 Can everybody hear me? Can anybody not hear me? I've never had anybody tell me they couldn't hear me. So hey, welcome. This is a talk that I have been wanting to give for a long time. I'll do a bit of history on myself here, but the main idea behind this is the open source communities and projects. I feel like a lot of how we talk about them, a lot of the conferences, given the name of this, literally open source developers conference, is kind of aimed more developers, even though a lot of us who are not developers, either for a living or by passion, actually are in open source communities, don't necessarily always feel like there's a lot, as much aimed at us. And so I was going to talk a bit through this. But more than likely if you hear you're not a developer, right? There's like dozens of us. Dozens! I'd like to get an idea of however who I have in the room and what your role is. It's not too many people, I think I'll probably even just get every one of you. But who is like system admin, system engineer for a living? There you go. Okay. For the rest of you, what do you do? Oh, marketing! Okay, there you go. How about you in the back? What is your role in you're a developer? Okay, who are developers? Alright, there we go. Alright, fine. Okay, well that's good. It's always good to have a good diverse crowd. This is kind of the overview. I'll give you a bit of background on me. Why this is a talk that I care about who I am and who is this guy up at the front of the room talking. Then I've got three main points. We'll talk about what the big idea is. What I actually am trying to get across. How you can get involved and why it's important that everybody is involved in open source. I am a Red Hatter, so I worked for Red Hat. I just passed three years this July. I am what was called a solutions architect. My job is to work with Red Hat's customers to solve their business challenges or business initiatives or project requirements with open source solutions. Those come from us. My background prior to working at Red Hat was in, I was behind a desk as a systems engineer. I did automation largely and I worked with open source technology and I was an open source contributor. Also, I'm a gamer. That's my actual Minecraft avatar is Link. Those are two favorite games of all time. Probably the Legend of Zelda franchise and Minecraft and all of its 32,000 iterations. That's my cat. He's very nice. He lets me live in his house. Sometimes if I'm very good, he snuggles me. He's very soft and cuddly and that's what keeps me sane while I'm working. Open source is where I got my start largely. I can trace my roots in open source all the way back to the day. I remember learning about it. I'm everyone familiar with Drupal. Anybody not familiar with Drupal? Drupal is this open source CMS. It was all the rage back in the day when CMSs were beginning to really come to fruition. Open source versions of them were properly coming into their own and we had Drupal and a whole bunch of others wordpress strangely transforming from a blog platform into a CMS. I went to DrupalCon. At DrupalCon, this lady named WebChick, who is still the Drupal Community Manager, gave this what I call a sermon. I think she'd probably appreciate that. The sermon about open source and what it meant for Drupal and what it meant for the community and why we should get involved. That was the day that it sparked in me what open source was. I decided I wanted to be closer to it in my career. When I left working for the university, I went to working in the private sector and was plunged into a world of unsupported open source technology. No one I worked for up until Red Hat ever wanted to buy software. I always wanted to use the quote unquote free open source version. I became very plugged into and active in the communities. These are the communities I contributed to the most. There's a few others that are in there. Actually, Pulp I've even had some interaction with that community through my work with the foreman. But this is where I've come from. This is my background. I just wanted to give an idea of the reach that I've been able to have even in the only five or six years I was really properly active before I went into working at Red Hat. This is where I've come from. I want to talk a bit about why I have brought this topic to you in the first place and what it's all about. The big idea is that open source is not just for developers. Developers are extremely important. Developers are the base of everything that we do, but software projects are software projects. There's this great quote from Linus Torvalds, Long May He Rain, that is, in open source we feel strongly that to do something well you have to get a lot of people involved. You just say developers, you said people, and he knows if of anybody that there are roles within every software project that require more than just development skill. The first point is two points here, but there's the first point in this, open source projects are just software projects. They're no different from any other software project. They're needy. Software projects have a lot of needs. Just to give a quick snapshot of the kinds of non-development roles we deal with, product and project managers, the chief cat herder of the team, people that keep things on track, people that decide priorities and what has to be done here and there, QA and QE because nobody writes bug free code, people that specialize not only in how to make something pretty, but also how to make it functional. I was just talking to somebody else that's out there who works for our user experience team whose background is psychology and is the one that's out there sort of, he's the one that's got the strings