0:00

Hi, and welcome to the Kubernetes Podcast from

0:02

Google. I'm your host, Abdel Sigiwar. And

0:04

I'm Kaslin Fields. Welcome

0:16

to the third episode of the four-part

0:18

special series for the Kubernetes 10-year anniversary.

0:21

In this episode, we spoke to three leads who

0:23

are carrying the Kubernetes torch into the future. Nikita

0:26

Raghunath, Nabaron Pal

0:29

and Pako Tzu. We

0:31

discussed how they got involved in the project,

0:33

how they transitioned to lead positions, and what

0:35

advice they have for new contributors. But

0:38

first, let's get to the news. The

0:42

Kubernetes community released a blog commemorating

0:44

the project's 10-year anniversary. The

0:47

post outlines Kubernetes history from the beginning

0:49

of containers to today. It

0:51

highlights major milestones in the development of the

0:53

technology and cool stats on how the

0:55

community has grown over the last decade. Check

0:58

it out at kubernetes.io. The call

1:00

for proposals for KubeCon North America's breakout

1:02

sessions is now closed. But the

1:04

CFP for co-located events at KubeCon North America

1:06

is still open. Check out

1:08

the list of co-located events and get your

1:10

submissions in by July 14. Kubernetes

1:13

community days, or KCDs, are locally

1:15

run events for the Kubernetes community.

1:17

There are several events happening around

1:19

the world this summer. KCD

1:21

Zurich and KCD Barcelona are both

1:23

happening on June 13. KCD

1:26

Italy will be on June 20. Through

1:29

August, there are also KCDs in

1:31

Munich, Lahore, Pakistan, Lima, Peru,

1:33

and Taipei. Through the rest

1:35

of the year, there are also KCDs

1:38

in Washington, DC, Austria, and London. Only

1:41

KCD Austria currently has a CFP open,

1:43

and it closes June 22. So

1:46

if you're interested in speaking at KCD Austria,

1:48

get those submissions in. Support your

1:50

local Kubernetes community by attending any KCD that

1:53

is held near you. And

1:55

that's the news. Nikita

2:00

is a staff software engineer at

2:02

Broadcom. She is currently a member

2:04

of the CNCF technical oversight committee,

2:06

overseeing all technical matters at the

2:08

CNCF. In the past,

2:11

she was a member of the Kubernetes steering

2:13

committee, a tech lead for SIG Kintube X,

2:15

and has also won a CNCF top committer

2:17

award. Currently, Nikita is

2:20

a co-chair of the KubeCon and Cloud

2:22

Native Con conference. Welcome to

2:24

the show, Nikita. Thank you so much for having

2:26

me here, I'm glad to be here. I've seen

2:28

you around multiple times before, of course, we are

2:31

in the CNCF, we are in the KubeCon chair.

2:33

I've been in the committee a couple of times,

2:35

but we never have an opportunity to talk until

2:37

now. So I'm glad we had

2:39

the opportunity. Thank you for being with us. Oh, definitely. Like

2:42

I've seen you around in the community so many

2:44

times, definitely the podcast of course doing with Casslyn.

2:47

So yeah, it's a pleasure to meet you too. Awesome,

2:49

awesome. So, you know, we're doing this as part of

2:52

the 10 years anniversary for Kubernetes. So we're talking to

2:54

a lot of people from those who have been around

2:56

for a while, those who are kind of more new,

2:59

a new way should say, and we

3:01

wanted to talk to, we call them

3:03

the new leaders, although some of you

3:05

have been around for a while also.

