 Alright, hello everyone, welcome to the day one at KubeCon, I hope you are having a very good experience so far. So my name is Natesh, I am currently working as a Linux foundation mentee with the Kubernetes Relays Engineering team, where I am working to building a Golang library and CLI tool. So when I started contributing to the Kubernetes for the very first time, it was overwhelming, with a bunch of meetings happening around, everything going so far, it was very overwhelming for me and I think it's overwhelming for any of the students so far. And that is the reason I was thinking of having a panel discussion with the folks who started their way as students on how folks can also get started their contribution to the kids. And when I say students, you do not mean that you may be starting in a college, no. You are a maintainer to some project but you want to get started with the contribution to kids, right? So you are a student with that project, right? So we have an amazing panel members who will be sharing their own experiences on how they got started as students and where they are currently at. So I'll be starting with an introduction. So Leonardo, would you like to start an introduction about yourself? Yes, sure. My name is Leo. I started contributing to open source like two and a half, three years ago for the most part, contributing to the release team, Kubernetes SIG release, but also for the last one and a half or two years more to the CNCF. I started with some amazing folks, the technical advisory group for environment sustainability. Maybe you saw it on the keynotes today. I'm mostly around, we're all there now. Hi everyone, I'm Fika and I started contributing to Kubernetes just last year. So for me, it was obviously a very overwhelming project just like for any one of us. Just beginning, I was a student. I was very new to cloud native. I did not know what exactly anything is. So I began it with SIG Contribute Coms and that's how my journey began. Right now I am a SIG release lead shadow for v1.29 release and I'm also an LFX mentee at Istio. So yeah, that's it, that's about me. So myself, I have started my open source journey in my second year of the college and I have been contributing to the Kubernetes in the release teams, like I have been shadowed two times in the docs, then CI signal and I have been a lead in the CI signal in 1.28 and right now I am a release lead shadow and yes, working at Red Hat with the Open SIG. So yes. Hi everyone, my name is Grace. I'm finishing my undergrad next year at Waterloo. I have been contributing in the Kubernetes project for over two years starting in the pandemic because I didn't have anything else to do at my time. I let the release of Kubernetes 1.28 planter deadies that just came out in August. I also work closely with SIG security and help out with their security self-assessment sub-project. That's awesome. So taking an introduction of the panel members, you could literally sense how can this panel discussion can be helpful for anyone of you. So starting with the first question, if anyone of the student tries to get involved with the K8s ecosystem, the first fancy word that comes in the K8s is SIGs, all special interest group. And to be very honest, there's a GitHub repo called as K8s slash community. It contains information of every SIG, what is the SIG does. So starting with you, would you like to explain how do one navigate the K8s slash community repo, probably understanding how the SIGs are working or how can someone get involved within the particular SIG of the Kubernetes? Yes. Sorry. Yes. So as we or as you probably know, Kubernetes is very broad. So all the topics that we discuss at KubeCon, they range from security to scaling to contributor experience. So we have like a very wide range of topics that we need to cover. And to make sense of all of this, we have special interest groups, as you mentioned. So basically just divide and conquer this complex problem, have like hubs of teams who just share their knowledge and can own this part of the community. And to get involved in one of those SIGs is kind of, I would say, pretty standard across all the SIGs. So you have always a communication channel over Slack. So there's the Kubernetes Slack, you can join one of those channels. And then you can just ask your questions. There's also repository with documentation, how to join off one of these meetings. You can just reach out directly. And some of these SIGs are also owning code. And if they are owning code, they are usually labeled or they are always labeled in the community's community repository. So you can look out for those labels and just browse the issues. These are some common ways. I just want to add on to that, like understand the experience of starting within the repos and everything is really hard. But you can just come to any of the meetings. They're completely open to the public. They can come. We often introduce ourselves at the beginning of the meetings and it's very welcoming. And I find that that's the best place to actually understand the needs of the SIG and where you can kind of step in and where you need help. So how you can do that is join the Slack channel. Look for the meeting. Invite that to your calendar and just attend. And I think through that process, if you attend those meetings regularly, you kind of build a rapport with folks and they kind of know who you are and they're more willing to help you along the way. That's very good. So you basically got a definition of what exactly is SIG. But let's go ahead and further understand. So if we look at Grace, she has been the previous release lead. Meha is the current release shadow lead, right? FICA is also in the part of the release team