 Hi, thank you everyone for showing up here. Hopefully not too hung over. Everyone have caffeine. So hopefully you're not here for an in-depth SDN session because this is OpenStack mentoring. So we have a lovely selection of mentors and mentee who's become a mentor. And so we'll start off with some introductions first of all, and do you wanna get started? I'm sure is this thing on? Good morning, I'm Ann McCormick. I'm a tech leader at Cisco. Let me just say a little bit about what I do. I work on the MetaCloud side, which is a managed on-prem solution. And my task is bringing Cisco technology into the MetaCloud deployments. So I've been working on OpenStack for about two and a half years. This is my sixth summit and it's awesome. Thank you. Hi, my name is Trevor McCausland. I'm a superstar developer for AT&T. I've been a mentee of Amriths for quite some time and this time around, I've entered the speed mentoring to be a mentor this time. Thanks Emily. My name's Amrith. I work with Verizon Wireless. I've worked with OpenStack and Trove for about three and a half years. I don't remember how many summits this is, but the first one I went to was in Atlanta and I'm the PTL for the Trove project, which is database-to-service. And I'm Emily Hoganbrook, process of elimination there. And I'm involved with women of OpenStack and so I run the long-term mentoring and also the speed mentoring programs. So we wanted to give a couple of introductions to some of the different types of mentoring that you'll see in the community. We won't talk in depth about all of them here, but how many people are familiar with outreach-y internships? Basically they're maybe six months long. They're pretty intensive. So you come out of them with a lot of in-depth knowledge, but it's a fairly small pool of mentees and mentors. Then we have Upstream Institute. Did anyone attend Upstream Institute maybe this weekend or had a past summit? I know when I started in OpenStack, I went to Upstream. So that's great. It's just a couple-day workshop and it's face-to-face. It's great for your first introduction into the community. They show you how to get Garrett set up. They show you how to interact with the community, things like that. Then like our mentors have mentioned, we have speed mentoring. So we typically hold that on the first day of the summit and it's a way for new people or not so new people to get to know some different leaders in the community and get to ask them a couple questions in sort of a fun speed-dating-esque format. And we have long-term mentoring, which all of our mentors and mentees here have been involved with. And so that's over a period of several months. Typically we match people around summit time. It's not as intensive. It's great if you have occasional questions, but don't need like an everyday check-in with your mentor. And then you've probably noticed that specific projects have their own mentoring. So there's onboarding, I think, for a lot of projects this week, which is fairly new. And if you look for any project, a lot of times they'll have something set up for how new people should get started, who you can reach out to, things like that. So to talk a little bit more about the types of mentoring that I'm involved with, the speed mentoring, like I said, it's summit activity. We had our third one at this summit. And it's a good way to meet some new people, maybe get some quick advice, like you're stuck on what's a good patch I can get started with, or I'm having trouble getting in touch with someone, how do I do that? And we're averaging somewhere around 40 mentees for speed mentoring. Our long-term mentoring program, it doesn't require any face-to-face meeting, although we encourage people to meet up with their mentees and mentors at summit. It's also been around since a little before Austin, we started both speed mentoring and long-term mentoring at about the same time. But with long-term mentoring, you don't have to meet face-to-face. So it's good for people who maybe can't make it to summits. We're playing around with a lot of variables with it, as far as the timeframe and how we make matches. We've tried some automated matching, how much guidance we give to mentors and mentees. We have a guide and we've been updating that. So we did our third round of matching after the Barcelona summit and we had 10 mentor mentee pairs. And so we have an online survey that you can fill out and then we match based on those survey results. So try to give you someone in your project or someone maybe who's on the same career path and a little farther along the new, things like that. And if you want more information, here's our wiki page. So that's a short introduction to mentoring, but let's get to the actual fun part of this, which is interviewing our mentors and our mentee here. So first question, how did you guys get involved with open-stack mentoring? Let's see, for me, I'm a relatively new mentor. I just got involved with the long-term mentoring just in the past six months. I would say I'm at the point in my career where I'm starting to think about giving back and trying to get other people inspired and involved, particularly women in engineering, girls who code, it's having a big pivotal moment now and that's really important to me. Something that I found out recently is that I took a leadership training for women in particular and they mentioned just by being a female engineer, you are setting an example and that's why I wanna be involved and meet