 Thanks so much for having us or, you know, being with us today. We really appreciate it. Do you want to tell us a little bit about who you are and what your background is? Yeah, sure. Well, first of all, thanks for having me. And so, yeah, I'm Catherine Paganini. I'm the head of marketing at Boyan. That's the creator of LinkerD. And yeah, so very involved in the LinkerD community, but I also do a lot of things with the CNCF, so I'm the co-chair of the TAG Contributor Strategy and the Business Value Subcommittee. Oh, gotcha. Why don't you tell us a little bit about LinkerD first, because I think, you know, there may not be a ton of people who know what it's for. Yeah, so basically, LinkerD is a service mesh. It's actually the first service mesh, and it's the, and our team actually is the team who coined that term, which is pretty crazy. And it's the only graduated service mesh, and kind of known for its simplicity, right? So that is, yeah, kind of what we're trying to do, make it easier for people to adopt a service mesh, which provides observability, reliability, and security features at a platform level, right, to make it easy, because that's really, really critical features that you need. Right, yeah. And what people don't realize a lot of the time when they're kind of architecting an application kind of in their head, is like the complexity of like kind of running all the time, right? And how hard that actually is to, you know, make true, and I think, you know, kind of the advent of the service mesh concept, you know, Kubernetes in general with orchestration, but you know, that particular subcategory really makes a big difference to how that works. So you just, was it the first LinkerD day that was yesterday? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So LinkerD day was yesterday, very first time. And I'm very proud that we managed to have like 100% end user content. And for me, it's always really, like my favorite part of the job is really working with the community, working with end users and empowering them to, or help them, you know, tell the stories. Because I feel, I don't know, like, even at like a cube comma, I think like there are far too many vendors speaking, and I know it's always difficult to kind of get, it's not as easy, right, to get end users to speak, but like I think end users can't, right? Yeah, yeah. And because end user stories are so much more powerful, right? Because it's like, I know vendors are always biased, right? Like even if you believe that you are telling the truth, which we all are, right? But we are biased, right? Because that's why we work for those companies, right? And then having end users who are actually using it in production and sharing their experience with peers, I think that's the most powerful, those are the most powerful stories. So, yeah, so we had Adidas share their story and lots of other companies, and it was like really, really great, I think, like, so really proud about that. That's cool. Was there any particular stories that really, you know, kind of caught your ear as it were? Well, I think like all, well, one of them is, I think there was like a very catchy story as well. What was the name of the talk? Like going to production with a team of one, right? And she basically got it, the whole thing, like she was responsible for the platform and at the end, it was just her, and she got Lingardee up and running, and it was new to the service mesh, and like, yeah, just hearing that it doesn't have to be complex, right? Right, right. So, it is so, like, I already adopted Kubernetes, it's complex enough, I don't want to add an additional complexity later, right? And it's true, sometimes that's the case, but it doesn't have to be, right? Like, there are simple ways of doing that, and then like hearing her story and how she kind of managed to do it with one person is kind of like, speaks for itself that it doesn't have to be complex. So, I think that was kind of like a good story that. Yeah, yeah, no, that is a cool story. I mean, it's always nice, especially like someone who's new to the thing, right? And is able to, you know, kind of understand enough that they need it, right? And then figure out how to actually implement it and then deploy it. You know, that's not a trivial exercise, you know? So, that's really cool. And so, what do you think is kind of next for Lingardee? Do you want to kind of come back at, you know, in North America and do the same kind of thing, or sorry, for Lingardee Day? Yeah, or, you know, or do you maybe do in smaller events? Yeah, we're thinking about it. I think like it was a really great experience. If we do it again as well, we would love to have like also like a very big end user focus, but yeah, so we'll have to see. We'll have to see, but like for now, I think like if the CNCF is happy with it and so like probably, but it is also like a lot of, of course, it's a CNCF event, but it's a lot of work on our end as well, especially if you want to encourage end users to speak, because you have to find them, right? It's like vendors are always having to speak about what they do, right? But identifying the end users and encouraging them and say, because they're busy is a lot of work. So, which is why like, like you are so proud when you managed to kind of line up, right? Yeah, I run a smallish conference. It's about 400 people called DevConf US and the US and it is there's a lot of work that goes into it that I don't think people realize how, you know, how much effort it really is to, you know, kind of put a show on. And, you know, my running joke is for the first two years of it, both years, I blew out a pair of shoes with the amount of walking around I did for the