and Leo has already been in the part of the release team several times. So we can generally say like we have the release team right now or maybe the future release leaders. So any student who tries to get involved with the Cuban attest release team, they generally have this program called as release shadow program and it's kind of tough to get in, right? So what are the some of the patterns that we have seen within the folks who have got rejected from maybe from the release shadow program? Maybe it can be something like not attending the meetings or anything can be like that. So any one of you would like to add some points to that as well. Maybe I can give some context. I ran the 1.28 release. I was involved in the release process since 1.22 and part of that is like reading the applications and selecting members for my team. And first and foremost, our goal is to put out a quality Kubernetes release because that's obviously really important for the ecosystem. And so for folks who are not accepted into the team, it's really competitive these days. I think the acceptance rates is something ridiculous, like maybe 7% to 10%. My advice to you is to look around in the community. There's lots of places that needs help and would love to see you there. And once you've built a little bit more experience, come back and apply again. We do give extra consideration to folks who've applied multiple time. We do ask that on the survey. Yeah, would you like to add some points to it? Yes, sure. So as while I was being a lead in the CI signal, I got a chance to choose the folks. So what I have considered is we need to consider that the shadows give the proper time to analyze the things. Like they have the proper bandwidth because what happens is, like if we are selecting the random shadows, then all the work should be done by us. And this is not what it means for. Because you also need to put some enough time and you need to learn the process like what the lead is responsible to do. So yes, and also the second factor the lead need to consider is like we need to consider from the geographical region. So we can't only focus on the simple one region and take all the folks from there. So yes, that was the one thing. And yes, the another is like contributions and some experience like totally fresher. If you are just stepping into a release team, I would suggest that is not a good idea because if you have done put in some effort beforehand, it would be good for you. So yes. Actually, I want to add on to that. Just for context, when I got accepted to the release team, I didn't have any open source experience. I was just doing Kubernetes in my internship. And the thing I put on my application was a hackathon project that I cared a lot about. I was like a foster management system and I talked about, you know, the reason about why I built it, how I built it and how I pitch it and, you know, the process of working with folks to build that project. So I understand that like contributing to open source is hard. And you can show your work, your public work, and it might not be open source work, might be, you know, your school club, something that you've demonstrated that you've put in effort over time that can be considered as well. You know, I was working for writing a blog on the SIG release. And at that question I have is like, what are some of the patterns? And the SIG release leads a road like maybe not attending the meetings, just write some answers that depicts your interest that you really want to work with the Kubernetes release team. That being said, so whenever any student tries to get involved, whether he or she's in at any point of his career, right, there's some time commitment as well that you have to give to the open source contribution, whether it's Kubernetes or whether it's any project. So Fika, you have been as your college student, right? Grace is also a college student. Meha, you are working at the company. So if I ask you, like, how do you manage, balance your time, like the work-life balance and contributing to the open source project? Because most of the students or any other generally find it difficult managing both of it. So any one of you would like to go ahead and share your experience or what are the strategies or tips maybe you would like, you implement while doing some stuff? So I'll go next. The thing is that I'm still a student. I'm in my final year right now. So I started as a student and obviously, like any student, we have a really tight schedule. We have so many things to do. We have our college. We have our assignments, examinations, and then we also have families. So with that said, I definitely had a very, very, very low bandwidth when it came to managing open source and your college studies. So how I did, that's like really, really interesting question. I'm really interested in answering that reason being I have been following a template on spreadsheet, I guess, to manage my time like really properly. I mean, what I do exactly is that I have a spreadsheet template. I've been following it where I write and actually monitor my time. What exactly I do every single day. So I have my task list. I have my weekly goals. I have my monthly goals written on it and I divide that spreadsheet. I'm actually very interested in telling you all how exactly that spreadsheet looks like. So it is something like I have my, in the rows, there are all the dates. So it's like one day, sorry, not dates. It's days, Monday, Sunday, all those days. And in the columns, I have the times and the time is divided into like one hour. So this way, I'm able to actually divide every single day how much work I'm doing. And just below all the timing, like we have 24 hours, 24 columns. Just below