Building welcoming Kubernetes communities and the many paths to contribution

Bart: Kaslin Fields, welcome to KubeFM. For people who don't know you, who are you? What's your role? And where do you work?

Kaslin: Hello, everyone. I'm Kaslin Fields. I am a developer relations engineer and developer advocate at Google Cloud, where I am now a manager. I run the team for cloud runtimes developer relations at Google Cloud, which means Google Kubernetes Engine and Cloud Run, our serverless offering. I'm also a co-chair of the special interest group for contributor experience in open source Kubernetes and run the communications sub-project there. I've been involved with the community for many years and am super excited to be on your show, Bart.

Bart: I'm excited to have you with us. So going back, how did you first get involved in Kubernetes?

Kaslin: I also run the Kubernetes Podcast from Google, which I co-host with Abdul. But that's not how I initially got started.

I graduated from college in December 2013 and started working for a storage company called NetApp. There, I had wonderful mentors. One in particular, Jonathan Rippey (who is still around doing awesome stuff in the industry), was super excited about containers. He started to teach me about containers because I was new to the industry and wanted to learn about the exciting new technology.

I moved on to a team doing experimental prototyping with containers and started getting involved in the local meetup community to meet more people learning about containers. As Kubernetes began to gain traction and won the container orchestrator wars, I started attending Kubernetes meetups. More and more people were using Kubernetes to run containers, so I wanted to get involved.

I had never done anything open source before. After a few failed attempts trying different Special Interest Groups (SIGs), I eventually found my way into SIG ContribX. Now, I'm doing Kubernetes all the time.

Bart: And doing Kubernetes all the time, it's a very fast-paced ecosystem. You run a podcast, so that's obviously one way to stay informed. But what are the resources you go to? What are the things you follow? Who are the people you're tracking to make sure you're up to date?

Kaslin: It is so hard to stay up to date. One tip for anyone who wants to stay informed and stay on the cutting edge: creating your own content is pretty much the only way I've found to really stay on top of things because I've got to be learning in order to create new content for other folks to learn.

Some tools I use to stay up to date: being involved in the open source community is incredible for this because you meet so many people who are working on the cutting edge of the project and in different industries and companies, all working with the same technology. You get a lot of different perspectives from folks who are really amazing.

Just being involved in open source, you get a lot of that. Then on social media, I like to follow a bunch of folks. The classics are like Julia Evans, who's not a container person at all, but more Linux-focused. She's always a good person to follow.

CNCF stuff is always great to follow because it's more than just Kubernetes. There are so many more open source projects related to Kubernetes. Keeping an eye on what's going on with the entire ecosystem—like which areas have a lot of new projects, what types of problems people are trying to solve, and which projects are growing—is a really fantastic way to stay involved. Reading the reports that come out of the CNCF and keeping an eye on it are some of my favorite ways.

Bart: And you mentioned how you got started originally at NetApp and being close to someone who mentored you and got you on this path towards containers. Who else in the community has helped you level up?

Kaslin: Because there have been so many mentors. Rip started things off when I was at NetApp, teaching me about containers. But in the Kubernetes community, I've had such amazing mentors like Bob Killen and Paris Pittman. In SIG ContribX especially, Paris started the communications subproject that I now lead. After my failed attempt to get into SIG testing, which wasn't quite what I was hoping for, I was trying to figure out where I should go within the community next. Paris showed up and asked, "Have you considered communications? I'm starting up this new thing."

Paris was really influential. Bob helped me learn how to be a SIG chair. I felt like in every meeting with Bob, I would come up with an idea—identifying a problem in the community and proposing a solution. Bob would have all the background on what had been tried in that space before, which would always blow my mind. Now I get to be that person for other people.

Chris Short, my co-lead for the communications subproject, has been an incredible mentor for my career and my work in the open source Kubernetes ecosystem. He's been with the Kubernetes open source project for a really long time, much longer than I have, and has such diverse life experience in his career roles. He's been really influential in helping me figure out how to lead a group in open source.

Bart: I wouldn't be sitting here today had I not met Chris, as well as yourself and other folks in early 2021 getting involved in the Contributor Experience Upstream Marketing Group. Shout out to Matt Broberg and a whole list of other people that made all that possible. There's a technical part of Kubernetes and also a very strong community aspect—the people we get to meet along the way. Kubernetes can mean a lot of different things to different people depending on who you are. So, what is Kubernetes for you, Kaslin?

Kaslin: Kubernetes is a container orchestrator. I've built my career on explaining the basics of what Kubernetes does and why it has value in our industry.

From a technical perspective, Kubernetes does something really valuable for the technology industry. Containers are a way to package applications so that they run the same way in different environments and very efficiently. Kubernetes is a tool that allows you to run those containers across many machines. Businesses have multiple computers and need to run various applications across those machines, and figuring out which computer to run which application on can be challenging. Kubernetes can help with that.