people and hopefully inspire them and it's been a fantastic experience so far. I also volunteered for the speed mentoring for the first time and I really enjoyed that. I put on my career hat for that day instead of the open-stack and I enjoyed it. I got to meet people who are just starting out and actually just starting out in open-stack or in their career and I really enjoyed it. I first heard about the speed mentoring program when I was just starting my career as a software developer and I was told I was gonna go to the open-stack summit so I'm like, okay, so what are all these kinds of events and the first one was the Austin Summit that I ever went to so speed mentoring was kind of new and so I looked into it and I applied because it seemed to be a perfect fit for me. I'm trying to learn the open-stack ecosystem and how to do things and it sounds like a good opportunity for me and it was and that's kind of like how I got involved and I've been involved in, now this time I've been a speed mentor and now I also participated as a trainer in the upstream university training. Cool, so I've been doing this kind of thing for a while now. I started working with open-stack in Atlanta three and a half or so years ago and so I naturally went looking to see what opportunities there were. Before coming to open-stack I've been, mentoring is just another name for a formalized way of working with other people, building a community. So I've done that before. I've worked with women who code as well and I think that's a great organization and well worth supporting. So what do you think makes a good mentor? Are there certain personality skills that you need or? Right, so a mentor you'd have to have like a lot of different kinds of experiences because you really don't know what your mentee might come back and ask for you. So it's important to have both the technical background and also like a career background because you never know what your mentee might be asking you. So if you're working on the open-stack and you submit a patch and no one's reviewing a patch, you're gonna be wondering why is that happening? Is there something that I missed? It's not just about writing code, there's other things. So in order to be a good mentor you have to have both a technical background as well as like a career mindset for moving forward in your path. And so if you have a good balance so that way you can field all the kinds of questions that your mentee might answer. And also you'd want to make yourself available and make sure that you can find a time to meet with your mentee when you can. And what skills have you guys developed as mentors to make you better mentors? Well in my particular case, like I said, I'm kind of just starting out so I bow to Amrith, but it's, like I said, giving back is great but I also am inspired by the people that I'm meeting. I'm actually getting a lot out of it as well. In terms of skills, I think having been in the industry for a while, like Trevor was saying, being able to navigate career-wise and also still be on the technical side, I think it's a good combo to have. And that's it for me. Cool, I'll take a slightly different tack at the answer and say, I think to be a good mentor you need to know how to listen and you need to know how to ask good questions. You probably didn't realize it but you asked me a lot of questions I never gave you any answers. You answered them all yourself. There's no point in my projecting my bad experience onto you and trying to make you make the same mistakes. But I can at least tell you what mistakes I made until you're not to make the same ones again. Go make your own, is probably a better way to put it. So, lead you in the right direction but not say go do this. Right, right, exactly. I want to kind of add on to that because a good mentor would be someone here who's had a lot of failure so that way whenever a mentee comes he's like, hey, I have this kind of cool idea and then he's just like, no, don't do that. I've tried that, please just do something else. Yeah, brave people have died doing that. Go do something else is the thing which you want to say but you don't say it that way. It's like, have you considered maybe a career in skydiving? Things like that. That's at least my take on it is, all the subject matter shit is all very useful yet I need to know about OpenStack and all that. That's really interesting. The real thing is I need to be able to listen to the question you're asking and in a lot of cases the question you're asking is not really the thing which is troubling you. It's the ability to understand what the hell is troubling you and give you the tools to go figure that out for yourself because there's no point by just telling you what the answer is. All right. I was just gonna say, I don't know if this is obvious or if we've mentioned it but Amarith and Trevor have a mentoring mentee relationship. I think it's long standing, right? Yeah, it's been a while. I think since now I'm a mentor I think I'm well on my way to, I mean we both agree that we're all on my way of being a contributor to OpenStack. So, I mean, yeah, when the mics are off I'll tell you guys what he does actually. Yeah, I think you guys were matched actually in our first round of long-term mentoring, so. Yeah, at that time he was just a developer and now he's a superstar developer. Well, that's due to your mentoring, right? Must be something there, yeah. So talk a little bit about the experience of being a mentor and