3:07

So let me get going with my first

3:09

question. So you've held multiple leadership

3:11

positions. You do the TOC now, but you've

3:14

been a co-chair of other SIGs, or tech

3:16

lead of other SIGs. You did the Kintrib

3:18

X. How

3:21

did this whole thing start? So

3:23

it all started when I was a student in

3:25

university as a Google summer of code intern. So

3:27

at that time Kubernetes had put out a project,

3:30

which said like, hey, improve this thing called

3:32

as a third party resources, which doesn't make

3:35

sense anymore, because that was the name for

3:37

CRDs before. And that's kind of

3:39

the thing which blew up the whole extensibility

3:41

of the Kubernetes ecosystem at that time. That's

3:44

like CRDs for context is something that

3:46

you write controllers on and operators on

3:48

and so on. So that's

3:50

something that I worked on and I wrote a lot of

3:52

code features for it, including validation sub

3:54

resources and so on. So I worked

3:57

on one particular feature. And at

3:59

that time, I meant to work on it. we

10:00

were going to ask was the leadership role. But

10:02

one thing you said that I liked very much is getting

10:05

involved in a project like Kubernetes, there's

10:07

a lot of things to do. And

10:09

there is probably not that much people

10:11

who have time to guide you. So

10:13

you have to figure things out yourself, right? Like

10:16

if you are the kind of person that has

10:18

to wait for somebody to tell them what to

10:20

do, it will be probably harder, I would say

10:22

to get involved. I agree. I think one of

10:24

the challenges we face as maintainers is also people

10:26

who reach out and say like, Hey, I want

10:28

to contribute, how do I get started? I really

10:30

hate that question. Like I love that people are

10:33

coming in and they want to contribute, but I

10:35

don't have the time to kind of explain everything

10:37

from the start. So what I

10:39

like is if someone reaches out and say

10:41

is like, Hey, I'm really interested to contribute.

10:43

Here's the background I have. Here's all the

10:45

research I've done. And this is what I

10:47

think is interesting to me, or at

10:50

least the area that's interesting to me. And do you

10:52

have any issues or bugs or

10:54

whatever that I came up on? So

10:56

having some more information

10:58

about yourself, and the kind

11:01

of work that you want to do and the research that you've done

11:03

is a great way to

11:05

gain maintainers interest and have like, my

11:07

point is basically help maintainers help you.

11:10

Yeah. So like, make it easy for

11:12

others to help you. And I think

11:14

then you'll have a much better experience

11:16

working with the project. In other terms,

11:18

people have to do their homework, right?

11:20

Nice, nice. Okay.

11:23

So what are your day to

11:26

day responsibilities look like? As

11:28

of like, I know that it changes depending on the role

11:30

you're in, but like, what does your day to day look

11:32

like today? So right now,

11:34

I'm mainly my named role that I

11:37

have is part of the GitHub admin

11:39

team. So this involves everything related to

11:41

like having admin rights over all GitHub

11:44

projects, or GitHub organizations,

11:46

repositories, and so on. And

11:49

before this, I was a technical lead for say,

11:51

contributed experience, I'm still involved there. So this

11:54

means kind of reviewing PRs related

11:56

to anything that touches

11:58

the meta aspect. their

22:00

models, deploy them, and experiment

22:02

on Jupyter notebooks. The

22:05

infrastructure was quite traditional, and we used

22:07

to run on VMs, and

22:09

we built our own scheduler and an

22:11

orchestrator to run system

22:14

units on VMs running

22:16

on AWS or Google

22:18

or any other

22:20

cloud provider as deemed necessary

22:22

to do so. Then

22:25

we decided to try out this magical thing called

22:27

Kubernetes. And I

22:29

started modernizing our logic to leverage Kubernetes

22:31

for all things. I wanted

22:33

to give back to the Kubernetes project after

22:35

I saw the magic happening, and

22:38

I started contributing to areas of the project

22:40

that we were actively using in our product.

22:43

So first I began with the Kubernetes Python

22:45

client, and it has been a

22:47

long journey since then. So

22:49

when did you start doing

22:51

code contributions in open source

22:53

Kubernetes? You started being aware of it

22:55

in 2017, so how long

22:57

did it take for you to get to the point where you were doing

22:59

code? So I think

23:02

the first code contributions that I did to

23:05

the Python client was around 2018, if

23:07

I remember correctly. Pretty quick.