going up to sort of what you do and how much you work with this and that. He's out there doing research on user experience. That's incredibly important and that's not something that without a background in that and without that being your passion and your specialty is a skill that is necessary for this marketing. We have to get the word out somehow. Build engineers and technical writers. These are like the, what I thought of sort of the six most common overarching roles and niches that get filled within any given software project. This is sort of more enterprise level, which you would do at work, not necessarily in the open source role, we'll get to that in a bit, but also open source projects are communities. There's this wonderful set of stickers here from the Fedora community and I love what, it says at the very top, I just got these this morning, it says that most communities are inclusive and diverse. I love that because it's completely true. Homogenous communities are not as rich or functional even as a diverse community. So to give you an idea, these three projects are some of the healthiest and most diverse communities I've ever seen. I don't show these logos because they are enterprise products. I think actually the fact that their enterprise oops, I guess I lost my laptop, sorry. I forgot to plug it in. It's my fault. That's good. So what we get from, this is what we get from a diverse community. I guess I don't have caffeine installed anymore. Okay, well, it's fine. I'll just shake my mouse once in a while. So these are examples of what you get from a healthy community, right? And the fact that their communities were healthy and what they produced was strong, what they produced was good. What they've produced has been very useful. Ansible in particular. Ansible is a fantastic example of a community that is perfectly married the skills of developers to the needs of the systems engineering side of the world, right? Ansible is my favorite product that I work with sales teams to sell. I just got back from talking to a customer about how we can transform everything that they do using, by changing a bit of their culture to properly take advantage of automation and to utilize Ansible. And that's going to solve all of these challenges that their development world had solved a long time ago with CI CD tools and build tools, but the automation we needed to properly develop and program the systems side of the house has been lacking until we had a tool like this. And it was possible because it was a big effort from developers who saw that need and system engineers and everybody else in between taking part and feeding back into it and contributing and Ansible now is literally taking over the world. It's amazing. So this is what you get when you have these diverse communities. Elastic is another really good example of that. I was involved early on with the Elastic Search Project. Now it's an incredible company. Some of my friends work there and they've built something great and they still take care of their community. What do you potentially get when you have a somewhat homogenous community? Something that nobody loves. Nobody loves PHP. Nobody loves to work with PHP. It's awful. It's terrible. Even if you contribute to it, it's terrible. I have to admit I tried to get involved in that community. It didn't want me. They're not very interested in ideas. They're not terribly into it. This was my experience about four or five years ago, but I think that's a good example of the fact that it's like, yeah, it's there because, I don't know, no one's really replaced it yet, but nobody loves this anymore. Nobody leaps out of bed for PHP in the way that we do for Go or even Ruby or something like that. So to make this point open source needs you. If you're not involved yet open source has a place for you. These projects have a place for you. So how might I get involved? You might be asking. I'm glad you asked. I've got some ideas. So let's go back to this. Now I've kind of modified. This list looks familiar, right? It looks a bit like the one I showed a few minutes ago. So this list, I've changed the titles a little bit to match more of the functional role that that sort of niche would look like in a community, but where we might have a product or project manager, oftentimes we have community managers. Community managers are sometimes functions, product managers. Sometimes we have product managers and they often also act as project managers. So these are people that help centralize the efforts in the community that help keep projects on track that help decide on priorities, often that interact constantly with the community's beneficiaries. So the people that are out there using the software that may not be plugged into the community. They read the feedback, emails, things like this. Very important role. Absolute glue for everything that happens. QA in testing, there is no QA department for open source projects, right? The community is QA. And what is expected of us as community members is that we try and work with new versions of things and push them and use them to their proper use. And when they don't work, because it is a when, because it's software. There's no such thing as perfect software. When they don't work, we report it and we make sure that that is known to the community and we can help and work with the people that are developing it, if we're not the developer, to fix those issues. UBuy and UX designer, right? Just as important, it's software that is going to be used, needs to be software that is functional. Also the same thing, software that is used must be able to be used. So if we don't have documentation, so the greatest software in the world is