My KubeCon NA'22 Experience(Virtual)

What is the buzz about?

For everyone who doesn't know what is Kubecon and how to take part in it you can refer to A Beginner's Guide to KubeCon by commclassroom.org.

In brief :

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s flagship conference gathers adopters and technologists from leading open-source and cloud-native communities.

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon provides an important forum for exchanging relevant information and insights on Kubernetes and broader DevOps trends. It is a gathering of one of the best technically sound minds under one roof, where they discuss about changing technology trends in the world and how the OSS and cloud are affecting the traditional developer work.

I got the chance to attend the Kubecon virtually with the help of the Dan Kohn Diversity Scholarship, this was my second time attending this conference, but unlike the first time I tried to get the most out of it as must I can.

Dos and Don'ts

Planning out schedule :

Just like the CNCF landscape, this conference can be pretty overwhelming for the first timers, as there are lots of things going on a single day, to tackle the situation they include an attendee guide to understand the working of the website and how you can use it, even the organizers understand that it's difficult for everyone to manage their agenda and so they include the sched app which allows you to build your schedule and get the most out of the conference when start going through the list of sessions you get the idea of what to select for your personal agenda.

Keep in mind

When scheduling a session to attend, always consider the timezone of the session, it can be a little problematic for folks who are attending virtually to be able to be available at all times, but you can always watch the recorded session afterward, I suggest you attend during the Livestream as it helps you to interact with the speakers and also network with your fellow attendees.

Tracks to look out for

There are multiple tracks to group the sessions.The most relevant tracks for a student or beginner who is just getting started with the cloud-native tools will be

1. Student track
2. Lightning talks track
3. 101 track
4. The Keynote session track
5. Community Track

My experience

I was able to attend multiple talks this year and there were many notable talks I attended including :

• “Why Can’t Kubernetes Devs Just Add This New Feature? Seems So Easy!” - Understanding the Feature Lifecycle In Kubernetes - Ricardo Katz, VMware & Carlos Panato, Chainguard

• Tutorial: Becoming a Kubernetes Developer: Writing Your First Operator - Abby Bangser, Syntasso

• Kubernetes Community Days For Fun And For Community Profit - Bill Mulligan, Isovalent & Katie Greenley, CNCF

• BoF: Intro to Open Source Licenses and Q&A - Jeff Shapiro, The Linux Foundation

• How To Build a Distributed System (And Should You?) - Rebecca Bilbro & Patrick Deziel, Rotational Labs

• The Course Of True Community Management Never Did Run Smooth, In 1 Act - Karsten Wade & Jen Madriaga, Red

• Mentor-Mentee Framework To Build the Next Generation Of Cloud Native - Kunal Kushwaha & Mark Boost, Civo

• Balancing Yin (Community) And Yang (Company) In OSS - Nikhita Raghunath & Kiran Mova,

• Consumers To Contributors: Open Source As a Competitive Advantage - Brendan O'Leary, GitLab

They touched upon many topics which included Kubernetes, Mentorship, career paths, Open Source, Community management, Cloud technologies, etc

Highlights

Some of the sessions which I found to be most beneficial to attend were

- We're In! Students Hacking Their Way Into the CNCF - Ashwin Kumar Uppala, AtSign; Kaiwalya Koparkar, M. S. Gosavi Polytechnic Institute; Karuna Tata, AsyncAPI; Abhishek Choudhary, Nirmata

The speakers demonstrated how students can start their journey by contributing to CNCF projects while participating in hackathons, specifically cloud-native hackathons. It was an amazing session and at the end of it, they also shared some resources to help in getting started with hackathons.

- The 10 Biggest Mistakes You Shouldn’t Make In Open Source - Bill Mulligan, Isovalent & Divya Mohan, SUSE

Here the speakers discussed on what are the things that should be avoided in the open source community as a contributor and as a maintainer to maintain the inclusiveness and a healthy environment.

Tips To Fight Impostor Syndrome - Aurélie Vache, OVHcloud

It was a pretty an awesome session in which the speaker discusses how to deal with imposter syndrome and also shared her story and how to overcome it.

All of the mentioned sessions were amazing I learnt a lot from them, and if you want to watch the session too they are now available on the cncf youtube channel.

Reasons for attending :

1. Networking

There is so much to an event than just sitting and listening to the expert speakers. These conferences are the best place to meet amazing like-minded people who share the same interest in technology and broaden your horizon, you get to meet several community leaders, founders, and experts in their respective fields which helps you to broaden your perspective.

2. Learning Opportunities

The amount of knowledge you get from attending these events is far more than sitting in your room and watching a tutorial, your knowledge graph can be increased.

3. Gaining a new perspective

you get to know how other people are leveraging different tools and software models by including it in their workflow and it can help you to get new insight.

4. Mentoring

KubeCon is also a great place for getting help in kickstarting your career. Peer Group Mentoring + Career Networking allow participants to meet with experienced open-source veterans across many CNCF projects. Mentees are paired with 5 - 10 other people in a virtual breakout to explore technical, community, and career questions together via Zoom.

Conclusion :

Even though no one can beat the in-person feel of a conference, the virtual event was really on par with it we get to chat live during the session and network with other people. I thoroughly enjoyed these days and will also advise everyone to attend these kinds of community gatherings. A big thanks to the CNCF for organizing these events and also for providing me with the scholarship to attend the conference 'again'. Hope to attend the conference in-person as soon as possible and geek out with other developers.