three days of trying to keep the fires put out, you know. So what do you hope to see at the rest of the coupon? Like what is, you know, the hope for the rest of the conference? Well, so it's it's fun because it's like after Lincredi Day, it feels like I was like, oh, actually, conference just started. So, yeah, so, I mean, I'm going to be at the Lincredi kiosk mostly. We also have like a buoyant booth. Of course, we're going to be there and hopefully get like really good conversations and tell, you know, more people about Lincredi. And but also like I'll be on two panels. So looking forward to that one for the tag contributed strategy. So yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I'm a co-chair of the tag contributed strategy. And one of the things that we always tried to do was like, well, once is like, or maybe I should just say like what the tag contributed strategy actually does. So basically, the tag contributed strategy is that tax of technical advisory group or the CNCF that tries to help projects be successful. So it's like more geared towards helping maintainers, project maintainers. And I love the mission because basically what we're trying to achieve is to create like a cross-project community. Because we always talk in open source about communities, but we mostly talk about our own communities. Right. Like, yeah. And I think we figured that out. People know it's important, right? Like, but I don't think we kind of have really done a good job yet to kind of have the cross-project community, right? Because it's like every project is has going, yeah. And it's going through the same problems, right? Like in every problem that a project is going through, someone else has already gone through, right? And a lot of projects try to reinvent the wheel each time, right? And there is no need for that, right? And our, like basically the CNCF is our common home, right? All our projects live there and it provides this platform for us to connect. And so, yeah, I think what we want to do is kind of build that cross-project community so that we talk with each other, exchange ideas, learn from one another, and then, yeah, just make it easier, yeah, like, yeah, because people have best practices identified or more mature projects have identified best practices. And let's tell your project those best practices, right? Don't let them do the same mistakes. And then there are lots of resources and things like that. And so I think like it's incredibly valuable, but not a lot of people know about it, but not a lot of maintainers. And that's the other challenge, because it's like, maintainers is like a subgroup within our community, right? And like reaching them is not that easy. And so this panel, because we always talk about the resources we create, this panel, we wanted to talk about what we get out of that, right? Because it's a lot of the, a lot of times we talk about contributing and people think about contributing as like giving and it is giving, right? But it, you get actually so much more out of it than you give. Yeah. And so we wanted to make a little twist and talk about like really like us and how it has benefited us in our careers and everything, right? To be a part of that community that you should be getting to. Yeah, yeah, because it is really, I think, like once you start, you get hooked and there is no going back. Yeah, I mean, one of the things when I kind of first joined the Thor community, you know, and got really kind of involved in it. One of the things that I found, which was really interesting was, you know, like how I could have like kind of an impact, you know, on every location that I went to. And, you know, and that there was a Thor community everywhere. And so I could kind of, you know, participate in it wherever I happen to be traveling, which is a really, you know, kind of nice feeling to have that community out there. And, you know, I think with Kubernetes, I think we're starting to see more of that, as you say, you know, kind of trying to get the overall community to also be, you know, more together rather than the individual kind of silos, which is kind of good for everyone. Yeah, yeah. But it is sometimes, yeah, sometimes it is like, I feel like people like containers are so busy that sometimes they feel it's like they don't have time, right, to do an initial, engage in an additional community. But I think what people maybe like, I don't know if they don't realize, but it's like, if I think you end up saving time too, right, like for instance, if you need, need to know about something, right, like or when I joined the tag, one thing that I need, like I just had just joined LinkedIn and I had no idea because I was new to open source, how how communities take and whatever. So it provides, it gives you the chance to actually talk to people who will be very gracious with their time. So I interviewed several maintainers who took, I think a whole hour to talk to me and share their best practices. And if I were, I couldn't just go to people and say, like, hey, I want to learn this just for LinkedIn. Can you tell us to me, right? Like, but I told them, hey, I want to learn this new to open source. And I want to contribute, like I want to summarize the best practices, you know, like in a doc that we can share with all the projects. And then suddenly people really gracious, like they're really kind of taking the time to do that. So, like, you don't have access to those types of resources. If you're doing it just for yourself. So yeah, not enough, right, to get that critical mass to, you know, because, you know, everyone's busy. And if you, but if you're going around to, you know, whatever 50 people versus 1000 people, you get, you