kind of useless. If you have absolutely no idea how to even install it and use it, marketing is still important too. Build and release is very important. And I'm going to dive into a few of these. So the first one I would say, one of the places that in my time being involved in open source, I made some of the largest impact was just writing documentation. That was it. It was like, hey, I kind of figured out this process. Can you check that I do this right? They're like, yeah, yeah, that seems right. Am I cool? Like, no one's written this down yet. And they were like, yeah, well, I look forward to your contribution. Which is one of my favorite responses in the open source world. People get complaining. They don't really have something to offer. You say, okay, I'll look forward to your contribution. But in reality, I got the point. So I wrote it up and I submitted it. This is, I took this picture, actually is marked down and it comes out of the Foreman's documentation. It's not one. I tried to look for maybe some docs that I wrote back in the day. I couldn't find the exact section, but it's easy. Like, it's so easy to take the notes you probably already have written on how you're doing something, convert them into documentation format, send in a PR. More than likely, they're just going to say, oh my gosh, thank goodness somebody finally actually committed something. Yes, we'll take it. We'll put this in place, right? But it's so important to have all these things documented and we want to make sure that the software that we're writing has a good documented source of instruction and how to and FAQ, even going so far as just collecting frequently asked questions out of an IRC channel and forums and mailing lists and maintaining that list of frequently asked questions and their answers is incredibly beneficial because a lot of us search for something like that before we try to even send an email. Is there an FAQ? Is there a quick start guide, a quick reference? How about an upgrade guide, right? That's another thing that's really, really, really useful that we don't get very often. If we're going to go from version 1.9 to 2.0 of a project, there's probably a fair bit of work that you would have to do to actually upgrade and any of us that figured it out have some notes on it. It doesn't take too long to convert that into markdown or whatever format the project wants to use and submit it. And you would benefit so many people. I was so surprised when people saw that I committed something. They were like, oh, thank you. We've wanted that for so long because none of us have had the time and I'm not a doc writer. Spellcheck doesn't work because I'm so bad. Those kinds of things are the kinds of things that we can really do. And especially those of us on the system side of the house, all of us should have a background in documenting. It's like half of our job sometimes. Also, testing and reporting, and I would emphasize the word reporting, it's great to try open source software. I'm trying some right now, actually. This is a presentation remote so that I can see my speaker notes. I found it there was one I used to use that I hadn't used in a while so I didn't install it. I went back to look and there's a new one in there that's open source and I go, this is cool. So, hey, if it breaks, I'm going to let them know what broke and what didn't work. But that's what's important too. Sometimes one of the biggest contributions you can make, SSSD was up there on my list of projects. My only contribution to SSSD was months and months of it didn't work. This is why here are my logs. Let's look into it. My contribution to that was very helpful in finalizing the integration if you don't know what SSSD is, it's from in Red Hat based operating systems. It is the sort of daemon that handles authentication on the system. So, when you connect to LDAP server or to Active Directory or to something else, it's what handles the connection, it's what does the user translation. You can set all sorts of permission controls and stuff. It was great and I was working with it in the upstream because unfortunately, again, I said, my company didn't want to pay for support so I had to live in the SSSD channel on FreeNode and I got to know a lot of the core developers and some of them are still my very good friends and in fact one of them in particular was sort of like heads up quality engineering for SSSD at Red Hat. And I was in the community running into all sorts of problems because I was trying to integrate with Active Directory back when it was a very new concept to do Linux as a native member in Active Directory. I submitted all this never code not once, but I would submit all sorts of issues that I ran into and then we would resolve them and I would try a hot fix and they were good and then those fixes would go into the community but I was opening open probably 40 or 50 bugs in the course of a few years including one that was a race condition that it took us two years to find and that was a huge contribution because that's the kind of stuff that you can't just get out of a regression test. Even if you have a great quality engineering team you still need people reporting when they've run into problems and working to resolve them and that is a really big contribution that even at the time when I was so frustrated all I just wanted was to get it fixed. In retrospect I see how important that was to the project even though I didn't necessarily think about it at the time that way. Also improving the experience is really important and this is another reporting thing, right? Say it's not not working. It just isn't great. I don't like that the button is here I keep misclicking and cancelling