23:10

The community was very welcoming. I

23:13

really felt nice to be around

23:15

the people who used to maintain

23:17

the Python client, and they're still

23:19

doing it till date, which is

23:21

great. I mean, the resilience in

23:23

people I really admire in this community. And

23:26

they were very receptive to suggestions from new

23:28

people like me. And

23:31

I got the real boost, I believe,

23:34

at KubeCon Europe 2019, held

23:37

at Barcelona, where I attended

23:39

my first Kubernetes contributor summit as a

23:41

new contributor. I

23:44

got exposure to so many great

23:46

individuals back then, and

23:48

I got exposure to contributor

23:50

experience and release, which

23:53

is when I felt I found

23:55

what I wanted to keep doing in the community,

23:57

and that's where I found my place in the

23:59

project. I had no idea that

24:01

you had a machine learning HPC type background.

24:03

It's amazing to me how many people in

24:06

the community have actually those

24:08

kinds of routes of trying

24:10

to run machine learning type workloads, which at

24:12

the time were very niche, as you were

24:14

saying, but now, of course, they're kind of

24:17

everywhere. But it just made so much sense,

24:19

even in the early days, for a distributed

24:22

system and a scheduling system like Kubernetes to

24:24

be used for those kinds of use cases.

24:26

Yes. I mean, it was all about us

24:29

coming with a use case and finding

24:32

Kubernetes to be very suitable for

24:34

its dynamic scheduling and

24:36

orchestrating capabilities. We just fell in

24:38

love with what Kubernetes did. Awesome.

24:41

We're going to dive into that more

24:43

in our next episode, where we'll talk

24:45

more about HPC backgrounds of folks in

24:48

Kubernetes. So you're kind of giving us

24:50

a lead into that. But we'll

24:52

come back to leadership and contributing right now.

24:56

So you started using it,

24:59

and then you started contributing to the parts

25:01

that you were using. And then you started

25:03

getting more involved with the community and you

25:05

found these other areas that you were more

25:07

interested in. So how did you

25:10

kind of do that

25:12

progression of being

25:14

a contributor and then eventually moving

25:16

into all these leadership roles? I

25:19

think being on the release team early

25:21

on when I joined the community, shaved

25:24

my thoughts pretty much on why

25:26

I should lead or

25:29

move into a leadership role that gave me

25:31

that purpose. So the kind of impact

25:34

that you can create on the project and the

25:36

people in the project made me realize that this

25:39

is something I really want to do. I

25:41

loved aspects of what

25:44

the release team was doing and the kind

25:46

of impact that even Kubernetes with its releases

25:49

makes year on year and release

25:51

on release every quarter. And

25:53

then when Jeremy asked me whether I'm interested to be

25:55

the lead for 1.2.1, I obviously knew what I wanted

25:58

to do. who

38:02

get time out of their day jobs to work

38:04

on open source. I know

38:06

that the set of people is very small

38:09

compared to the large workforce on

38:11

this planet. I

38:13

am part of a team which

38:16

builds a product on top of Kubernetes

38:18

and another project called KCP. So

38:20

for the listeners who haven't heard about

38:22

KCP before, it's an open

38:25

source project to build horizontally scalable

38:27

control planes. For Kubernetes

38:29

like APIs. And this is from

38:31

the documentation directly. So

38:34

due to my role, I am very

38:36

involved with API machinery, auths, and scalability

38:38

aspects of Kubernetes. And also

38:41

the KCP project because KCP is kind

38:44

of like an extension of what we,

38:46

it's a fork of Kubernetes essentially, which

38:49

does Kubernetes like things. In

38:51

the past, I worked at a team in the

38:53

same company building a Kubernetes

38:56

distribution. Over there, I was

38:58

involved with the release as well. And that is where

39:00

I used to get like majority

39:03

of my time to open source and

39:05

hence all of these activities

39:07

I could do. Currently almost

39:09

all of my leadership involvements

39:11

are practically on my own

39:13

time. So it's a little

39:16

challenging, but I have a lot of like

39:18

other technical aspects which relate to my day

39:20

job. For me, I've talked about on the

39:22

show before that my job essentially considers my

39:24

open source work to be 20% of my time. So

39:28

we kind of try to keep it within that

39:30

box. It sounds like you're kind of in a

39:32

similar place where you get to do some of

39:34

it for your work, but only a small portion

39:36

at this point, at least.