a mentee. I mean, for mentors is it like you have one mentee at a time? Do you have multiples? What's that like? So I was matched with a mentee out in California. I work out of the Boston area who's relatively early in his career. He had a lot of aspirations for projects he wanted to get involved in with OpenStack. In my case, our relationship kind of fizzled, I wanna say, and maybe that's something we can discuss but it turns out he got very busy. He was going for an associate's degree and also working full-time and it just didn't have the ability, the bandwidth to be able to carry on. So that's my experience, but. So during the last couple of years, maybe four or five people have been working with in different capacities. One was a woman who was doing her PhD in computer science so it was on her doctoral advisory committee. Trevor, a couple of other people in other places but each one was kind of different. In the OpenStack area, I'd say one, maybe one and a half at a time. Okay, so what have you all gotten out of the experience? I guess I'll start with that. So that's a pretty loaded question because our mentor, our long-term mentoring kind of went over the extent of almost like two summits. So at the beginning, I didn't really know a lot about OpenStack and it actually had like a lot of hardware requirements so I had to make sure I'd get those all straightened out and Amrith was, that can be really tricky whenever you're working with virtual machines and so Amrith was able to, he actually had like a screen sharing session with me one time where he came in and he was just like, okay, so let's make sure you got everything straight and he kind of walked me through the steps I'm getting up my first debugging through one of my Trove instances. But beyond that, I mean, that's just a technical side of it but there's also like other things I was able to discuss with them like, right around like the first, like there was like other things whenever you're a software developer it's important to develop certain skill sets. So like one thing for instance, is Amrith asked me if I had a blog and I told him no, I didn't have a developer blog so he's encouraged me to do things other than the OpenStack community to go out and be a good developer and just be overall just like working towards my career. So like other examples is there's a local user meetup group in St. Louis that I was giving presentations for and every time I wanted to hear someone's advice I would ask Amrith if he would wanna look over my slides and he would give feedback and good suggestions on my slide as well. And he's also like taught me like the importance of like contributing to OpenStack it's really like the importance of like not only making a good commit but also like the quality of like the code and how to do how to fix he helped me walking through like how to fix bugs and like what meaning how to make like meaningful reviews not just like plus ones but minus ones and explaining in detail like with certain reasons why and he's also talked about other issues like he's helped like he's also explained like the importance of like debugging gates as we know in Trove. And there's just a lot of other things and one of the things that kind of stick out to me the most is when I was first starting my OpenStack career and software career in general I didn't really know like what direction I wanted to go so I kind of did like a strength like weakness analysis of like of OpenStack in general and I kind of he was he was sick at the time when I told him this and I'm like hey Amrith I'm not sure if I wanna keep working on OpenStack can we talk about it and he's just like oh man he sounds like you need to have a call so we talked about it and basically at the end of it he said he gave me some simple but like clear advice is to don't he shouldn't be going away from something but instead you should be moving towards something else and at that point you know he was right. Who told you that? I did? Yes. That was the drugs okay fine. Yeah so it kind of really made it clear to me I didn't really like OpenStack's pretty great and it's an awesome project and a good ecosystem to be a part of so I don't know why I would wanna move like I wanna move like I don't know why I wanna like I don't think I can move towards something better than what I had at the moment. Cool. Well he did mention you were sick that day maybe it was an off day or. No it sounds like amazing advice. But yeah just you know just being a good mentor is being available because even though he was sick he still wanted to talk to me because it was a really important time. It's dedication. You wanna know what I got out of it? Sure. I got a hat. Our wonderful sponsors I can tell did these hats for all of our mentors for speed mentoring so that was the big draw everyone liked swag. Kidding aside I think whether we all want to acknowledge it or not the fact that we're sitting in this room means we're really lucky. You mentioned giving back. I don't know whether I'm giving back or I'm paying forward because where I am today is because a lot of people help me and I'm sure I'm gonna need some help in the future as well so it's probably some of both. It's not like I've arrived now it's time for me to give back I'm paying forward as well. Oh I think I already mentioned for me what I get out of it is the energy and the inspiration for people who are just starting out because they're hungry and they're excited and I think that that's a really