it, I have my task list. That is where I actually wake up in the morning. I write down, okay, these are the things I need to do. And within this time limit, I complete it within that time limit. And I just have a checkbox next to it. So that's how I manage my time as a student, I would say. I really want to share that template. I guess y'all can connect with me on Twitter. So my Twitter handle is one F-Y-K-A. And I would be really interested in sharing what exactly the template looks like. And so yeah, below the template, I also have my weekly goals and my monthly goals. Those are like areas and it's like a really cool template that I have, which I follow in order to manage my time better. That's one thing. But it doesn't make sense to say that just having a spreadsheet would give me extra hours of the day. So that's obviously one more thing. Yeah, definitely we have to skip sometimes our sleep schedule. We have to sleep six hours a day and some days manage things that way. So I had this, I had it this way. I will only give three days to my college and academics and the rest of the days is for open source. And I'm pretty bad with managing my personal life. So I did not have much fun in there, so that's how I do it. That's my answer. Maybe I can also add to this. So in open source, you can contribute to not just code, but also documentation and organizing events and managing working groups, founding maybe a new SIG, something like this. So the contribution can be like a very wide range of things. And at least at my university, I was always able to talk to my professors about how can we maybe change this project in a way that it's using maybe open source. So you can kind of move it in a direction where you can hit two projects at once. So you contribute to open source, but you also learn something for university. So it goes hand in hand. I think, I mean, without this, it's impossible for me to manage the time because it needs to go hand in hand. I don't have infinite time. I need eight hours of sleep, not six. So I think always talking to your professor or to your person, maybe at work who is in charge of the outline and just kind of trying the best to organize the interests, I think this can help a lot. So to me, like I'm working a full-time job and like doing the open source contribution is a big thing, like finding a time for it. So yes, what I do is like in working days, I have some job work. So I do that. And in weekends, like I focus on to sparing some time for the contributions. Like I see if I need to do any PR reviews or need my inputs or someone needs any help. So yes, I do like work days and weekends to the open source. So yes, this way you can manage. That's that's so pretty. So you have, you know, monthly goals, monthly goals, you add into weekly goals and then weekly goals in two days. That's that's amazing. I'll again come back to the first question that I asked you, Leo, but specifically to you, FICA, so if I look at you, you have been contributing to various aspects of Kubernetes, whether it's writing the LWKD for all those who don't know LWKD is latest week, Kubernetes development news. Right. So FICA is working with that. You have been the part of the release team. How did you manage to navigate the document? You know, having a mentor sport is really great. And I think the sick contributes has a bunch of good mentors. Like, for example, Madhav is sitting here, Nikita is also there. So bunch of good mentors. But that being said, um, how do you try to go through the, navigate the Kubernetes documentation and point out, like, this is a thing that I want to work for. What is the thing that, what is the way that you approach the mentors? Hey, I would like to work on this thing. And how did you do that? So would you like to give something to it? Oh yeah. So I'm not sure if you're going to come to a question where, uh, what should be the best resources for students? I'm not sure of that, but if you're asking me about, uh, how do you navigate the documentation? So I would just say I have not seen a documentation as good as Kubernetes anywhere. So the Kubernetes documentation on GitHub is just fabulous. So if you just read through it carefully, you will understand every bit of it. So I would just say, I just went through the documents. It was very complicated, though, even though, because it was my first time contributing to open source, so it was complicated. Otherwise for the ones who have already contributed to other open source projects, it would be like the simplest thing to crack. For me, it was my first time. So I was just going through the documents. I was seeing six WGs. What are these words? I have no clue. Uh, but after giving it several reads, I was able to figure out what exactly that means. And then there were also the names of sig chairs, sig leads and all those things mentioned and sub project leads and stuff. So what was my next point of contact was the sig project leads sub project leads, not exactly sig project leads. So I would suggest if in case someone wants to navigate, this should definitely first go on GitHub. GitHub has really, really good repositories. Just the first page of Kubernetes will have you all the links to the sigs and stuff. And once you navigate through all the sigs, you read through their documentation, you'll find out which exactly interests you the most. And after that, if you are still not able to understand something, join Slack, and I would suggest not exactly reach out the sig chairs because they have particularly low bandwidth. They are like the people at the, at most, I would say, so it's better if you reach out to the sig sub project leads to understand the project better. So that's one like really good tip. Even