39:38

In the past you've had more, but at

39:40

this point, a lot of it is volunteer time. Yeah,

39:43

so both times it's 80-20. Earlier

39:46

it was 80 open source and 20 day

39:48

job. Now it's 80 day

39:51

job and 20 open source. It's

39:53

such a convenient way to split the time. I

39:56

don't know who designed it, but

39:59

it worked. It keeps coming up though. Yeah. Lovely.

40:03

So, let's start to wrap up

40:05

here. And what advice would you give

40:07

to a new contributor, or I

40:10

guess an active contributor right now who is trying

40:12

to move into a leadership position in the project?

40:14

We'll start with that one. Yeah. So,

40:17

what I usually tell people is find your purpose in

40:20

the community. Find what

40:22

drives you the most. I think figuring

40:24

that part out early on gives

40:27

the best motivation to pursue the

40:29

path of leadership. As

40:32

it's not always a bed of roses. You

40:34

will often run into obstacles. And

40:37

the days where you feel like you're

40:39

running into obstacles, that

40:41

purpose that you found out early on will keep

40:43

your motivation alive. And that's what happened with me

40:45

too. The next advice

40:47

that I think that I always give people is like,

40:50

seek mentorship from existing community

40:52

leaders, ask them about their

40:55

journey. I have had like

40:57

really great conversations with leaders

40:59

in the community about how they got

41:01

into certain positions

41:04

and what motivates them to be

41:06

there. That gave me a lot of perspective on

41:09

like, oh, hey, this is how

41:11

it works. And

41:13

hence, I do want to do it. And

41:16

sometimes during those conversations, I found out,

41:18

okay, this is not for me. This

41:21

looks great. This is a great work, but maybe

41:23

it doesn't align to my purpose. So

41:26

it's okay. Whichever way you

41:28

go, it's okay. But

41:30

it's good to know it's very important to

41:32

know what is out there. And

41:35

just ask people for their

41:37

experiences. Ask them, like,

41:39

can I get on a one on one

41:41

with you or whatever suits best. And

41:44

follow what they're doing. Be a fly on the wall. Always

41:48

see what they're doing in the community if you

41:50

want to do it in future. And

41:52

that's how you be there, essentially. Yep. It's

41:55

all about just being there is often what I

41:57

tell people. The more you're

41:59

there, the more you'll learn about what's going on

42:01

and the more all the other people involved will

42:03

know about you. Yes. So that

42:06

we can help you contribute to the community. And

42:09

let's talk a little bit more about what advice

42:11

you have for folks who are looking to get

42:13

started as contributors. Maybe they're not looking at leadership

42:16

yet, maybe they're inspired by leadership and want to

42:18

move in that direction at some point, but they're

42:20

not even contributing to the project yet. What

42:23

advice would you give to folks who are new

42:25

to the community? So it's an evergreen

42:27

question and it comes up like

42:30

very often. And the question

42:32

comes up so often that

42:35

I have templated answers ready for

42:37

this. Because usually the first

42:39

conversation is always the same. And then from

42:41

the second conversation, you start seeing the divergence and

42:44

then basically depends on how

42:46

the conversation goes with that prospective new

42:48

contributor to Kubernetes. So the

42:50

first thing that I tell people is like find

42:52

your interest area. You should

42:54

try out a few things in the

42:56

