 Good afternoon. I'm Jamie Klassen. It's been a long day, so I'll briefly share a gentle story with a happy ending. I'm an engineer at a big tech company and nearly all I do is work on open source backstage as a maintainer of the Kubernetes project area. I like this job. I was the first project area maintainer outside of Spotify and I want to see more people in this role. It'll make our code base better, our jobs more fun, and it could also help my boss and yours depending on your circumstances. Since I'm here to talk about value, here's an extremely shallow summary of my career to give you a sense of my personal values. My first software job was at Pivotal Labs, where we practiced strict test driven development and pair programming. To this day, getting into a shared flow state working this way is one of my fondest experiences. However, I was always working on somebody else's code base for a short contract, never getting to see my work in production or put my name on it. Later, I was assigned to work on Pivotal's open source, continuous thing doer concourse. My contributions had my name on them and I was even involved in feature ideation and project management. I was proud of the code quality. I felt a real sense of ownership but worried I might be building a toy since the product was mainly used internally and not really supported for general customers. VMware acquired Pivotal at the end of 2019 and I was moved to a commercial project, then called developer console. I loved building something with real paying users but shifting back to closed source, I inevitably dropped some test coverage or introduced duplication in the interest of meeting a deadline. I felt guilty about it. The public nature of an open source repo with quality at the forefront helps prevent these kinds of compromises. One day, leadership told us we were changing strategy and the core of our developer portal should be this open source thing backstage. I expected the company would have a team dedicated to contributing to backstage as other open source projects had similar teams. Dreaming of returning to concourse level, code quality and autonomy, I hassled my manager to put me on this team and eventually succeeded. I poked around the whole repo and got the hang of the project's ways of working but I mostly got the team to work on Kubernetes-related contributions in support of VMware's Kubernetes-based commercial application platform product. I unwittingly developed a broad base of familiarity combined with a single area of specialization. This is popularly called a T-shaped skill set. When the CNCF style contributor ladder model was announced March 2023, the stars aligned, my company wanted to maintain our presence in the community and I was a natural fit for the Kubernetes area. So what's it like now that I've arrived? Maybe surprising for an engineering role but a lot of correspondence, planning and project management. For those who don't know, this is fairly normal open source life, lots of email, writing up tasks in GitHub and JIRA and mediating discussions. I also stay aware of internal strategies and keep them unblocked. For example, declarative integration is the next big thing in backstage but a sister team in VMware has been building something similar. It felt great for me to be able to take a few full days and do a thorough comparison of the two solutions and come up with a plan to make them stay compatible. I do still work on VMware internal stuff regularly but it's always backstage related and I'm glad for the perspective check. I know I'm not just building a toy. Since we're short on time, let me give one illustrative example of the value I believe I provide as a project area maintainer. The existing Kubernetes back end plugin was built with a pretty narrow use case in mind but teams within VMware were trying to use it as a general purpose data access layer for building UIs. Brushing over the details, this had some serious performance problems. Because my effort is nearly full time, I could look at use cases from multiple teams and research solutions in similar open source projects. Because of my authority as a project area maintainer, I could initiate a long running track of work to create and maintain the proxy endpoint. This enhancement has saved resources and improved stability for many use cases. In summary, my company has a big investment in backstage and here it's normal for significantly impactful open source technologies to have their own teams. Also open source tends to be the most fulfilling way for me to work personally and the backstage community in particular strikes an excellent balance between open-hearted kindness and critical artistry. This talk is about value and I spent most of it discussing my personal values. When it comes to business value, I'm much less assertive. So I'll leave you with a testimonial from my friend and certified business guy, Woldir Montoya. If you want to take on an increased role in the backstage community, please check out the QR code on the left. Feel free to leave feedback about this session with the one on the right. Thank you for your time.