KubeCon 2017 - giving talks as a newbie

So one of the reasons I was attending KubeCon was that I was a speaker. I find it very telling of a community when they let someone share her experiences who at this point a year ago did not even know what Kubernetes was. Of course, Kubernetes is a new technology, and there were in fact very many people at KubeCon who did not know about Kubernetes a year ago.

I have given a few meetup presentations, and I'm no stranger to the stage, because of this music career thing I had going for a while. But talking in front of an audience would have been incredibly difficult if not for my awesome coworkers, who helped me shape and crystallize my talk.

Additionally, I was lucky in that I got to give a short demo at Eduardo Silva's fluentd salon, together with my coworker, Yeni, the day before my big talk on "how to be a beginner at Kubernetes".

Yeni was totally awseome. She live coded like a pro and didn't lose her cool even a little bit. People asked some challenging questions and she fielded them so well.

So the next day I gave my presentation and my coworkers and SIG-contributor-experience leads all showed up. Fellow Adie Tehut Getahun showed up as well, and asked literally the hardest question that came up in my talk (yay!). Someone should hire her; she is brilliant. Everyone made it easy to present. Another thing that was beautiful was that so many people were actively listening. I felt honored. The talk was part of the "Kubernetes 101" track, and even though the picture doesn't show it, there were about a hundred people in there.

I sent my mom the above picture of my talk. She's a retired Latin teacher. Her first comment was, "Look at all those men listening to what you have to say!" My mom is funny. I loved that she instantly realized the elephant in the room, and I also hope that in a few years' time, this picture will look different.

I really hope that my talk was helpful. It would make me so happy if people took even just one thing away that helped them out. Also, folks, the cool thing about blogs is you can comment. If you want to ask any questions, or share tools and experiences, or correct me on facts because I was Wrong On The Internet, this is a blog and I welcome comments!

KubeCon2017 - first reactions

It's the weekend after KubeCon 2017, and I'm still buzzing from the excitement.

Here are some highlights of my experience.

I won't lie. One of my very first impressions was, There sure are a lot of men around here.  I don't have official statistics, but there seemed to be at most one woman in twenty. From my office at Samsung, there were three women, all recent hires, all graduates of Ada Developers Academy, two of us there on a diversity scholarship, two of us there due to being speakers. I don't think I have ever been at an event that was so skewed towards men, including sports events and video game conferences. It felt bizarre. It did not feel hostile, at all, but it was this very obvious thing I could not escape. I mean, my office has about 20% women, so it's not great, but it's different when you're in a small, friendly office and you know all those men as individuals.

That leads into my next experience. All these people are individuals. They deeply care about their community. They put effort into being welcoming, open, flexible. Several of my own coworkers are deeply connected to the community, and made sure to help me take part in this community. I had started work on the Kubernetes Contributor Guide before showing up at KubeCon. What this meant was that leaders from SIG-contributor-experience already knew my face, and were happy to see me and show me around.

(Side note: I'm spewing a lot of jargon, which tends to be off-putting. Kubernetes is an open-source community, which means that the code base for the project is public and free to use. It also means that many different people and companies work on it at the same time as collaborators not competitors. It means that if you see something that's broken, it's on you to fix it if you can. It means that the community needs to be open and welcoming to feedback and contributions from many different people, and many different kinds of people. In order to organize such a huge project, there are SIGs - Special Interest Groups, which have community leaders and sometimes their own GitHub projects. They meet regularly on video chat.)

On Tuesday evening, there was an event for all the women attendees called EmpowHer. I was not aware this was an event, but my coworker did, and I was thankfully allowed to crash the party with my speaker badge as proof. At this party I began to feel less lost and got to meet and chat with many of the women in the community, which turned out to be very helpful when navigating the crowds the next day. I loved how supportive and helpful everyone was being. I personally have some reservations about women-only events (my participation at Ada notwithstanding, but after seeing the nearly-all-male crowds in the afternoon, I felt this was not only 1000% justified, but sorely needed.

On the next day I got to trail Jorge Castro and Paris Pittman like a happy little puppy all day. Jorge saw me right after SIG-testing showcase (which Paris had dragged me to), and gave me a big smile and a hug. Paris left her phone in a million places, and we tracked it down with her, joking and poking friendly fun at her. I got to meet all the cool folks. I met Sarah Novotny, who runs the weekly community meeting (among many other things) and was introduced as "the person who is re-doing the contributor guide" (no pressure, there! If I was ever going to fade on this, now I can't) and she gave me a fabric Kubernetes patch! This is a thing, as Jorge told me, that only contributors get. I am so honored! I will have the coolest backpack in all of Seattle.

