Our Journey Through Cloud-Native as Mentee and Mentor

The presentation discusses the experience of contributing to open source projects, particularly through Google Summer of Code (GSoC), and the benefits it brings to both mentors and mentees.

• The speaker shares her experience of contributing to Jenkins through GSoC
• The CDF community is welcoming and supportive of new contributors
• Goal setting, time commitment, and communication are important factors in successful contributions
• Imposter syndrome is a common challenge for mentees
• Anyone can be a mentor regardless of their level of expertise
• Matching the right project is crucial for successful contributions

The speaker talks about how she initially felt overwhelmed by the idea of contributing to a large open source project like Jenkins, but with the help of mentors and the supportive community, she was able to create a plugin for interoperability with CD events. The plugin received positive feedback and was even published internally in companies. The speaker also mentions the importance of goal setting and time commitment, as well as the challenge of imposter syndrome for mentees. She emphasizes that anyone can be a mentor and that finding the right project is crucial for successful contributions.

Meha and Brad have been working together in the community for a long time. From working in communities together to doing a GitOps GSoC project together, becoming members of the Keptn project, on the Kubernetes release team all the way to landing Meha's first Internship. This talk will share the experiences learned from both a mentee and mentor perspective, and how you can get start your own journey, whether you are starting off as a complete beginner, or if you want to step up as a mentor to help new folks coming into the community. They will give tips on how to get into the community and feel welcome, and steping up the contributor ladder, discuss mentoring program opportunities, and also tips on how to get an internship. They will also present challenges on the way and how you can overcome these, bringing up topics like Communication, Culture, Neurodiversity, timezone differences, and time.