great energy to be around. Cool so our mentors what do you think makes for a good mentee? Are there certain qualities that are easier to mentor or eagerness? I have a slide which I'll show you. Sure. Okay is it here? Yep just go. All right. So I think the most important thing which a mentor needs to see in somebody is somebody wants to ask you a question. You want to be a mentor, great. You can't want something for somebody more than they want for themselves. That's a very clear indication somebody wants something very specific. I'm not gonna point out who it is but that person knows exactly who it is. You know who it is. Trevor was exactly the same way. He was very clear what it was he wanted and you know that's the first step. The other half of what it is to be a good mentee is unfortunately something you don't know upfront. It's something you only know much later and that is having been a mentee the person turns around and says I'm now gonna be a mentor which you just did. So that's the best thing possible. Thanks Henry. I really like giving back. I know open stacks of community it's really important to help others especially because it's really important to if you sense someone being like a new contributor is to be extra friendly towards that person point towards the right documentation and really go with the extra effort to explain in detail what you need to do because you know it's kind of a job to do that as part of a welcome as an open source community is that we need to be welcoming to everyone and help those out we need it the most. And I'll say that we've never had a problem getting mentors for the program. I mean this community is amazing with the long term mentoring with speed mentoring we always have more mentors than we can use. So that's a great problem to have. And do you have anything to add about what makes a good mentee? I think some of it's already been said somebody who's willing to describe where they're at and what they're looking for but I also think in some ways you have to come with a little bit of an empty cup and be willing to take the advice of somebody with less experience perhaps. I don't know how to say that exactly but. So do you guys have any feedback on how we could make the mentoring programs better and in particular speed mentoring or long term mentoring? And you'd like to see us do differently in the future. For me just starting out it was hard to kind of get the right cadence at first about how often to meet and people get busy and things like that and then like I said it kind of fizzled and I take responsibility for that and my mentee got very busy. So I think maybe a little more guidance on how to get started and what the cadence should be. I think it would be good to encourage kind of like showcasing like what the mentor and mentee have already done. So like I know we can already do that by like proposing talks and saying like, hey mentor and mentee we challenge these problems and this is how we did it. But I'd also like to see support from like the women of OpenSec to do like have submissions from people and then they have like a series of lightning talks on it or something like that. Just to really show like what has happened, like how does OpenSec benefit from this mentor-mentee relationship and you know like things like that. Basically like giving some kind of like pushing them towards like accomplishing something so that way they can come back and like act so that way they have like something to work towards together and can you know show off like what they do. So it sounds, I mean that would just kind of encourage like more participation and it's like, hey we really got to get this done before because the summit's coming up. I really think things like that. Cool, that's a great suggestion. So what was your question was what is the feedback? What feedback we had? So one thing which I don't know how many people in the room know about stack analytics but there's everybody likes to measure stuff, okay. And people are gold on these things which they measure how many commits do you have, how many reviews do you have and stuff like that. I think a good thing which we need since OpenStack is all about a community, a strength of a community or a strength of a community participant is how many people they're willing to invest in growing the community. So maybe we need to have a stack analytics count for every company and say how many mentors are part of this company. Because if you're not giving back, you're just a moocher. If you have more mentors it's way more valuable than you got a bunch of people fixing typos. So I'd suggest that you should get company participants to pony up people and say we're committing so many people to be mentors. That's a great suggestion, thank you. So I think we have about 15 minutes left so are there questions from the audience? It doesn't have to be about these particular mentoring programs that can be anybody trying to start up mentoring programs with their project or at their company or I mean we have some great mentors up here so. Oops, you're done, okay. So I've been hearing a lot about the development side. Is there any mentors on the operation side? Cause I'm one of these administrators and engineers have been given open stack and here, learn it. And I'm figuring it out and I love it and I'm consuming it but I'm going at it blind so I'm wondering if there's like a mentoring operation inside of it. Yeah, I don't think that we've closed the mentoring program