start and see what excites you. Best

42:59

case is when you contribute to an area

43:01

that aligns to what you work on day

43:03

to day. You

43:06

will keep the motivation alive basically because you

43:08

would have aligning interests all throughout the day

43:10

and you don't need to be conflicted on,

43:12

okay, what should my mind

43:14

think as a primary thread at

43:16

what times of the day? The other

43:18

thing is like being consistent showing up. And

43:21

it's not about like showing up. Let's

43:23

say 20 hours a week. It's about spending,

43:26

let's say even a couple

43:28

of hours every week to start with. And

43:30

it's much better than like spending time in bursts. Like

43:33

for example, you spend 10 hours one week and then

43:35

you don't show up for like five weeks. That

43:38

doesn't work out for anyone in

43:40

this scenario. What you can

43:43

do is you be consistent, don't

43:46

be bursty. You

43:48

can just show up in the meetings, try to

43:50

understand, spend some time what people are talking about

43:52

in the meetings. If you have doubts, raise your

43:54

hand or ask questions on Slack

43:57

asynchronously if you don't feel comfortable speaking

43:59

up. on the call or if

44:02

the meeting is not like

44:05

something that you can attend depending

44:07

on your day or night or

44:09

whenever it is you

44:11

can always go and see the recordings but

44:13

again coming back to the point being consistent

44:15

is very important. The

44:17

next thing is like keeping expectations in check. It's

44:21

very hard to keep a track of motivation across

44:24

time unless you think

44:27

in a very sustainable manner you can't

44:30

think about like oh hey I start contributing one day

44:32

and then in a couple of weeks

44:34

I start committing code. Yes you

44:36

can do it but then there are corner

44:38

cases. What you need to do

44:41

is like be consistent

44:43

keep expectations in check and don't

44:46

burn yourself out. It's very

44:48

easy the perils are high

44:51

and it's okay to take a break if you

44:54

feel oh hey this is feeling overwhelming

44:56

to me. Just

44:58

pause, breathe, think about what you're doing

45:00

maybe take a day or a week off and

45:03

then come back that works

45:05

out really well. This

45:07

few advices have worked out for me and

45:09

a few contributors have given

45:11

me like feedback as well over time

45:13

that this parts

45:16

and pieces in different sets and permutations

45:18

like worked out well so

45:20

I feel happy about giving this advices. Each

45:23

individual's experience in open source can be

45:25

so different and so I feel

45:28

like a lot of the time the advices

45:30

kind of general and broad but

45:33

it kind of has to be that way because each

45:35

individual's experience with the project is going to be different

45:37

because you want different things out of

45:39

contributing and it's a long term thing. It's

45:42

all about putting down those roots in

45:44

the community and then sticking around. So

45:48

the paths end up being very different

45:50

for each individual person. Yes

45:53

I agree. I think

45:55

every individual in this community has

45:57

a unique path. I am yet to see.

46:00

two people who have the same paths. Yeah,

46:02

even very similar. Like, yeah,

46:05

they're usually not even close. Correct.

46:07

Like maybe even like some part of

46:09

their pathways are same. But

46:12

then I've seen like everyone is involved in

46:14

some distinct sets of

46:16

things in the community. And

46:19

neither they're like completely

46:21

disjoint, neither they're like completely same.