But Kubernetes is more than just a technical tool—it's open source, which means it's about people. It's a huge community working together to build an incredible tool with amazing industry value. It's fascinating to see people from all walks of life involved in the community: students learning about technology, professionals who use or build Kubernetes daily, and even retirees who want to stay connected to the tech industry while being part of a fun, collaborative group.

Bart: And you mentioned the aspect of different walks of life, different skill sets. Going back to your shout out to Paris about giving outlets for contributor experience that focus on communication, you've become a visible community builder and educator in Kubernetes. But what first drew you to that particular path? I know you mentioned some of the trial and error around the SIGs, but what was so attractive about this specific area?

Kaslin: I started out with containers and quickly moved to a team doing prototyping, figuring out what containers could be used for in our business while I was still at NetApp. I started to get involved with the community and leaned more into public speaking, which came naturally to me from my school days.

I saw communities trying to learn about this technology and wanted to help. I looked for ways to run meetups and contribute to events, recognizing how challenging running events can be. I started investigating the common questions people were asking and how to help more folks learn about the technology without falling off the learning path.

In the technology industry, there are so many new things to learn. What sticks is the technology that resonates with you, where you can make progress one step at a time. I wanted to help people find those steps to level themselves up and stay motivated. That's how I dove more into contributor experience and the community aspects of this technology.

Bart: With that in mind, keeping the balance between practitioner experiences, now with your role as a manager and the things you're looking at, both in Google Cloud and on the serverless side, we have a very strong technical element and community education. How do you balance those two?

Kaslin: It's a real challenge. Part of it is driven by what my organization and the business need. At Google, we have a system of OKRs with measurable team goals. Wherever possible, I try to find a balance between delivering metrics and using opportunities within the community to dive into the technical side of things.

When a product is developing a new feature, it's usually a great opportunity to explore and try out that feature so I can tell people about it. Staying on the cutting edge means continuously learning and trying new things. Right now, our team has a goal for upskilling because this is the era of AI, and we all need to understand how it's disrupting everything.

I'm thankful that my team has strong upskilling goals, which I use to get more hands-on experience. I recently published an AI chatbot application fully run on GKE, where I built the CI/CD pipeline, used Terraform, and created a Kubernetes cluster with the application—a process that takes significant effort and thought. I used this upskilling opportunity in AI to try out these technologies and help others level up.

Bart: With that in mind, in terms of leveling up, a big thing we have to think about is these open source technologies. The goal is for people to adopt them. For adoption to happen, there needs to be smooth onboarding, understanding that this is answering questions or responding to problems that may have arisen in your organization. What impact do you think SIGs like contributor experience and community storytelling have on adoption?

Kaslin: So many different aspects of adoption. The number one aspect of adoption that the contributor experience group focuses on is open source contribution. How do you get in as a contributor in open source and not fall off? Because that by itself is really difficult.

There's this quote from the book "Working in Public" by Nadia Eghbal, where she says that people don't contribute not because of a lack of technical skill, but because they're afraid of committing a social faux pas.

I think the most important thing with onboarding, especially for a community, is about making the community welcoming and making it clear that you're not going to make a mistake that's going to ruin your life forever. Instead, you're going to learn, and we're going to have fun with this together.

I think that carries over to the technology side as well. If you're trying to learn a new technology, you don't want to make a mistake that's so bad that you can't recover from it. It's all about making sure that the failure paths are recoverable and that you have the tools you need to debug things when they go wrong, to build the confidence that you'll be able to do what you need to do with that technology or community.

Bart: I really like that. Going back to 2021, my experience of joining the Contributor Experience Upstream Marketing Group is that in every single meeting when new people arrive, there's a round of welcoming them. They're told that if they just want to attend a meeting to listen, there's no need to feel they have to rush into participation because that can burn folks out or increase imposter syndrome.

I really appreciate that, as much as there is a technical part, there's also the social aspect that was quoted from the book "Working in Public". There are a lot of people out there with different skill sets. In my case, coming to Contributor Experience, I wondered: "I haven't contributed code to Kubernetes. I haven't really gotten involved in a technical way. Is there something, is there a value I can provide?" And the answer is very much yes. That's why I'm having this conversation with you today.

What advice do you give to folks out there who want to engage but maybe don't want to write code or simply don't know how to do it at the level they think is necessary?

Kaslin: Bart, your work today is still an inspiration for the folks in the communications sub-project. We have one person following in your footsteps, reviving the video work you did years ago. There are many ways to contribute.