to just devs but I don't know how many mentors I've seen on the ops sign up on the ops side. So I'll answer the question for the video but contact me later if you'd like. There are a number of people in the community who have a lot of operator experience who are also in the upstream university. Say, you know, name names, how about dims or J-pipes or people like that. Contact them and they will definitely help you with it if you don't know them send me an email and I'm happy to connect you with them. I think that's an interesting point though. Emily, you would have some insight into this, I'd imagine, but how do mentors and mentees get matched up? Do you kind of dig into their area of interest when you're doing that? Yeah, so if you go out to the wiki page and look at the survey that we have been using there are some questions on there about what you're looking for and we kind of try to ask it a variety of different ways. I'm trying to, obviously if you're a developer it's nice and easy, we try to match you with someone in your same project or in your same area. We've played around with some automated matching programs. I think we've found that geography sometimes is a big issue. I've had some mentor mentee pairs who have asked to be unmatched because geographically it wasn't working out and they were having trouble finding a time zone to meet. But sometimes it's worked out really well and there are some people where you just naturally get matched with someone who's a night owl and somebody else who's an early bird even though they're halfway around the world from each other it works out. So there's I think still a lot of trial and error. So if anybody has some fantastic suggestions of how to match people we'd be really open to that. Perhaps area of expertise like as Trevor was saying like your list of accomplishments maybe that would help match people. Did you pick Trove as what you wanted to work on? I thought it was Trove and Neutron, right? That's what you wanted to work on, okay. Yeah, so because you mentioned Trove you were stuck. Yeah, so I got a Trove mentor, Amryth and then went around Barcelona so I'm gonna actually get a Neutron mentor as well. Cool, what'd you get? Chinat Samanti, he's actually contributing a lot to Tacker at the moment. It's okay. We're considered doing presentation mentors like for first time presenters, hooking them up with someone who had a lot of experience which seems like it could be a way we could really develop. So that's one thing which I never got to do with Trevor. I was just telling him before this panel started and I've done this before with people. We did this at one of our mid-cycles, the Trove mid-cycle, we called it Presentation Carry, okay? Okay, so if you sign up for it, if you want to, I'll do it again. I probably still have the presentation. You don't get to see the presentation till 10 seconds before it starts. It's 10 slides long. The audience decides when to flip to the next slide. You see the slide when it goes on the screen and you keep talking. The idea is very simple. You're not gonna be comfortable on a stage doing a presentation unless you're comfortable making a fool of yourself with a group of friends. You signed up for Toastmasters, you said, it's the same thing. If you can't add lib, you know, it's not gonna work. So if you wanna do that, happy to do it again. We can make it a regular part of the summit or forum or whatever you want. I feel like both of those work together. By the way, that sounds horrifying. So the thing is there's nothing to be scared about it because the last one we did, I still remember, very vividly, the presentation, the title of the presentation, if you stepped on the stage, all you would know is it's hair care products for men. The entire presentation is pictures. No words on it. And the reason is very simple because most people, the first time they do a presentation they stand in front of the screen and they read the damn thing off the screen. I can read it just fine sitting in the audience. There's a bunch of pictures. You gotta add lib those pictures now. And it's like pictures of bald men, pictures of people who need a haircut, all kinds of things like that. But everybody has fun. And that way you're not, you don't have a lot of inhibitions when you get in front of an audience and you have to talk. You're not gonna get stage fright. That's basically the idea. Do you wanna do it next time? That sounds like a great idea. I'll sign up to do it. Sounds like fun. Do you wanna do it? Actually, yeah. Okay. That sounds, I mean, it depends what the pictures are, but I guess I won't find out. They're all clean. I'll tell you that much. For years. So maybe I could help with them or some folks like that. You know, I've had thoughts about being a developer, but I've never had time to get into it. Even though I write Python, I have a networking degree, I've thought about getting, you know, maybe it would be good to like, see how that works. I also run a hacker space in my community and I have members that, you know, are really starting their career in Python and there might be some attraction there. So maybe there's like resources I could use that might be easier to get them attached to the OpenStack community from my local community. Interesting. Yeah. Where's this community? I'm sorry? Where's the community that you? We're in Burlington, Vermont. Okay. There's like a local community you mentioned. There's like a user group meetup. Is that, do you