Paris did mention I needed to contribute some actual code to the upstream repo, and introduced me to some people who could point me the right way. I so, so appreciate this advice. It is very easy to get hung up on documentation and meetings and procedure, and it is good to remember I am very new to this and should take any opportunity to become more technical.

I met so many great people - Kris Nova in passing who is one hell of a human being, Tim Pepper who is patiend and kind and thoughtful, and had some awesome and challenging ideas for my talk the next day. I finally got to meet Eduardo Silva, who is a fluent-bit-logging genius and so very helpful and nice. I met his bosses too - and they were just as nice and outgoing, which made me so happy to see. I met Josh Berkus, who is organising the SCALE conference in Pasadena in March. My coworker, Yeni Capote Diaz, was outstanding in her lightning talk on community, and we were successful in our presentation at the fluentd salon. I was even asked how my golang rainbow code worked. I kinda hope no one will go look it up - it's very hacky and not meant for serious use!

This is already a very long post, so I'll put this out now and hopefully will be able to pull together something more coherent soon.

I'll close with the thought that while I certainly learned a lot at KubeCon, I think even more than anything, I gained confidence in the things that I do know already.

KubeCon2017 - getting ready

Another thing I did last summer was submit a proposal to speak at KubeCon. As a bootcamp graduate, I feel there can be a fair bit of "invisible prerequisite" to learning any new technology (this feels especially true for entry-level CS classes butthat's a whole different post), and so I decided to plan a presentation on how to be a beginner at Kubernetes.

My proposal got accepted, and so next week, I will be heading to Austin to meet people, learn, share, and hang out. This will not be my first presentation, but it will absolutely be my first time ever attending a professional conference, at all. I am beyond excited.

KubeCon is hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, an organization I am still learning lots about. But they also provided me with a diversity scholarship to attend the conference, so I am very grateful.

KubeCon has a diversity training course for speakers, and it will host a diversity luncheon. Personally, I am excited these efforts are being made, but I am also saddened that they are seemingly so necessary. For what it is worth, I have so far been treated with nothing but respect from everyone I have worked with, and I have taken lead in an upstream effort to improve new Kubernetes contributors' experiences, which so far has been met with enthusiasm. I mean, who better to tell new people about the steps to take than that newbie who just tripped all over everything? ;)

Oh yeah: The open-source nature of Kubernetes makes for a vibrant community of people who collaborate across companies and projects. I look forward to meeting people in person that so far I have only met on a screen: Jorge Castro, Paris Pittman, Josh Berkus, and many others, all of whom have been welcoming and asked me to talk and share experiences and plans in open forums and meetings.

As stated above, my talk will focus on how to get started with Kubernetes. I will be sharing my personal experience and specific tools that I believe are a great place to start. I look forward to KubeCon!

About me and why I am writing this blog

Hi, my long-form name is Guinevere, but you can also call me Guin if you like. Welcome and pleased to meet you.

So... last summer I got a new job.

Not only was it a new job - it was a new kind of job. After years of being a musician for my main source of income, I dropped everything (except some gigs that were worth it for the fun!), attended Ada Developers Academy for a year, and learned how to code. I may in the future write more about the details of how or why I chose to do this, but I am terrible at keeping these kinds of promises, so, not promising anything. In fact, I am generally kind of terrible at blogging and keeping up with posts, so I hope that won't happen.

So last summer, I got hired as a software engineer. I am learning that this means a lot of things. I am in a place where I work with a fairly new open source technology called Kubernetes. I have developer friends who have been in the industry for ten years whom I've taught about what Kubernetes is, to give you an idea.

The beautiful part about being new to programming and also working in Kubernetes is that almost everyone else is also new to Kubernetes. I have repeatedly been in a position to explain things to more recent hires at my company, people who have been software engineers for years.

So that is exciting.

In this blog, I plan to post technical and professional things I learned. I am obviously still learning. I hope to post little technical TIL's and, time permitting, work my way up to full-blown tutorials. I also expect to be wrong sometimes, and I expect any readers of this blog to tell me so. POLITELY. Please share your knowledge, and you may help not just me, but others as well.