From Student to SRE That Loves CNCF in No Time

The importance of contributing to open source projects and continuously learning in the field of site reliability engineering

• Contributing to open source projects can be more than just coding, such as contributing to documentation or sharing knowledge with the community
• Continuously learning and staying up to date with new technologies is crucial in the field of site reliability engineering
• Joining conferences and engaging in internships can provide opportunities for learning and discovering new things

The speaker shared their experience of contributing to the backstage project by proposing a new feature and discussing it with the community, even though they did not contribute code. They also shared their experience of finding a bug in the LinkedIn project and reporting it to the maintainers, which was appreciated as a valuable contribution. These anecdotes illustrate the different ways one can contribute to open source projects and the importance of doing so.

A year ago Jacob knew nothing about Kubernetes, Linkerd, or any other fancy CNCF projects. Jacob had been studying Software Technology for two years where he learned to write code and use software design patterns. In his fifth semester, Jacob decided to try something new and joined Lunar as a Site Reliability Engineer for a five-month full-time internship where he contributed to CNCF projects and learned to develop and maintain a GitOps based Kubernetes platform. By constantly questioning his knowledge and pushing his boundaries Jacob steadily learned how to navigate the CNCF environment. Now, 1 year and 6 months later, Jacob is a Certified Kubernetes Administrator and continues to work at Lunar where he plays with Kubernetes, Flux, Fluent Bit, Prometheus, Backstage, Linkerd, and many other exciting CNCF projects. By following Jacob’s journey we will explore the opportunities and obstacles you face as a student wanting to start their journey towards working as a platform engineer.Click here to view captioning/translation in the MeetingPlay platform!