 So, welcome to the Everyone Can Contribute Track at our 2020 GitLab Commit Event. My name is Beth Vander Kolk and I'm the Senior Manager of the Community Advocacy Program at GitLab, a part of the Greater Community Relations Team. I'm proud to introduce one of our GitLab heroes, Mario Garcia. Mario's story is at the heart of Everyone Can Contribute. His journey has been unexpected and inspiring. Even though he was involved in other open source communities and had plenty of experience speaking at conferences, he championed Imposter Syndrome and gave his first tech talk in English at last year's Commit. Mario's journey continues this year and we're excited to hear about his experience, his insight and what's next for him. I'm happy to be here and join GitLab Commit again to share the story of my expected journey to become a GitLab hero. I'm Mario Garcia. I'm a Silla Redson GitLab hero from Mexico. If you want to stay in contact after this talk, you can find me on Twitter, on GitLab, or you can go to my website to find more contact details. What I'm going to talk about during this talk is when I started using GitLab, why I joined the GitLab Heroes Program, the work that I've been doing here in Latin America, and what are the future plans? Well, if I have to say when I started using GitLab, that was two years ago, but I created my account in 2016. I was attending a civic innovation lab in Rosario, Argentina in October of 2018. This was a hackathon-like event and I was there to join a multidisciplinary team for working on one of the nine projects that were built during two weeks and that were looking for a solution of a social problem through technology. I joined my Calo Corso team for working on a platform that supported and promoted third grade within local producers. There were four developers in the team, so we decided to use GitLab for the developer process and we based this platform on a fork of open cards, which is an e-commerce platform developed with PHP. If you want to share the project, you can go to the repository at gitlab.com. Before that, I didn't have any experience with GitLab and I was looking for a CICD tool that supported Rust and Python that were the languages that I was using for some projects that I was working on. I also needed that it supported Heroku and later I also had to learn about Docker. So I chose Krabi CI for GitHub. This was before GitHub Actions, before the GitHub Actions was released to the public or before the beta was ready for access. I also tried GitLab CI and after reading, searching on Google, testing, as I always do, when I'm learning my new technology, I take some notes and publish a few articles about it on-depth. These articles were in English, so I wrote about Krabi CI. How to use it with Rust projects. I also wrote about GitLab CI and how to develop a web app developed with Rust for Heroku using GitLab CI. This was in April last year and later that year I joined the GitLab Heroes program. I also have to mention about GitLab Commit because both events happened at the same time. I sent a proposal for GitLab Commit and later that month I also applied to join the GitLab Heroes program and one month later I was accepted to speak at GitLab Commit and joined the GitLab Heroes program. I was in Unity to present my first talk in English. I wrote many proposals. I don't remember how many of them, but those events said no. So I was on Twitter one day and I saw a tweet about GitLab Commit and I thought this could be the last opportunity I had. So I worked on a proposal and sent it on the last day that CSP was open. Later that month I found out about the GitLab Heroes program and I went to the page. Something that caught my attention was the idea that everyone can contribute, that it related with the work that I already had been doing with Open Source Project and the idea that if you are an active community member, you can get recognized as a GitLab Hero if you organize meetups or any event, if you write technical blog posts or contribute to the Open Source Project of GitLab. I was already writing about GitLab and I thought it was an opportunity for learning about DevOps and GitLab and the tools that it provides, an opportunity for meeting other community members and learn from them and share the things that I could learn with the community here in Latin America. It's been a whole year. I joined the GitLab Heroes program last August and one of the events or the first events that I attended as a GitLab Hero was the GitLab Commit. I remember that I spent a few hours to work on the proposal and one day I was coming home and received an email that said, GitLab Commit, London, the proposal accepted. I couldn't believe that it actually was happening and that this could be an opportunity for presenting my first talk in English. I had to get ready for GitLab Commit and started working on my presentation, practicing for the band, preparing everything for traveling and it was amazing to see my profile picture on the page with the other speakers and see the speaker card on social media. After a few weeks, I was ready for the band and the adventure started. I traveled from my city to Mexico City, then Bogota, Colombia and after 20 hours traveling, I finally arrived in London two days before the band. So I had some time to walk around the city, took some photos, visited the London night and I also got lost when I was going back to the hotel. But in general, they were amazing days in London and I really enjoyed the time at GitLab Commit. I learned a lot from the other speakers and made new friends and it wasn't amazing to present my first talk