46:24

Wonderful. So we hope all of you

46:26

out there are excited to join the

46:29

Kubernetes project and get into

46:31

contributing. But keep those

46:33

expectations in check and know that this is

46:35

a long-term commitment if you do start contributing

46:38

to open source. And

46:41

I'm so glad that I got to talk with

46:43

you today, Nabirun, and I really look forward to

46:45

seeing what you do in the future to lead

46:47

Kubernetes into its second decade. Thank

46:49

you so much, Kislin. It was great

46:52

talking. Thanks. Today

46:55

we're talking to Paco Xu. Paco

46:57

is an open source team lead in DAO Cloud. He

47:00

started working on containers on Docker in 2016 and

47:02

later started to participate in the Kubernetes community in

47:05

2018. He is

47:07

currently a member of the Kubernetes steering committee and

47:09

works mainly on kube EDM and Signode. He's

47:12

also the co-chair of kubeCon and Cloud NativeCon

47:14

China 2024. Welcome

47:16

to the show, Paco. Hi, everyone. Thank

47:19

you for being with us. So Paco, you've

47:21

been involved for quite a while since

47:23

almost 2018, but you're

47:26

considered kind of like the new generation

47:28

of leaders, right? Can you tell

47:30

us a little bit how did your Kubernetes journey started?

47:33

My journey almost started when I joined

47:35

Docker Cloud. At first,

47:37

we are working on Docker-based

47:39

path. And later, we

47:43

used the Docker store method first, and within

47:45

a year or two, we switched to Kubernetes.

47:48

And then I started my journey in

47:50

the Kubernetes community. And later

47:52

in 2020, I

47:55

started working full-time on the community.

47:57

Nice, nice. So it has

47:59

been... around four years

48:01

almost right since 2018? Yes I

48:04

have been working in the community

48:06

for full time for

48:08

four years and maybe six

48:10

years. Total okay yeah so how did

48:12

you find your place in the project?

48:15

How was that experience finding something you

48:17

can contribute to and work on? Yeah

48:20

before I joined the community I'm

48:22

a community user and

48:24

when I joined the community I

48:26

started from my familiar

48:29

part and as

48:31

my team is working on the infrastructure

48:35

and also the installer so I

48:37

started from the kubitm and also

48:39

kublet and this leads

48:41

me to the part

48:43

of the community stake node

48:46

and the stake class life cycle. Nice

48:48

nice cool. Then how

48:50

was the transition from contributing to

48:52

taking a leadership position because you

48:55

are in the steering committee right? How

48:58

was that transition? I think

49:00

there are several reasons. At first I

49:03

participate into the community

49:05

by myself and later I help

49:07

others to join the

49:09

community and helping them to learn

49:12

about communities, answer questions and help

49:15

them to most their

49:17

requests and later

49:19

I started my promotion

49:21

of the best practice from the community

49:23

to our company like

49:26

the CAP, the product,

49:28

soon, the review process

49:30

and also other best practice

49:33

from the community. And

49:36

also I started to share

49:38

my experience to the in

49:40

some events like KCD,

49:42

China and also Ku-Kong and

49:45

I also started to organize

49:48

a KCD in Chengdu 2021

49:52

and later last year I

49:54

organized the communities contributors summit

49:56

in Shanghai and this

49:58

year I will be the co-chair. chair of the

50:00

KubeCon and the Cloud Native Con in Hong

50:02

Kong, in this August. Nice.

50:05

So through those activities, I

50:08

started to think like a maintainer

50:10

and I also participated

50:12

into the steering committee

50:14

election last year. And now I'm a

50:17

member of the steering committee. Nice, nice.

50:19

I'm a member of the program committee for

50:22

KubeCon China this year. So I just finished

50:24

the reviews like a few weeks ago. Yeah,

50:26

thanks. It was pretty cool. It

50:28

was very interesting activity and I was able to see submissions

50:30

from different parts of the world. So

50:33

in your current role within the

50:35

Kubernetes community, what does your day-to-day

50:37

responsibilities look like? Currently,

50:39

I serve as a member

50:41

of steering committee and also my

50:44

primary work is on the

50:46

signal and the kubedian. I

50:49

also contribute to the release team

50:51

in recent release cycles as

50:54

the release signal team shadow and

50:56

lead. As I'm now

50:58

the co-chair of the Kubernetes, I'm

51:01

very busy on the events. So

51:04

I may focus on some maintenance

51:06

tasks this recycle and later I

51:08

may start other works in

51:10

next release. All right, cool. So

51:13

then how does your work with Kubernetes itself in

51:15

the open source world relate to your job? At

51:18

first I was a developer for

51:21

our enterprise platform based

51:23

on Kubernetes. And

51:25

later after I joined the community,

51:28

I started to work

51:30

as, we

51:32

will learn the latest information from

51:35

the community and share it to our

51:37

team. And this also help

51:40

our product to build our roadmap.