want to use the microphone? Yes, sorry. I should stand here. Yes, and I also run the, with a number of other folks, the local code for America Brigade. We do a code for BTV. And that's a group that actually tries to move routinely. So we have people coming in and sometimes thinking about projects and other things. And if I have someone who wants to get involved, you know, it's just maybe, how do I maybe succinctly do that without being so involved in a mentor and program already? Like how could I be around, I had around how to talk to these people and maybe engage them in the OpenStack community. When, you know, sometimes I've talked to such people and you're not very aware that OpenStack even exists. You're like, oh, AWS. And you say, oh, it's kind of like AWS, but, you know, it depends on how young they are, how much knowledge they have of cloud computing in general. Yeah. I think they're always welcome to sign up for the long-term mentoring. And one thing I think we're gonna be getting more into is if we can't match people, if we don't have a mentor in that area, a lot of the projects have their own guidance. So we'll try to kind of guide people toward the project guidance. Yeah, so really just give them your role and start from there. And yeah, and you mentioned Neutron. So I mean, I work on Neutron too. So you can talk to me after this if you like. And actually, I was just gonna mention in previous summits, I don't know about this one, but they typically have a session on building a community. I've seen those before, like how to build a meetup kind of thing. I don't, does anybody know if there was anything this time around? There was? So that might also be useful. And I know all of the videos are available after the summit, so. I'm actually owner of the St. Louis Meetup. I just recently became the owner. And I, yeah, it was running for, someone was running it for three years and he stepped down and now I'm the new owner. And some good advice I would give is you could go to the Marketplace Mixer and talk to all the big vendors there and tell them what kind of presentation you want from them. And most of them are, I found out to be really excited about just talking about engineering and technology. Because what I was afraid of is that everyone would just wanna sell their products and services at the meetup. But it turns out they have a lot of engineers there at the Mixer too. And they're just enthusiastic about it as I was. They're questions? So out there, I think we've heard from a couple people who are looking to build mentoring in their community. But for other people out there, are you coming to this because you're interested in being a mentee or interested in being a mentor? Mentees? Mentors. Microphone. I think it's important to recognize where skills drop off and where skills are exist in a particular person. So having the ability to say, okay, well, I need help on Cinder or I need help on Neutron or I need help on Mist. But I know how to do this. I know how to build heat templates. I know how to build this or that. And I think that that's, I think it's important to have both of a two-way relationship with a mentor mentee. So it's not just a one-way street of giving a brain dump and it's only one way to do it. So it sounds like more of like a collaborative, like a working pair because you're both learning from each other, right? And I think it could even bring in more people. You might be a mentor in one project and a mentee in another. And that's totally fine. And I think that's a big part of how we grow the community. That's very true. You don't just have to be starting out an open stack in general. And I think just from like the mentor mentee pair, you both like learn from each other anyway, whether it's technical or not. I ran into someone at the conference here and she's a rather, what's her name again? Malenian. I think I'm misremembering. Anyway, she's fairly well-accomplished and a fairly high-up I think developer at Intel for OpenStack. Oh, Malenie? Yeah, Malenie. Yes, there you are. But she was mentioning that she can't even find active clouds really run on to develop on technology that's actually being used. So it's like you're running in a small laptop or a small little test environment that's not real, if that makes sense. And it's just like it's hard to see where the problems hit the road when you're always anomalous of theoretical world, if that makes sense. So the cloud I built was basically a nonprofit cloud with all 501c3s as tenants. So I mean, I keep having this idea that it could be a training cloud, that we could say maybe three nines is okay, that these organizations aren't so nervous about a little down climb, it's not millions of dollars to them. So maybe there's an opportunity there and has that ever existed in the community? No, of anything like that that's existed, but I think that's a great idea because yeah, certainly testing things out and unit testing on your laptop is a lot different than running in production. We have a couple minutes if anybody has any other questions or feel free to come up and find us afterward or if you see us in the hallway and wanna ask us questions or see us on, I think we're all on IRC. So yeah, keep mentoring, keep being a mentee, keep learning and I wanna say thank you so much to our mentors here because they do a fantastic job and the community. Thanks for the hat. And thank you Emily for being an awesome moderator and for all that you do is mentoring. Thank you.