native english speaker It might be a little bit easier to kind of read and absorb. So It might be helpful for you to wear your name tag. Um, I I also try to make sure I carry a nice handle of business cards So Heidi before we go, I read that you write romance novels. Yes, I do and do you write them under your own name? I do it was a terrible idea. I'm gonna I'm gonna stalk you after this to check out your novels. Oh my goodness I'm in so much romance novels Hey, we all have something we're passionate about It could have been horseback riding. It could have been horseback riding cool Well, I want to say thank you. Um, first of all to all the panelists Sheila matt nicky you guys are the bomb I'm so glad I got to meet all of you this this time And um, thank you for joining in so we're gonna wrap this up just a little early So you can either race to a new session meet somebody else in this room or come up and say hi to us and ask us questions So thank you. Bye. Bye