51:43

And also when our

51:45

customer using Kubernetes,

51:48

they meet some problems, the

51:50

Kubernetes contributor or maintainer can

51:53

solve the questions faster

51:55

and better. We can

51:58

provide a better solution and better.

52:00

better product to our

52:02

customer. This is the

52:04

basic thing for our company. Nice.

52:08

And this also helps us to learn

52:11

the latest information. And the

52:13

latest information sometimes helps

52:15

us to forward. Nice.

52:17

Yeah, you mentioned that you use

52:19

the CAP process and the product

52:21

readiness review process internally, right? Yes,

52:24

we use part of that, not the

52:27

same one, but the similar. Yeah, but you got

52:29

inspired from the community and then you implemented a

52:31

similar process inside your company. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This

52:33

is very interesting. This is the first time I

52:35

hear something like this. This is the first time

52:37

I hear people taking advice from

52:39

the open source community. It's usually the other

52:41

way around. So because

52:44

the production readiness review, I think that that

52:46

used to be a Google process and internal

52:48

Google process. CAP, I think, is

52:50

something that the community came up with. But

52:52

it's just very interesting to see that an

52:54

open source project helps with more than just

52:56

the code, right? Just processes as well. Yeah.

53:00

Yeah. All right. So thinking in your

53:03

current role, and I assume you work with

53:05

a lot of new contributors, right? Yeah.

53:07

All right. So then the question, what

53:09

advice would you give to people who

53:11

are either thinking about

53:13

contributing to communities or thinking of

53:16

transitioning to a leadership role? For

53:18

my view, I think our

53:22

initial goal is to become a

53:24

better engineer, no matter a

53:26

leader or not. So

53:28

first, we should continuously improve

53:30

our skills and also help

53:32

others. When you

53:34

started to help others, I

53:37

think you become near to

53:39

the leadership. And another

53:42

thing I think we can do is

53:44

to learn from current leaders and

53:47

also current maintainers. We

53:49

can observe and learn from their

53:52

behavior and also their

53:54

decision-making process. And

53:56

we should think as if we are

53:59

in their role. And as

54:01

we are working in the open source

54:03

community, all decisions are made

54:06

in public. And you can find official

54:08

history in the cap and also

54:10

in the GitHub

54:12

issues or pull requests and

54:14

also the stake meetings. All

54:17

the meeting videos are public. So

54:20

you can learn from all those

54:22

resources to know how

54:24

to become a leader and how to

54:26

become a good leader. You may choose,

54:29

you can see how the

54:31

leaders work and then you can

54:33

choose to become what kind of

54:35

leader you want. Awesome, awesome.

54:38

Well, that was all the questions I had for you. So

54:40

thank you very much, Paco, for being with us. Thank

54:42

you. Thank you, have a good day. I'm

54:46

so excited that we got to speak to these newer

54:49

leaders in the Kubernetes community.

54:52

We have folks from Steering, we

54:54

have leads of SIGs. Nikita

54:57

is just, you know, a superstar.

55:00

Yes, yes she is. And Abdel,

55:02

you got to do the interviews with Nikita

55:04

and Paco and I haven't gotten to listen

55:06

to them yet actually as we're recording this.

55:08

So how did those go? They

55:10

went super well. I think it's funny that

55:12

we call them the new generation, although Nikita,

55:14

for example, have been involved for quite a

55:16

while, right? Yeah, I mean, it takes a

55:18

while to get into leadership, right? That's true.

55:20

That's true. Yeah, so Nikita

55:23

was awesome because Nikita have been involved. First

55:25

of all, she's been involved since university, right?