in English there in a city that I really wanted to visit since I started traveling for speaking at conferences. This was my first talk in English. I had previous experience attending other events in Latin America and it was also amazing that I received many positive comments and I also had the opportunity to visit Mozilla London. This was the second Mozilla space that I had the opportunity to visit. The first one was Mozilla Toronto in 2013 and besides speaking at GitLab Commit, I've also learned a lot about some technologies like Git. I learned some new comments that I wasn't using, the idea that you can create a new repository directly from the Linux terminal instead of going to the GitLab.com page and later go into your local depth environment. I've also learned a lot about GitLab CI, different cases scenarios and how to use it with Broth and Python, how to use GitLab CI for publishing static websites like my website that is hosted on GitLab pages. I started to get familiar with Docker and basic commands and how to build a custom Docker image and container as an app. I learned a lot about Heroku. I always was using Heroku but I learned how to publish an app with Heroku in different cases scenarios. You're probably thinking that I've been doing all of these activities on my own but the truth is that I have a lot of support from GitLab and especially from some GitLab team members like Emily Sheen who supported me last year and this year for preparing for my presentation by reviewing the content of my presentation, giving feedback and suggestions on how to improve it. I also have support from John Cogwan who managed the GitLab Heroes program and from Dwight Pyke who with John managed everyone can contribute drag for the GitLab committee this year. So you have to be an expert but willing to learn if you want to join the program you will have the support of the GitLab team members and other community members that can help with code or anything related to stocks. If you want to organize a meetup or if you want to speak at conferences or host a workshop you can have the support of the community. And talking about communities, I've been collaborating with some communities here in Latin America and if you attended my talk last year or watched the recording you probably remember that one of my friends had a statement that I recently changed that says if you create a documentation don't forget about your native language especially if you live in a non-English speaking country. I truly believe in this statement. I started learning English 17 years ago and from Mexico so my native language is Spanish and most of the content available related to software development and technology related topics are in English but not so many people have the opportunity to learn this language. I know that there are efforts for localizing tools and documentation like the work that the community is doing here in Mexico for localizing Firefox from English to Spanish or the work that the Python community is doing for localizing the documentation of Python from English to Spanish. So we as content creators or speakers need to focus on creating more content on our native languages so that is the way that we can support other people that don't have the same opportunity to learn the language or getting access to all of these content. Some of the communities that I've been collaborating with are Collegio Facilito which is an education platform where you can get access to courses about software development in Spanish for free or through a premium package. Ross MX, the most active community of Ross here in Latin America. Some of the Mozilla communities here in the region like Mozilla Peru or Mozilla Chile. I've also attended some events organized by the Latin American free software in software community which is the largest event here in Latin America for promoting free software. And last year I collaborated with the Major League Hacking for hosting Learn Git with GitLab and Git Dragon, a workshop that I hosted last year in December. I've also attended some events organized by some local universities like the Polytechnic but true last year in my city or the University of the South in the capital city of the state where I live. I've been writing things that I've been doing for so many years as a way to improve my grammar and vocabulary. I've been writing on that and Punto Tech both in Spanish and English about GitLab open source and software development in general. I've also been using GitLab for hosting a few projects. One of them is a working progress for localizing the official Ross book from English to Spanish. I am planning to finish this project by the end of the year but if I have to say what I really would like to do in the future or what projects I would like to work on these are some of them. I want to become a DevOps expert. I know there's a long and found way to go but it's something that I really want to do. And one year ago I was invited to write a book about Ross but the outline I sent wasn't accepted. So I really would like to write a book about GitLab in Spanish for documenting the things that I've been learning and the things that I could learn in the future. I want to focus on creating more content involved English and Spanish especially blog posts and videos and after hearing this talk you want to join the GitLab heroes program. I will be more than happy to support and help you as I want to become a mentor for new GitLab heroes here in Latin America and my story with the program it's been like this. I don't have anything else to add so I would like to say thank you for joining me.