something because the button is there. Report that like that's a big deal because it's not hard to move a button and if you're frustrated more than likely most people are too, right? I mean how often if you encountered like a prompt comes up and instead of ok being on the right that's the cancel button and just instinctively you accidentally cancel and you're like I just lost 30 minutes of form that I filled out, right? Well that's a user experience problem that we can either submit a pretty quick fix for if you're good with HTML or CSS or any of the simple web rendering code or send in a report and talk about it. If you happen to specialize in user experience that would be incredible to get involved in the community and say hey let me work on this let's put out some surveys see how people feel about this. Let me look through the bug reports and the things that people have feedback. That kind of contribution can be just as useful even if it's just bringing expertise and saying these are the kinds of changes we could make that would make this easier or better to use in the long run. I would also say the other contribution that I was surprised to find out was so important was the help the people. So I would just be in chat rooms, right? Kind of further to a point I'm going to make in a bit. I would be in the chat rooms I would ask for help and I would get help or I'd figure something out. Then people started coming in and they were asking the same questions I was asking. I was answering them. Because the people that were answering me were busy. They're core maintainers of the project, they're developers, they've got their code to write, they've got their day jobs, and they're just on this channel. Well I was at my day job. My company wasn't going to pay for this software so I thought the least they could do is let me be involved in the community as part of it because they say we pay for engineers and not for software. That's not an invalid point and I would absolutely use their engineering dollars on maintaining this project, right? I would sit in this channel and answer questions and talk to people and just be involved in this. Much to my surprise one day, one of the community managers for Elastic sent me a private message and asked me for my address and I was like why didn't I do something wrong? She was like no we wanted to send you a thank you gift. She was like for what? Did I win some raffle I didn't know about? She was like no. Everybody here knows your handle. Everybody knows who you are because you're the most helpful person in the channel and I was like really? I feel like all I do is sit around and talk to people. She's like yeah we need that. It's really important and so from that day forward I redoubled my efforts. Anytime someone came in and asked for help I tried to help troubleshoot. I would ask the basic questions because to be honest with you if it's not somebody friendly more than likely you're going to get somebody gruff who's like up at two in the morning and they're like are you kidding me? Why don't you read the F-ing manual? The amount of that answer in open source is infuriatingly common because people aren't there who want to help, who want to be able to answer these questions and so the people that don't want to answer them are left to do it and what kind of answer are you going to get out of someone that doesn't want to be there? Somebody that doesn't want to be doing this? It's like I don't know it's just it's not the best experience and I walked away from communities over that. I walked away not to name names but I will I walked away from the Ruby community over that because I wanted to be involved in the Ruby community and I had an issue and I brought it forward to them and they literally with multiple expletives told me to get lost and I was like okay well this isn't a community I want to be part of. If you're part of a community and you want other people to be part of it be part of it with them which brings me I think to my next point which is getting the word out. Another thing that's very very helpful and a huge contribution to open source is bringing in contributors and bringing in community members and one way we can do this is by advertising any time in any way we can so when we say get the word out this means that we're at a conference like this and you're in a conversation with somebody and they say yeah I'm working on this thing or that thing. Have you heard of this project? This is really neat. This is a really great way to handle this particular issue. Maybe it's something small, a small open source library. Maybe it's something huge like the formant which I was constantly evangelizing because it changed my job and I was absolutely in love with it. There's a hat over there Mr. the formant hat. The bright yellow one. I love this. A formant is probably my favorite project because of what it did for me. I will always love that project and I still good friends with a lot of the maintainers and the community manager even though it's not my job anymore. I don't have the time I'm still plugged into that community and getting the word out is something I still do. I think this is where I make this point either way. So one thing that's really really great and that we often really need people for is working booths at conferences. If you go to a conference like Scale at the Southern California Linux Expo is my favorite conference of all time because it's just like completely organized by communities. That's it. There is no corporate sponsor. I mean this is an awesome conference but it's put on by Red Hat. It's our conference. There's no Red Hat behind Scale. Scale is entirely a community conference and every single booth there