KubeCon Europe 2018 Copenhagen - Personal Retrospective

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.

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!