Lightning Talk: What I’ve Learned by Running Local CNCF Chapter Cloud-native Islamabad

The speaker shares their experience of running a local CNCF chapter in Islamabad and how it helped them overcome the challenge of learning cloud-native technologies. They also discuss the importance of building a community and collaborating with others in the open-source world.

• The speaker struggled to learn cloud-native technologies due to a lack of people around them who were knowledgeable about it.
• Building a local CNCF chapter helped the speaker overcome their shyness and learn more about cloud-native technologies.
• The CNCF provided resources such as a website, registration process, and live stream platform to help the speaker establish their community.
• The speaker gained knowledge about cloud-native vocabulary, success stories, and how others learn and build products on top of Kubernetes.
• The speaker emphasizes the importance of sharing knowledge and building a community in the open-source world.
• The speaker offers to help others build their own local communities and provides contact information for further discussion.

The speaker initially struggled with the idea of building a community virtually due to the pandemic, but with the help of the CNCF, they were able to establish a successful local chapter in Islamabad. They conducted over 25 webinars on various cloud-native technologies and gained a good following on social media. The speaker also learned how to talk about cloud-native technologies in public and gained confidence in sharing their knowledge with others.

I struggled a lot when I started learning about cloud-native technologies because not many people around me were also talking about k8s or other cloud-native things. I always felt shy asking people for help when I got stuck with cloud-native tooling. However, I’ve found that many people are experiencing the same even though opensource is all about engaging with others, helping others and collaborative knowledge, and collaborative power of mind and energy. I want to share how I overcome this challenge of talking about cloud-native language in public while building out my local community. Attendees will walk away from this talk having learned the easy way of learning Kubernetes, how to build out local their own CNCF chapters, how this will help overcome the shyness of asking people for help in public, how to create empathy within the community, how to talk about open-source publicly, and how to start contributing to a worldwide community.Click here to view captioning/translation in the MeetingPlay platform!