A bit of background
For those of you who don't know, I work on this really cool technology called Kubernetes. I can talk about it all day if you let me but that's not what this post is about. Kubernetes is an open source project that anyone can use and contribute to. Hit me up if you want to get started contributing and I'll show you the ropes.
KubeCon is the big conference that happens several times a year around the world that is all about Kubernetes. It is huge, it is fairly oriented toward corporate sponsorship, and it is attended by mostly men, but that's a different post. I love KubeCon because I learn a lot every time I go and because of the awesome people I meet.
To me, the best part about Kubernetes is its community. And I do love the technology aspect, I do.
Detour.
I am a bootcamp graduate. I believe that my particular bootcamp, Ada Developers Academy in Seattle, really set me up for success in a way not all bootcamps do. The program is 11 months, tuition-free with a ~10% acceptance rate, and 5 of those 11 months are spent in an industry internship. The program is for women and nonbinary folks. I was lucky that my internship place, Samsung SDS, offered me a full time position, and because I really enjoyed working on Kubernetes tooling and automation, I accepted and stayed.
I got involved with the upstream community because one day I tried to submit a pull request and had a heck of a time figuring out how to do just that. I filed an issue, was directed to some folks involved with contributors' experience, they agreed their contributor guide wasn't the greatest, and offered me the opportunity to fix it.
So I did.
And I had so much help. And I met so many wonderful people. And I learned about the testing and pull request automation code base. And now, as a result, this KubeCon, I was asked to lead an entire workshop on how to contribute, together with Josh Berkus, who has been working on this for a lot more and in different areas. Dream team!
Back to why my favorite part about Kubernetes is its community.
As a female engineer who is a bootcamp graduate, in many ways I have two strikes against me. Many of my class mates struggle with getting recognition, advancement, and mentoring. Some of this struggle is universal. Some of these things happen to me also.
But in the Kubernetes community, I feel welcome, I feel listened to, and my ideas are respected. I am making friends.
What I learned for myself from this KubeCon
So I'm at KubeCon because I helped new contributors. But I'm also there as a developer, a technical contributor myself. I want to be very clear on that, because, despite the community being very self-aware, I've already been asked to consider nontechnical career tracks. And the reason is that people see how passionate I am about growing the community and helping onboard people (which by the way totally takes tech skills). I do have several strengths that I bring with me from my previous career as a classical collaborative pianist, vocal coach, and piano teacher.
One of my jobs was to teach young children piano, which I believe is one of the hardest skills known to humankind. And their parents expected that I should somehow get them to like it. I got really good at explaining complicated things in fun ways to hyperactive small people whose brains haven't fully developed yet.
So here's the thing. Algorithms are hard. Systems design is hard. Those are things you need to study, grok, and gain experience in.
APIs and tooling? Not hard. What makes them hard is that the documentation for them is terrible. If background, definition, and use cases were logically presented for everything involved? Most people could do it.
I really believe that.
My passion for onboarding people and finding mentoring, teaching, and documentation that helps people at all levels in tech is not only because I love teaching and community.
It is that I am upset at how obtuse and unusable so much of this is. Many of the roadblocks to working in tech aren't because you don't understand a concept. They are because you have no idea how two things hook together, and no one will tell you in a reasonable way. And writing code is tricky enough - but if you don't know which API objects will give you the thing you want, you can code trees in circles around me and it will be no use. Then you will feel dumb and the myth that you have to be "talented" or "intelligent" to be able to write software persists. This has happened to me when learning new tooling so many times.
I can teach illiterate six year olds to play Bach minuets on the piano. I fully believe that we can do a better job helping educated, passionate adults use our tools.
I want to write code. And I want to take others with me.
That is what I learned this KubeCon.
Showing posts with label community. Show all posts
Showing posts with label community. Show all posts
Saturday, May 5, 2018
Sunday, December 10, 2017
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.
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.
Saturday, December 2, 2017
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!
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!
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