 Hey, awesome. Welcome to our brown bag talk finding the balance between open source and proprietary work Quick introductions. I'm Douglas Mendesable formally with rack space looking for new opportunities now So I'm Fernando. I'm currently at IBM and I've been working with the Barbican project for about two years so, yeah And I'm Dave McCowen I work for Cisco systems and I've been working on OpenStack since the Juno release working on the Barbican project and the security project and As a developer in the OpenStack community We all face certain challenges balancing the efforts that we do for our company in particular and efforts that we do for the community at large Some of the challenges that bring about this conflict is tight deadlines on company product work when there's a Release coming out for your production system. That always seems to take priority over community work or community work Waynes There's always an inherent conflict even if you're working on OpenStack daily for your company products It's going to be on a stable version. A lot of companies might still be on on liberty or kilo or or Newton And then you work you're doing upstream first. You have to commit to the slash master. So there's always a platform difference there Another challenge is that you'll make commitments that last a whole cycle or longer than a cycle for the community but then your job or mission might might change in your company and it's tough to keep continuity in In the community as your job changes on a day-to-day basis and And finally there are competing priorities at the end of the day Your company is looking for profit and the community is looking for sharing exciting work And so balancing those priorities is something that we have to work with day-to-day So there's also things that you can't contribute So for example intellectual property, so there's a lot of company IP that you know, the company's not going to be happy with you contributing So you have to make sure you get approval from your manager. There are ways and there are processes within the company of pushing to open source patentable processes and company IP, but that's more of a law and management role So you would have to talk to your manager about that and then of course you can't really contribute if it's something that competes against A current product that you're offering. So so that's something to know So now we're gonna talk a little bit about our experiences Yeah, so Yeah, so when I first started working on open stack I set up this firewall a division between my community work and my company work And it was exciting just working in the community because I felt like I was not hamstrung by one-on-ones with my manager by Daily stand-ups by status reports. It was really great. I just separated the two and But what I found over time by doing that whenever I was doing community work I felt like I was stealing time from the company and I sort of felt isolated from my company as I did community contributions So what I decided to do is to tear down that wall and I communicated Just like my day job my community work I'm one-on-ones with my manager I told him my goals for the cycle and then at the end of the cycle I told him that yeah, if I achieve them or not I talked with my marketing team and my sales team about my community Contributions and successes there and they were excited and shared those results with our customers and so I found that and Giving status to my project manager. He was excited to add that to his slides and to communicate that across the organization So by tearing down that wall and making my community work part of my day to day I was able to get cheerleaders and stakeholders within my company that then supported me for for all my community work So I'm gonna agree with Dave. I had a somewhat of a similar experience where so I started with full-time upstream development for about a year. So I was just mainly involved in contributing to Key management of Barbican So then what happened is I strategically chose a team which does use Barbican in the back end So then even though I was working mainly on proprietary work I can still contribute in a meaningful way to the company's products So so that way since I can contribute features that not only help the community But help my company as a whole so I found that one if you're doing contributions that way and you're talking to You know your manager about you know how this is gonna help the product and making sure that you're making an impact on the actual product It's gonna help you out at work with with getting Time to contribute. So that's one thing that I've learned through throughout my experiences And one thing I wanted to talk about is Encouraging if you're a manager encouraging your employees to take leadership roles I was lucky to be working at a company that valued upstream contributions very much and they really encouraged me did to Put my name in to be a PTL Which at the time I was very sort of reluctant to do it didn't think I could do it But I had a really good manager that really encouraged me and I found it to be a really rewarding Experience experienced a lot of personal and professional growth because of it and very thankful to my manager For encouraging me to get involved upstream So yeah Some helpful tips if you're gonna join the community be sure to set up an IRC bouncer so that you're always logged into IRC And don't miss questions or people saying hi and things like that If you're at work and you've got some other priorities to stuff to be logged on to IRC all the time But being able to find some downtime to catch up with a IRC backlog is always good Always try to contribute at least a little bit try to make it a goal to submit a patch for a bug or Or something small every month That's helped some of us Always try to attend the meeting Regularly one thing I did for that is set up a block of time in my company calendar For the monthly meeting to make sure that people didn't schedule me to go to other Downstream meetings while that weekly meeting was going on If you if that's not possible, then there's always an IRC log at eavesdrop.obensack.org Where you can catch up with what happened that week and your project or projects if you're interested in many of them And always try to build a relationship with active developers, you know, just saying hi on IRC Every day goes a long way to being recognized by core teams and start building those relationships Yeah, so we'd like to end with that and see if the audience has any questions Okay, no questions. All right, cool. Thank you. Thank you for attending