 Hey everyone, welcome to Kipcon North America 22. It's so great to see you all here and today we are going to talk about how can students get into CNCF and our title of the talk is We are in students hacking in their way into CNCF and we have a pan list here So let's get to the introduction Hey, my name is Karuna and I am a coach at Major League Hacking and and I'm also a technical writer at Async API which is part of Google season of docs and over to you Ashwin Hi everyone, my name is Ashwin. I am also a coach at Major League Hacking I love personally hackathons in the past 12 months I have done over 55 hackathons and Collectively all the panelists here we have done together Over more than 140 hackathons together and we are going to use that experience to share with you How can you get started with cloud native technologies via hackathons over to you Kavalyah Hey everyone, I'm Karuna Kuparkar. I'm a campus expert open source advocate Devred and according to June 2022 I have been ranked as 14 most active contributor on Jithub in India So over to you Abhishek Hey, everyone, this is Abhishek and I call myself a geeky ambivert and a workaholic person who thinks sarcasm is seriously important I am incredibly privileged to be around these awesome people as a hackathon teammate and that's what we are going to talk about today Apart from that, I have been also working with cloud native technologies distributed computing As an intern previously at Nirmata. So without further ado, let's get started So what are hackathons? Right, that's the question But I'll make one thing clear is hackathon is not hacking into NASA getting passwords Illegally or and all those stuff right hackathon is basically an event where there's a theme and you build something for that It usually takes place on weekends. You can team up or go solo. Yes. So that's what hackathon is Over to you Karuna So, yeah, now that you know what a hackathons and now you might be wondering, hey, I but I am a student How can I manage both like participating in hackathons and also doing my academics? So do not worry about that. We got you covered Hackathons are basically a way to implement what you study if you are like very Curious about no curious about how to implement technology what you study in your books Hackathon is your way to go. So Once you implement those technologies you are you will be able to like explore every field which you like And you can even learn things on the go like if you are really curious about the technology You can just go and try it out at the hackathon because they give you free credits There are lots of things which like hackathons give you For free if if you are participating in it. So I would recommend doing both of that And over to you now That's good. That's great. But There are a lot more to hackathons than that And my first personal favorite things are the swags Now swags are the non non monetary incentives you get for participating in hackathons They range from bottles to tablets to Caps t-shirts what I'm wearing right now is a swag and I personally love swags All of us out here are wearing swags Now you get swags for doing anything at hackathon not not just by winning you get swags for participating in them you get swags for trying out a new technology or Just playing some mini give mini events or winning some raffles Swags are great encouragement for you to try out hackathons and try out new technologies I personally myself entered the world of hackathons because of swags But I decided to stay because of the great community and the networks they provide talking about networks yeah, so Swags are good, but a network is something else, right? If you see we are the panelists we got together as a team in a hackathon and we continued participating and won lot of them And we became really good friends and you can see the photo there, right? So when you are participating in hackathons be it in person or online You're going to make a lot of friends and they are going to stick with you together, right? And Your network is your net worth and it is going to be beneficial throughout your journey Yeah, and speaking about network swag There is one big incentive that is meant just to pick that you get even though hackathons are Part of the competition you build your ideas you build your projects and compete with each other You are not alone in this process. There are mentors and people who are there to help you out throughout your journey in the hackathon through checking out your experiences Seeing if you are if you have any difficulties with anything and they are there to help you out Then I first started with hackathons and events. There were so many mentors and I I am really fortunate enough to get so nice mentorship through such amazing people So that was really great start for me and I am now trying to Pass forward this mentorship to other people with whatever resources I have and that's a great thing to have when you are just getting started And not just mentorship. You also get career opportunities, which will be told by Karnas or to your Karnas Yes, so You might be wondering hackathon is a one time thing like I might do it for like One day two days 24 hours 36 hours or something and then that's it. That's over No, you are completely wrong. It doesn't work like that. So hackathon is a place where you can put your work in public and And then you will realize once you start putting your work in public You will get recognized by so many people out there Like let's say I use the technology or a sponsor a sponsor tool Which I used in my hackathon project and put it out there and the sponsors might like it and they might approach you to like work with them or maybe collaborate with them or give you some project to Contribute and this helps you in getting lots of career opportunities. So, uh, let me share my story with hackathon So I have been participating in hackathon for over an year now along with these amazing amazing panelists also as solo and During this period of time. I did not just do hacking, but I also mentored a lot of students I just the project just just few projects and I also like Helping other hackers get into hackathon. So it's a total round circle where I started to where I end So this helped me get into a role Called a hackathon coach at major league hacking. So they approached me apply to apply for this role And then once I got through the interviews and everything. So, uh, I am now working at major league hacking So I started hacking at uh mlh and now I'm work at mlh. So you can see the whole graph right there So this is a great way to explore more and more career opportunities Yeah, and speaking about careers, so You don't only get approached by companies and you don't only get job, but you can also create jobs So how so you can see these amazing companies and tools which are here and interesting enough that they have They