I got, I did that and it will be really helpful. So if you want to navigate through the project, it's better if you reach out to some of the sub project leads or even on Slack, if you're not getting a response or if you want it to be a more private DM, so that's one thing. I guess that's the way I did it. I reached out to several folks that way. Yeah, it was able to figure it out. Anyone of you already want to add something to it? Anyone of you? Not so much on like navigating the docs, but like related to docs. I think there's like a lot of contribution that can be done to the docs to, you know, make it as valid, fabulous at it as it is. And I just want to put it like the idea out there that like, if you see something that docs that can be improved, or if you're like really good at, I don't know, navigating API scheduling or like API machinery and you have opinions about things like that. You can comment on issues. You can just LGTM PRs, like read through them, understand them, comment them. There's not a permission like structure within Kubernetes. You can show up and put in your opinions if they're, you know, informative and respectful, they'll be well received. I think that's the biggest learning for me as a student coming from an academic environment. I was always looking for like permission. Like, can I do this thing? But that's not the case in open source. So my suggestion is see that something, first start with something that you can handle on your own mostly, do that thing and like write good questions. We see, well, I personally get a lot of DMs from people who are like, how can I get started with Kubernetes and I don't have the bandwidth to help with that. But if you can, you know, come up with like an informative question of like, hey, I saw this issue or I would like to work on this issue. I looked at XYZ, I have experience in this. Can you point me to more places? And slowly you do more and more of that and you kind of build a reputation within the community. And who knows, you can, you know, start becoming an approver and move up a chain to become maintainer. That's how most people start. Yeah. I would like to follow up on what Grace said. So yes, like while I was a Google Summer of Code Manti, what I did was, as soon as I have shorted out a few projects, I tried hands on to see like how interesting it is. So what I did was like some technical questions was there, like in which I was facing some difficulty, like I was, when I was trying to run it, deploy it, some thing. So yes, I reached out to the mentors, not with the higher overview question, but with a more deeper technical thing, like how this configuration, why it is not working, I am facing with this specification. Can you please help me? So by this thing, they will able to reach out to you soon and they will answer you quickly. So this is the way like you can do like first try hands on and then reach out. So yes. I think when it comes to reach out, I got a very good lesson from one of the amazing community members from the kids, Dems, he told me that always do your homework first. So don't always ask question, but always do your homework first. The maintainer should know or any person should know, like you have put some efforts to find your answer, you could not find it. Okay, let's see that right. We have a short benefit for that, but I have one last question for each one of you. So in the community, who is that one person you would like to give a shout out in this panel discussion. So would you like to start that? Sure. So I think this is like a very difficult question because over years, there are so many people who are actually influencing you and helping you out contributing to the project. But I think over the time, I would give out definitely a shout out to Joseph, Joseph Sandoval. He was also today, if you caught the keynote on stage moderating one of the discussions, he's, he's awesome, giving always a lot of help. And so about shout out, I really admire a lot of folks at Kubernetes. It's very difficult for me, but I would go with the person who's helped, I think who helped me to get started with Kubernetes. So it was just like I joined some mailing list. I started joining calls, zoom calls of a particular SIG and that was SIG Contribute Coms. And so I would like to give the shout out to the SIG Contribute Coms lead, which was Kaseleen Fields. She really helped me a lot. She herself DMed me and helped me figure out which SIG should I choose next. And that was the way I started contributing to the last week in Kubernetes, developed my newsletter and spotlight blogs. And now I'm moving to the coding side of things. So it was my beginning and I would like to give you a shout out. So yes, to me, it's like he's dims. He helped me a lot. Like, he came up with a 30 minute call on a zoom call, like, and he explained me very well. So yes, that was the starting point. So I would like, I would like to shout out dims. Yes. It's hard to shout out one person, but I think Leo shout out kind of SIG release leadership already. So I'm going to give a shout out to the SIG security chair is Tabi and Ian. They create a very welcoming environment. So join our join our weekly meetings. You all give shout out to one people. So let me try to give a shout out to four people because you already have one, one, one. So for me, a lot of amazing contributors are there. But specifically, I would like to give a shout out to mother who is sitting there. Nikita was already sitting there. Dimms is the person Marco everyone. So all the amazing mentors you will get in the Kubernetes community. And I think that's it for our panel discussions. Now we would like to proceed with the question that you have and we'll make sure