is some kind of open source project and somebody had to show up and talk to people and bring materials and be there at that conference and every time that conference happens the amount of people in that community grows because people are walking around that conference looking for communities to be part of and the same thing here. We have communities out there in that room and there are people that are sitting there who are there representing that community. That's a big contribution. It's an investment in time for some of us it may be comfortable. Not everybody is a people person but it is an awesome experience to get to meet people to get to talk, to get feedback on things. I would say this is another very important one. The final one is just join the party. Just go sit in the IRC channel and have fun. All of these projects if they have more than 20 or 30 people in them probably have talk 24-7 in their channel. Weekends included which is astounding to me. Look at the scroll back and see this deeply intelligent political discussion that happened at 2 in the morning on Sunday. That kind of thing was always amazing to me. This is a picture of a meet up that I threw together when I first started at Red Hat they needed somebody to go to Puppet Conf and I was like I live in San Diego and I would be happy to go to Puppet Conf and I realized there is going to be a lot of people from the Forman project there so I decided I would throw a meet up and all I did was put out an invite and we handed it out on the floor. We got like 30 people. I was so unprepared for that I told the restaurant 15. Thank goodness they had a long enough table but it was insane. People showed up and it was fun. They knew each other like oh my god you are this person and they had so much fun meeting each other over this table. So not only do I recommend getting involved in contributing but just being part of the community. The community is so much fun and going in there and making friends and getting to meet them at conferences because conferences are probably the one time if you live on one side of the country and they live on the other the one time you are going to meet unless you become really good friends and fly somewhere to meet each other. Is that a conference? But that is what is super fun about things like birds of a feather or meet ups that happen at conferences. Those are your opportunities to go and actually meet and physically interact with these people that you spend so much time with online and it is great it is so much fun. So the last contribution you can make is just you yourself and your personality and being part of it and enriching the culture within the community and becoming unknown members. Somebody who is yet another friend in this group of friends who is trying to make something cool happen. So like I said there is a lot of places you can a lot of niches to fill. Everybody can be involved to some degree or another even if as I said it is just answering questions for people. Even if it is just answering questions for people. And then I would like to also talk a bit about why and the reason I like to talk about why is because I think a lot of us know how important contribution is but it is a lot of work. It is hard and I would like to give you some reasons to really consider putting in the effort to get involved and get plugged in. So first of all it is good for the community for a few reasons. I have listed a few already. Communities are healthiest when they are diverse. Every new person joining is a new addition to diversity. Every new person joining for some niche skill that is needed is a massive boost to diversity. Diversity of opinion, diversity of ideas, diversity in discussion, diversity in contribution all of that is extremely important. You know what else is really important communities live and die by their contributors and their members and if we don't have enough people in a community the communities burn out and they can disappear. And if there is a project that we use and we love and we want to be part of the least we can do across the board is be there to try to help keep it going. It is not free software. Open source is not free software. It is freely available but it is built on the hard work and the backs of volunteers who have put their life effort and work into this. So a lot of us were maintaining open source projects as part of our day job but it is still a lot of work. We weren't necessarily paid to maintain them. We maintain them because they are important for what we do. It is still work over the top of what we do and if we want to have longevity in our projects it is important that we are part of them. Also it is very important for the community to have our input. We need more than a small sample set in order to get truly good feedback and to make something better. Also it is good for the world. I know it sounds like a silly point but it actually is. Open source has taken over the world. Red Hat just got acquired by IBM and I don't know how many waves that makes outside of people that really pay attention to this. IBM has ruled technology for 105 years or something like that. IBM is why we got to the moon. It was IBM supercomputers that got installed at NASA that did a bunch of calculations. IBM has ruled the world on their proprietary software and they crumbled under the weight of the importance of open source because open source came up out of nowhere for some of these people. Kicked them out of the data center and absolutely rocked their world because IBM could just sit there all day long and say, we will make software for you and you will like how we make it and it will be the right way. It will be the software that you need. We