were started through a hackathon and they were an idea in a hackathon and after the hackathon ended The people actually thought that project had a potential and they should bring it in a real world and it could solve a real world problem And they actually scaled their project beyond the hackathons and Made it a real life real problem solving project So even after you have done with your hackathons and if you feel that this project has so much potential You can actually work on that project even after your hackathon and maybe create such great tools and even startups Uh will create it through a hackathons and the people you found through the hackathons So next uh like prerequisite and myth we are going to burst so over to you Abhishek Yeah, so this was me actually I used to think like this that I don't have enough skills. I don't know how to actually build something. How do I even participate in hackathon? I don't know. Why should I even do it? I used to feel like that so but I attended one of the mini events in a hackathon luckily and I got to know That person told me that you don't need skills. I was like, okay. Wow. That's good When I actually tried one hackathon and I understood that you don't need skills If you basically if you just know how to design stuff You can obviously team up with someone who knows how to code And then you can design maybe a website that you are building for a hackathon And make it look good, right and you participate in a hackathon Not only that but we have also participated in hackathons just for fun Just for attending mini events and that you also get a lot to learn in mini events And you can use that knowledge from mini events to build something for the hack, right? So this is a very big misconception that you need to be you know to enter in these these mini databases To know these many programming languages and all those stuff to participate in hackathon No, you just go and participate enjoy it and that's what uh hackathons are all about right you need to enjoy it So, yeah now Hackathons, what if you have done a lot of them? That's as you might end up organizing one for your community This is where organizers try their best to make Hackathons easy for beginners. So if you're watching this and you are someone who has not tried hackathons before Trust me organizers want you in their hackathons. In fact, most of the student run hackathons make sure that they have a good ratio of Beginners to compare to veteran hackers in their hackathon How do they do that? Well, they set up code of conduct to make sure it the hackathon is friendly and inclusive in nature Uh, there's nothing to for you as a hacker to lose and a lot to gain because at the end Most of the hack hackathons happened over the weekend Which does not conflict with your academic times or previous commitments. You make new friends. You are learning some new technology You're learning getting swag all along the way. So there's not a lot of lose But you are learning a lot at the same time There are some hackathons which give out special categories to promote you joining hackathons like having a prize for most incomplete hack Or having a category just for beginners to win some awesome prizes in that category What this means is it does not matter if you have experience with hackathon before Hackathons and its organizers are trying their best to make sure that you get a great experience out of that Great and now we talked about uh students and hackathons But what if I'm a maintainer? What if I'm maintaining a project and the project is sponsoring some hackathon or is Participated in hackathon. What is it beneficial to me as a maintainer? So let's listen to one of my own stories So during the hackathon With working with these amazing people right here. So I was uh My task was to write some tests for the backend We were building for a one of our projects and I had to write tests for the backend, right? so I I was supposed to use the Pactamjs library and by writing the test. I realized that one of the the one of this portion or one of the section of the test case was not fully built or the scope was not totally there Right. So I found the flaw in our testing library while working on a hackathon project And then I reached out to the maintenance through the github repo and I opened the issue the maintenance was super We can super helpful and they asked me hey, you can just contribute to the Through this issue and I actually ended up contributing to Pactamjs while I was uh working at the hackathon so from this story What I want to depict is that even if you are a maintainer or even if you are a maintainer of a project Which is taking part in a hackathon There is a last scope that people get to contribute to your project Because they have known about your product and or your project so much and they are getting familiar to be your project Because of the hackathon This is not just my story. Now we have kaluna story coming right ahead Alrighty, uh now that you have heard cavalia story. I'm all up for my story. So, uh I I was using this a flask If you don't know what flask is it's a python framework. So most of you might know Like I was using flask and went on to documentation and I saw that there was some mistake in that So I went went to the repo and I saw there was already an issue before I raised one So I was like, okay, let's comment. I want to take this issue as every beginner does So the maintainer said, you know, you don't have to ask because you can just start working on it We're like, okay, cool. Every organization has their different set of tools and How they work. So all right, I started working on it I had some ups and downs like I had some review issues or something like, uh, how should I do it? So It's always great to ask questions to them. So if you are like Getting very very late replies on github, you just have to hop on to discord or if you are If if they have any other community communication channels, you can just hop on there You will find lots of lots of mentors. So I got I got to know two three people from the From the project who maintains flash. So I went to them I say them that this is this This is my problem and they helped me solve it and I finally contributed to it So now you might be wondering why are we even telling you this story that just because I'm a maintainer or just because you are a contributor No, we are telling the story because if like once you use a project, let's say a cncf tool or a cncf technology Or anything which comes under it You get to know how to use that tool in your hackathon project and once you use it, you'll get to know how it works And once your family are with it, you can go and contribute to it. That's also a great thing because cncf provides a lot of opportunities like lfx mentorship and That is a great way where you can learn from lots of mentors lots of contributors and also There are