know, some more time. Yeah, that's a big deal. The, yeah, I think that's, we've also interviewed like Chris Short on the show before, you know, who's always been a big kind of contributor, you know, participant in trying to get the same kinds of things. So yeah, I think it's, I think in some ways it's a magic open source. But the other thing I was going to say was that one of the things that it takes a while to learn, I think, is as a manager, right, is how to delegate, right? And how, you know, and how to teach somebody to do something new, even though it's going to take them longer to do it the first time. I think there's a lot of that with kind of the contributor world as well is that, you know, the temptation is just do it yourself, right, rather than kind of opening it up for others, because it feels easier. But I think you don't realize, right, is that as you grow the community, your, you know, your whatever force multiplier goes way up, you know? Yeah. Well, it's always an invent, you have to invest a little bit, right, and then for it to kind of save you time. So it's like it's counterintuitive, because first you think, and it's not counterintuitive, but I think like it's just, it's hard to get over the hurdle. Yeah, you're so busy thinking about the now that sometimes it's like, yeah, you don't want to, yeah, you just focused on like what you need to do next, but like it is really an investment in the future, because it gets easier, right? Yeah, I think I want to turn left here, but I guess we'll go another, another block and turn left there. Cool, so what's the other panel you're doing? The other one is about, it's more around the work that I do for the Business Value Subcommittee. And so, again, let's maybe just start with what the Business Value Subcommittee is. So, yeah, I'm non-technical, right? And so when I, so 2017, I had a Kubernetes company and had to kind of wrap my head all around it, which was really, really difficult, because like all the content out there is written for a technical audience and it starts with contacts that I had, that you don't have if you're not technical. So it's really hard, right? Like, so I really struggled. I had actually just, that he really actually bought a introduction to computer science book and like, because I had to build kind of like that, that the baseline to actually even understand what people are talking about. And then suddenly, like a few years later, like people from my network, not people who don't necessarily work in cloud native started to ask me, so, hey, my company is doing Kubernetes now, can you explain that to me? And I was like, oh, you know, like, there are a lot of people who are non-technical, who need to know about this and who are basically the same, what is I, what is right? Like, and not everyone has a time or a dedication to kind of go through and like really kind of learn it, right? And so I, in between, like I started writing articles that I kind of, for the news stack, like really basic fundamentals, fundamental articles and got really, really good feedback which kind of showed that there is a need for that, right? And then at some point I said like, okay, actually a CNCF, I mean it's great, I'm really grateful for the new stack for publishing it and it was a really great experience, but at some point I was like, shouldn't a CNCF on this kind of content? You know, like it's like they have, they have content for technical people, but like it's really important, it's an important part of their mission to kind of help the business side as well, right? Because they need to approve all these projects, right? So if you had, let's, C-Suite needs to understand the basic concepts, they don't need to code and stuff, but they need to understand what cloud native is, how it works and why they should adopt it, right? Because otherwise how can they even have these conversations with engineering, right? And so we formed the Business Value Subcommittee, which basically focuses on trying to explain these concepts in terms that, that, yeah, a business audience understands, but also making it easy for engineers, right? Like if engineer is new to cloud native, like having content that is really easily accessible and simple language makes it easier to understand, right? Then something that's full of technical terms and, yeah, like even like simple is always easier and friendlier when you're getting started. Well, I think one of the things that people, especially non-technical people, don't realize about cloud native is that it's kind of fundamentally at odds with a lot of the way you're taught programming. So when you take a computer science degree or whatever, I kind of refer to it as like everything's very like serial, you know, everything kind of goes in a straight line. And when you are doing something that is cloud native or event driven or something like that, you know, you kind of have all these things like popping off all over the place and writing your applications such that you can respond to that kind of scenario is kind of weird. And it's a mindset shift for even for technical people. And I think that, you know, like you're kind of mostly focused on the non-technical people, but I think there is definitely a lot to be learned for your average technical person to try to wrap their hand around. How do you design systems that run in this kind of unusual, you know, model? Although it's getting increasingly unusual or increasingly usual. You know, because you have to be able to operate your systems this way. Otherwise, it just, you know, you can't run a modern application anymore, you know. So it's really interesting. And is that, so would you say that's related to the glossary that