were being told by proprietary software vendors, this is what you want and this is what you need. At some point we got freedom of access to the ability to write and share our own software and we were like, you guys are so wrong. Look how much faster we can move with this. Look how many more contributors. IBM has hundreds of thousands of employees. There are millions of contributors to open source software. We open source in general, we so far outnumber proprietary software, it's not even funny because a lot of people that work at IBM are also working and working on open source projects. The Venn diagram is huge and open source makes all of this pale in comparison and it's great. We have so much great stuff now. Our jobs are so much better because of the open source technologies that have transformed and enabled them. There was no proprietary puppet. There was no proprietary the foreman. These things that were out there were terrible. The reason that nobody used them was they were bad and they were expensive and nobody wanted to bother with the investment but we can put our time and effort into these things and start to really change the world. But again that requires us being involved. That requires us stepping out and actually plugging in to one or more communities and being part of the greater picture. But frankly it's never been easier ever for a small contribution to make such a big impact. I was very proud to say that my small contributions were in my in the documentation, in the foreman for example, or a few thousands of times. The small instruction set that I maintained and kept updating every update to the foreman code base, the instructions were a little bit different. That was a really important set of instructions for people to have. That was a small contribution on my part in general. That was greatly beneficial to a lot of people. So I think this is very important. And then finally it's good for you. So few reasons. First of all who here works with open source upstream technology because as my company said we pay for engineers not software. I'm curious. Any of you working on unsupported running your companies on unsupported open source software? At least one. I actually kind of expected there to be at least a few of you. The thing that I found was problematic about that is when people said open source is free. I'd say well it's not free I got to put in the work for it. And then I would go and ask for help in the community and I would always say if you want help you should buy support. Because in a lot of these communities there was support. What I found was the way that I got support in those communities was by being part of it. And if I was a part of it and they knew who I was because I was an active and contributing member I wasn't some nobody off the street coming in and saying I don't have support but will you help me. I was someone who was in the community and said I don't know how to do this. Is someone available to help me with this? And everyone would be like yeah sure give me 15 minutes and I'll spend some time with you on it. There's a big difference in how we work within a community how we're able to access the resources within that community when we are within the community. Not just somebody showing up saying I've used this project for the last five years and they're like great weird this is the first time we've seen you welcome how can we help you? And then you ask this really complicated support question and they're like look we're volunteers we don't really have the time for this. I know it sounds silly but being involved is actually how you access the support of the community by building a base of support for yourself. There's this quote I'm so dumb for closing the tab there's this quote that I really liked I'm going to try to paraphrase it but basically it's a psychologist that says that there are sociologists that there are two kinds of communities I don't remember the names there was some complicated name basically there's one kind where you draw attention to yourself by show of dominance and there's another kind where you draw attention to yourself by being part and open source communities are the latter. You don't show up and show dominance that doesn't work unless you're Linus Torvalds and even he got kicked out of his own community by the way if you didn't know that he was forcefully retired out of the community to cool off right you don't do that in open source you can't be a tyrant everyone's a volunteer no one follows a tyrant if you're a volunteer. You get attention to yourself by being part and by drawing attention to yourself by your contributions also as I said like I have friends here Jen who organizes this conference and is one of the best people in the world is my friend because I was connected well enough within open source communities to want to go to scale and scale is where I met Jen and I wanted to go and be involved and Jen runs these a lot of our open source upstream community conferences I don't even though I worked for Red Hat corporate I do not like corporate events I don't want to go to reinvent I don't want to go to ignite I want to go to scale I want to come to devconf I like working with the people in the communities this is fun like this has made my job what it is that I've had this experience that I have these connections at Red Hat through my community involvement also I have friends all around the world like everywhere I go if I go to some random foreign country I probably have a friend there someone who I have worked with for years and I know and I would never have known had it not been for my involvement in an open source community and then also like really good way to hone your skills