When mentioning new folks joining the call and how we welcome them to the community, it's easy when they want to listen and understand what's going on. The challenging part is when they're excited to get hands-on with something. I need to find a project for them, or they'll lose interest.

We try to create various projects that are easy for people to start with. Last year, we started a new contributor orientation because many folks join community meetings across different teams wanting to grow their skills and do something meaningful. However, it's difficult to understand how large the Kubernetes community is and how it works.

We run these new contributor orientation meetings to help orient folks: explaining what the community is and how they can find their place in it. It's hard to get this information by just joining a random SIG meeting, where people are usually focused on their specific work.

The orientation is designed to be easy to get started with. Attend a few meetings, understand the information, and if you want to give a presentation, just let us know. We need people to help others get involved. You don't need to be deeply embedded in the community—anyone can join, and experienced members can help answer questions.

We also have social media—I'm the social media lead. During KubeCon, we have a spreadsheet with the schedule and things the community should know about. We ask people to write short social media posts, which helps them learn about the event.

Our blogging project is currently on hold because we desperately need blog reviewers. If you want to help, please join the community. Typically, we'd have new contributors interview special interest group leads to learn about their work.

For those interested in code contributions, be cautious about the "good first issue" approach. It's not just about writing code—you'll need to understand GitHub, source control, and work within an existing community and codebase.

There are numerous opportunities to contribute, both in code and non-code ways. The key is finding where your skills and interests align with the community's needs.

Bart: I think it's a good point that it's sometimes difficult to balance someone's desire and excitement about getting involved. The key is to channel that energy in a way that's sustainable, avoiding friction or burnout, and helping people start slowly so they can have a more successful experience as contributors. This is a noble project that requires deep breaths and patience. I hope folks appreciate that this doesn't just happen automatically—it's being built and continuously maintained by many people in their free time. Obviously, we imagine a future with lots of new blog reviewers. Looking ahead, how do you think roles like educator and advocate will evolve in the Kubernetes world?

Kaslin: Sometimes it's difficult to talk about AI all the time, but I think it plays a really important role in how we think about education and advocacy in the technology world going forward. AI LLMs started out as chatbots—a way to engage with machine-trained information in natural language. I think that's a really important tool for education, especially in the technology space.

There's a tool that some Google engineers came up with, which is open source, called kubectl AI. It's a command-line tool that knows kubectl really well. When I'm working with kubectl and trying to get the Certified Kubernetes Administrator certification, I often forget kubectl commands. It's really nice to have this kubectl AI tool where I can ask, "I know there's a command in kubectl to do this thing. How should I do that?" And it can explain it and run it right there in the console.

I think that's a powerful learning tool—finding a way to do something and figuring it out on the spot, trying things out and iterating. One of the best ways to learn is pair programming, working with someone else who either knows the space or, even better, who doesn't. You bounce ideas off each other about what to try next to accomplish your goal with the technology, and where you need to look to learn.

AI makes that form of iteration more accessible. Kubernetes is so big now. We always say in events, especially during last year's 10-year anniversary, that no one can understand the whole of Kubernetes given how large it is now. The focus going forward has to be keeping it both extensible and flexible for future changes, while not overwhelming it with functionality and technical debt that people can't understand.

The future of Kubernetes is about keeping it focused on the things it does really well—solving real problems in the tech industry—without adding so much detail that it becomes unusable. Advocacy will be about maintaining a simplistic view. When speaking to an audience of 100 people, each person has a problem they want to solve. Maybe Kubernetes is the answer, maybe it's not. But if they can't see a solution in the complexity of what it can do, they won't move forward with it.

Bart: And with that in mind, what's next for Kubernetes, what's next for you, Kaslin? What can we expect? What are you excited about?

Kaslin: KubeCon North America is coming up in Atlanta in November. I expect to be at that. In the communications team for open source, if you want to join us, we're still running meetings every Friday at 8 a.m. Pacific time. I'm trying to help folks get familiar with the social media side of the project. If you want to learn about social media in the Kubernetes project and how to keep contributors informed about the awesome stuff happening in the contributor community, please join us in open source Kubernetes.

On the Google side, we've got Google Cloud Next coming up next year in April. I haven't checked the date recently, but it'll be a big conference for my team where we prepare a lot of content about the technologies we're working on. If you happen to come to Google Cloud Next, KubeCon North America, or hop into the open source community, I hope I'll see you there.

Bart: Sounds good. And if people want to get in touch with you, Kaslin, what's the best way to do that?

Kaslin: Social media platforms. I may not look active right now, but I am super active. I've been getting involved on LinkedIn more. Reach out to me on any of my social media platforms: Blue Sky, X, LinkedIn, and in the Kubernetes Slack. Kubernetes Slack is probably the best way because I'm always there trying to help folks out with community questions. Feel free to direct message me on Kubernetes.