you work on? Well, yeah, so basically, like so we formed the business value subcommittee and then we realized, okay, if we're talking about these things, the first thing we need to do is explain the terms. Right? Like you cannot just start, like, so we need to first come to an agreement. What are, how do we talk about these terms? And so the glossary was basically, so it's a cloud-related glossary, it's open source, anyone can contribute and help improve it. So that's the idea, right, to have like it's community driven. So one thing that's important is that is community driven, it's vendor-neutral, right, and it's a living document. And so the glossary, I think, was launched a year now ago. And as I mentioned, tries to explain these concepts in simple words. We try to stay away from technical terms whenever possible using examples people can relate to when we're talking about applications. Let's talk about end-user applications like your Gmail account or things that people use to make it more friendly for people who are not technical. Yeah, I think that's the big challenge both in the definitions and the words themselves, right, is our industry, I say this kind of thing a lot, but our industry is so young, right? I kind of jokingly, it's like medicine's been around for thousands of years, so we have a pretty good idea of what all the words mean. And with the software world, we're kind of inventing new stuff all the time and approaches and models and styles and everything. And so as a result, we are not very good about solidifying around terminology. And so I think it's even more useful, I think, than people even realize, not just from an educational perspective, but also it's hugely useful to be able to pin down what a term means so that we can at least collectively agree that there was a pigeon that flew by because I would throw back to the geese, but the collectively agree on what the terms mean, which I think is hugely important and really difficult. I talk about it with my students. It's like, you know, if you walk into an organization and they say PM, that could be program manager, project manager, or product manager, and it could be any of those. And none of those jobs are the same, but they will all have used the acronym meaning one of them exclusively. And it'll be a different one at different places. So one of the things I, like I said, that I find super difficult in our industry is terminology and kind of pinning it down so that you and I, when we say PM, both mean the same thing. And I think it's even crazier, right? When you talk about, like I said before, like event-driven architectures which are even newer than traditional end-tier models and stuff. So yeah, super cool. Well, something that's like, just because it's like something that is also very cool is that we have several localization teams localizing it. And so I don't even remember how many languages are live right now. That's a good sign. That's a good sign. Well, it's not that many, but it's like, I don't know, have the exact numbers, but like, definitely German, Spanish, Korean, Mandarin, or probably forgetting something. But it's like an ordu just became live yesterday. So you have to have like at least 10 terms to go live. And that's another Italian as well as live. So, because that's another thing, like our, like in our world, everything is written in English, like most of it. And like we were just talking about how complex cloud native is, right? And so if you're trying to learn it, and then it's in a foreign language on top of that, makes it even more difficult, right? And then like really kind of having content in different languages makes it much more accessible because some people like it just depends on which some countries are really like, like people or engineers, most engineers do speak very well English. Others not, right? It's not really, it's not in some countries, it's not common, you know, to have like good, like be proficient in English, right? And you cannot, you know, like, and then you're basically excluding all these people because you're not giving them tools, they need to kind of learn these concepts, right? So I think like the localization efforts are really important too. Yeah. And especially those kind languages, when I get like these languages like order, I was like, this is so cool. Yeah, right, right. When they, yeah, I mean that's, personally, one of the things I like the most in the kind of open source world is when you get something completely unexpected, like unlooked for, as a contribution to whatever you're working on. You know, it's like I built a, you know, a plug-in for Vagrant many years ago. And you know, and people started using it, right? And I was so excited because I just kind of built it, you know, to solve a problem I was having. And you know, but then people started using it. And then I didn't really need it anymore. And so we had some people take it over because they used it and they continued to use it. And I was just, I was so excited, you know, completely unexpected. You know, I think that's one of the really cool things about open source. And, and you know, really, I mean, technically it's communities in general. But in, you know, in being a tech guy, right? Like the community I see the most is, is tech communities. So yeah, it's really interesting. Well, why don't we kind of end the interview there? And you know, thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate it. And we will continue our merry way to go over lots and lots of speed bumps. But I hope it wasn't too exciting. Yeah, well, thanks so much for having it. This was a lot of fun to talk about all the little things that we're doing out there. Right, right.