you want to practice something if you do want to sort of dip a toe into development you know who is really happy to help you learn how to do something the people that might benefit from your contribution to it so if you're in that community and you're part of that community and you go to one of the developers and you're like hey kind of want to learn how to write a bit more python you know I want to do some of this object oriented stuff and get really into more of the programming side of the house I was thinking there's this backlog item I might work on would you mind helping me with that and they probably will and you will get really good experience and you can say you've had an engagement and involvement in these communities I tell you I hire I do technical phone screens I look at resumes and I look for things like this I look for in the extracurricular activities it's great that someone was an Eagle Scout it's great that somebody volunteers at a soup kitchen I appreciate those things but I look for people that have invested in open source because I know they're a certain kind of person and I know that they have a dedication to what they do that they want to know more about their technology and they want to be involved in how it's made and that's a big deal when you work in a job like mine we're understanding something and it's why at its core why we do something with it is extremely important and that's why I think it's important and other people who are hiring as you begin to apply for jobs will look for things like this too this is a great way to get your resume bumped up to be honest with you so that's my point right it's a call to action I am an open source I don't call myself an evangelist even I love this stuff if you can't see it I'm kind of hopped up and excited not to shout I tend to do that so I don't want to blast you all but I get really excited about open source I get really excited about the contributions about what the communities are and how they have shaped my career my friendships my life how I view things and the fact that I can see from multiple levels how the work that we all all of us as part of the 30 plus year old open source world have started to really change the world around us how we have changed the way that the market responds to its customers even the fact that we the individual contributor have more power over everything now than we've ever had because all of us are part of making this happen so I would say go forth and contribute and thank you for coming I have if you want to contact me I think these slides go out right so yeah you need to upload them to sked I will upload them to sked yes I will so and in particular there's one blog I linked to down at the bottom from a guy named Florian I forget his last name I'm sorry about what open source means to him he's the director of one of the open source in this large open source conferences basically organizations and he's got this great story about how as a non developer it similarly to how I ended up in this he kind of fell backwards by mistaken to open source communities and involvement and now his entire world revolves around making it happen and I would say it was very similar for me and I would love to see more stories like that out there so thank you for coming please do contribute please have feel free to talk to the people that are out there that are at those community booths if that's a project you're involved in or want to be they are happy to tell you what niches need to be filled so thank you and have a have a great conference yeah of course is this microphone this microphone is working great so as people have questions if you could raise your hand I'll try to run the microphone directly to you so we can capture all of this in the video anybody have any questions I'd actually like to ask one if that's okay so I'm wondering if you have any thoughts about what it takes to sort of overcome the sort of technical process issues when you when you're approaching a community looking to contribute something that you that you want to be incorporated into it so whether that's like if you have documentation that you really want them to incorporate learning how to make the right kind of poll request in the right place that kind of thing have you ever found that that's a little bit difficult or have you found that people have been willing to help you with that what I found is if you state that your intention is to help so you come in and say hey I have you know I documented this process that wasn't well documented I'd like to contribute it would somebody you know I would basically state your intention to contribute because that's a good way to get everybody's attention and then say look I've never done a get pull request before with somebody might help me out with this so like one thing that might happen is if you submit a pull request it's got a bunch of commits they may say they'll just instant reject it and say quash your commits and recommit right and the first time it happened to me I'm like heck how do I do that so I went into the channel and asked and there was someone said it's not that hard let me show you right yeah so stating your intention to help what you're trying to do and say look I just don't know how to do the pull request I don't exactly know what you're looking for more likely than not you're going to find somebody that's like oh really great that's great yes hold on let me put this aside I'd be happy to help you out with that so any other questions? thank you are you willing to take questions afterward if people meet you outside I'll probably be out there the rest of the day so yeah please come by talk to me happy to talk thank you all for attending