that each one of your question gets answered. So yes, you have a question. So I can speak about my university. So at my university, there is no program or no course who really talks in depth about open source and not about open source contributions. I mean, open source is always mentioned like on the side and there's like communities, but everything is like pretty much still in the dark and there's not a lot of guidance, at least not from my professors. But we had courses about clouds or also like touch the cloud at least and the CNCF was mentioned and also the landscape. So there's like some you're getting curious when you see like this gigantic landscape and all those cool tools. And then you kind of do it yourself. You go into repositories on websites and do some research. So to answer that question again. So there hasn't been things from academic, but I have seen there are CNCF groups forming right now at all of our colleges. That is one thing that's happening like really great. And that is promoting a lot of CNCF things. So that is one thing I am having at my college. And I guess all of this whosoever from us as a student might have one CNCF group at their college as well. We have community groups, city community groups. And that is how we are able to promote cloud native and Kubernetes contributions at our college level. So it's still starting, but it's not done by the education board. It's done basically by the CNCF community groups. And maybe also one thing to add. I just remember at the CNCF, we have like a very fresh initiative to define like a study program for students. So this is one contributor experience. They have a new working group in the works. And they are already working with professors of several universities about brainstorming how a cloud native onboarding at universities could look like. So there's stuff happening. Any other further questions? Anyone else you have? So you've talked a lot about like giving shout outs to so many folks. Can you talk a little bit about what you plan to do going forward to grow more folks into the community and how you're going to act as that force multiplier? That's a tough question, but who's going to answer that? Yeah, I think both Leo and I have been release lead and we ran a team about 30 people. And a lot of that involved mentoring for the next generation of the release team. I'm coming back as an advisor for 1.30. But I think that there's a point there that there's not a lot of formal mentoring within other side of Kubernetes. And so I'm looking forward to kind of helping folks. I've been talking to folks to onboard them to the security self assessment subgroup because it's a newer project and we do need help there. Yeah. Yes, I would also like do it right now. Being a release lead shadow, like I'm learning how to manage all the sub teams together and manage all of them like managing the blockage if they are facing and try to resolve them. So yes, I'm learning all these things while being a shadow. So yes, I have planned to give back like to the community like I have planned to be a lead maybe in future and not the next immediate next one. But yes, as soon as I will find the bandwidth, like I will definitely plan to release like being a release lead and also maybe I am also involved with some of the mentoring programs like right now customized mentoring program is going on, which is really well handled by Natasha and one other person. I forgot the name. So yes, Natasha is very good like managing this customized mentoring cohort. So also I plan to contribute to that project. So yes, that's my plan. Awesome. Any last question before we wrap up the session? Yeah, so I know a lot of you said that you take out personal time weekends and it somewhat impacts your personal life for having to contribute to Kubernetes and open source. So like I'm curious to know what inspires you what to continue doing this. And even if it impacts your personal life and weekends. So yeah, well, honestly, it's the environment at Kubernetes. Honestly, I've been contributing to some of the other open source projects. I never felt so collaborative as much as I do at Kubernetes. So it's just the people there who are so humble always looking forward to help you the humility that you get from folks there. Everyone wanting you to develop yourself. I think that is one of the inspiration for me to be very honest. Apart from that, you have already seen students like us joining Kubernetes and going at a lead level, becoming chairs of the community, getting opportunities to be between the senior most people of the community. So where do you get all these things? Obviously only in open source. So that's one of our motivation to be between those people that work with them and find opportunities. Yeah, so I think what motivates me also a lot is that you are never really getting pushed back. So if you have an idea, like something that you may want to change or something that you're just thinking about, the community is always super nice and helpful and also supports you. And you can test things out. So if you want to, I don't know, start like a project or something, nobody will tell you, this is like a stupid idea. We don't have like the resources. This may be something that you may hear at work for like also understandable reasons, but at the community, you can test things out. You can be a little bit creative and especially as students where you don't really may know where you want to go. There are a lot of roles, a lot of fields in software. You can test yourself out and that motivates me here. Yeah, y'all can reach us out on our socials. I hope you all have the link, you can scan the QR and leave us a feedback for the session. Thank you. Thank you.