stipends to this is a great opportunity to learn and earn at the same time Over to you Ashwin Now that is so awesome Taking part in a hackathon and end up contributing to a project which actually is used by thousands of people around the globe is truly inspiring now What made us think about that is how easy it is to contribute To a project on github that we use via hackathon and that made us think that you know, uh, let's figure out how many students are actually part of taking part in cube con and cloud native conference And the win tool we did a simple google search on the post event report The one you can see on the screen is the one from cube con euro, uh, which happened months few months ago and If you see on the first row the number of participants has been increasing drastically over the year starting from 2017 all the way to this year We have 18 500 participants this year But at the same time if you look at the last row the people having academic background Which consists of students and professors has been declining Which is a surprising point. Why is that happening? Well, uh, it myself it took me Two different cube con to understand the platform and what happens here But it took me a single hackathon to understand How cloud native technologies work and how can I be part of them? So we all participated in one of the first student cloud native hackathons called cloud native hackathon Kavalia was one of the organizers here and To our surprise we had a whopping six thousand participants including the four of us here And the fact and jazz contribution by Kavalia was done in this hackathon We get to try different cloud native Technologies and it was fun. It was over the weekend And we learned a lot now the advantage of this being it is beginner friendly It was inclusive. There was a lot of swads involved and some of us got to contribute to real life projects In fact, the number of participants here is three times more than the number of scholars of cube con europe What does this mean? What does this number mean? Well, it means that students are more likely to take part in a short sprint of coding like hackathon If they are beginners compared to trying out Uh Joining a conference to learn about new technologies Conferences are a great way to learn But it can be overwhelming for a lot of students and you want to make sure How can we make it easy for every student out there to understand all the amazing cloud native technologies are there So this is a pretty straightforward statistics that we found out But hackathons truly make an impact to all the students who want to try out some new technology in cloud native out there Yeah, so you saw the stats and ashin told you how hackathons are beneficial for you Right. So let me ask you this basic question that what if your hackathon is over what you do next? Simply forget about it. No, that's not what you do. So what you do is You should one of the best point is that you should continue working on your projects like we discussed earlier Helm and elastic search and all those projects and uh elastic search is one of these startups Which is doing really good, right? They were originated in hackathons. Let's let's say imagine that When the creators of helm when they had participated in hackathon They got this really good idea that Kubernetes is missing a really great package manager So they got this idea. They started building on this and we have helm right now, right? So suppose they just drop their idea after the hackathon or maybe they were not able to complete this by the end of the hackathon And they drop the idea. We would not have had this really great tool right now And same goes with other technologies that originated in a hackathon, right? So the great idea is to start and continue working on a project even after the hackathon ends That's the story with helm. Uh, they started working. They continued working They caught contributors and everyone started, you know, like lifting each other and we have this right now, right and In hackathons, we already discussed you get mentorships, right? this there is a really intimidating tool that you don't know and You don't know how to use it. You'll get mentored and once you know how to use it You build something out of that tool Uh in your hackathon project what so you get the idea, right? and You should go ahead and you know, maybe just check out the code and visit the github repository if the project is open source That's what there There's the place where people miss out a lot, right? cloud native technologies are very complex and you don't get to use them More often imagining and using qn it is to orchestrate your to-do app. That's not what you do, right? So since you don't get to use qn it is much often. How do you learn it? How do you Uh, you know get hang of it. How do you get to know the internal concepts that you get to do that by going and starting to learn about the code base You know the much more internal stuff. This is what you can do after hackathon You use some technologies you learn about them and you know, you start try to contribute to them, right? If you do this, you know, uh, I have experienced it myself personally Your technical knowledge goes from here to here And that's a really great learning curve and as I said, you can uh Explore and see your projects and initiatives and you know, once you have built all those projects You can as corona explained you can put it to the outer world and it's exposed You know, everyone can see that and you can put that in your resume as well. So now what Since we have told you all about hackathons and all that stuff and you want to find where the opportunities are where you can Find out hackathons to participate and you know choose from them Should you really put your detective glasses on and look for hackathons and sources? No, we have made the work easy for you. You just need to scan the qr code That's on the slide right now and you'll find the the the resources that we have compiled For you so that you can find hackathons much more easier way That's me and thank you everyone for listening throughout this session to us and I hope many of you got inspired and got realized in set with statistics that why Hackathons can be a great way to get started with cncf and such great and overwhelming projects, so This is a feedback form We would really appreciate if you can just scan this qr code and fill the feedback form and we would love to hear How you feel about our Session and these are our socials. So if you want to connect with us, these are our twitter handles We would love to get connected and let's see you in the Q&A session Thank you so much for joining our talk. My name is asin kumar. This is karuna abhishek and kairavalli and We hopefully will meet you at cube con and if you have any questions feel free to Let's reach out to us. Have a nice day. Enjoy cube con. Bye everyone. Bye