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.