Lightning Talk: Beginner to Maintainer Journey of a Student

The presentation discusses the journey of a student from a new contributor to an approver in the Kubernetes community. It emphasizes the importance of mentoring, perseverance, and asking the right questions in the community. It also highlights the significance of regular SIG meetings and discussions and the need for contributors to comprehend the subject of the issue before attempting to solve it.

• The speaker shares their experience as a new contributor to Kubernetes and the challenges they faced in understanding the jargon used in the community.
• The presentation emphasizes the importance of mentoring and how it helped the speaker to learn about Kubernetes as an end-user and to contribute to the project.
• The speaker also discusses the significance of perseverance and the courage to ask the right questions in the community.
• The presentation highlights the importance of regular SIG meetings and discussions and how they help contributors to identify issues and areas where they can help.
• The speaker emphasizes the need for contributors to comprehend the subject of the issue before attempting to solve it.
• The presentation provides an anecdote about how the speaker worked on developing a contributor catacoda to help newbies who are not able to clear the threshold of setting up the Kubernetes code in the local system.
• The presentation also discusses how new contributors lose interest while looking for good-first-issues.

The speaker shares their experience of working on developing a contributor catacoda to help newbies who are not able to clear the threshold of setting up the Kubernetes code in the local system. They assigned themselves to the issue and collaborated with Quantum Comps and SIG Contribex to do the copy editing and came up with a contributor catacoda. The speaker encourages the audience to check out the contributor catacoda repository that is present at Kubernetes six repositories.

The session will highlight my learning as a student during the journey as a new contributor starting to contribute after attending a New Contributor Workshop during KCD Bengaluru to becoming an approver recently. I will share the nuances of working together in the community and will focus on areas that need a lot of contributors now especially with the "chop wood and carry water" kind of work that could be easily done by students. I will further focus on how various sigs runs mentoring cohort for contributors to grow up the contributing ladder and learn stuff necessary for taking leadership or helping the leadership, I have been part of such mentoring cohort under sig-contribex and now I'm a moderator of the k-dev mailing list. Also, I will try to focus on how new contributors loose interest while looking for good-first-issues, and I will try to emphasize the importance of regular sig meetings and discussions and help they have helped me to come up with solutions to help the project.Click here to view captioning/translation in the MeetingPlay platform!