55:27

Because she got into Kubernetes through the Google

55:29

Summer of Code, which is

55:31

the paid internship that Google has. And

55:34

then since then got involved in the project,

55:36

served in a bunch of SIGs. She is

55:39

actually already emeritus of SIG in Tribek. So

55:41

I mean, fair point on that one. Yes.

55:45

Yeah, because before the interview, she was like, the

55:47

way you wrote your questions make it sound like

55:49

I just started and I'm like, that's not what

55:51

we're implying here. Yeah. It's

55:55

hard to find the people who have real

55:57

impacts and who are really involved and can

55:59

have a good conversation. I think

56:02

in trying to list the people, it was a little

56:04

bit challenging because we don't want to, as

56:06

Nikita said in the interview, we don't want

56:08

to have the drive-by contributors, right? The

56:11

people that contribute when PR and move on. But

56:14

yeah, it takes time for people to like

56:16

build up enough experience to have something to

56:18

say, I think. And I

56:20

think Nikita is one of these people. Yeah, it

56:22

was very difficult categorizing the experts that we wanted

56:25

to talk to. It

56:27

was. Sorry if we kind of missed every now

56:29

and then. But they're all wonderful. So I'm excited

56:31

that we got to talk to them. Exactly. I

56:33

mean, ignore the titles of the episodes. What's important

56:35

is the interview itself. Yes, there

56:37

we go. So yeah, Nikita

56:39

was involved for a while doing, you know,

56:41

all the Kintube X, which, you

56:44

know, one thing, one thing I found interesting interview

56:46

with Nabaron, I did not know that the Kintube

56:48

X people are in charge of GitHub admin. We

56:50

are, yeah. I did not know that. That is

56:52

a scary one. Is

56:55

that new or was it the case for a while?

56:57

I think it's been that way for a long time.

57:00

It's kind of a tricky one for us

57:02

to manage because it requires so much trust

57:06

from the project for folks to have

57:08

that level of access to the

57:11

whole of the GitHub of

57:13

Kubernetes. The Kingdom. So

57:16

there's a little bit of shared ownership there

57:18

with steering because it's such a high trust

57:20

position for GitHub administration. Yeah. But there's

57:22

also kind of like two different parts of

57:25

GitHub administration. We were talking about this recently

57:27

as we were working on our annual report

57:29

for the SIG that there's

57:31

the GitHub admins who are

57:34

those super trusted people who have

57:36

really high access. And so

57:38

that's one part of it. But we also

57:41

have folks who do a lot of the

57:43

kind of day to day work of

57:45

doing things on GitHub that have lower

57:47

levels of access. So there's

57:49

kind of actually like two different pieces

57:52

GitHub administration and like GitHub management. We

57:54

considered splitting those into two different sub projects.

57:56

We haven't yet. Maybe we'll continue to consider

57:58

that. But yeah. GitHub administration is a pretty

58:00

kind of tricky one to manage because of

58:03

that high level of trust. Yeah, it was

58:05

just very interesting for me to learn. I

58:07

never thought about it until I heard, I

58:09

was talking to Nikita and then listening to

58:11

the interviews. I was like, hmm, that's interesting.

58:13

GitHub is critical to the contributor experience. Of

58:15

course, now it makes a lot of sense.

58:18

Yeah. Yeah, so that was cool. That was discussing

58:20

with Nikita. We talked about a lot of things,

58:22

how to get involved, how to

58:25

don't sit around and wait for people to tell you what

58:27

to do. But I think this is something that like echoed

58:30

across all the interviews we've been doing. So

58:32

yeah, it was all very cool. Yeah, that was one

58:34

piece of advice I got very early on in my

58:37

contribution in

58:39

Kubernetes. Of course, one thing,

58:42

don't sit around for people to tell you what to

58:44

do. But also, if you're a leader in the community

58:46

who wants people to do things, assign it to someone,

58:48

put a name to the task, otherwise it's not getting

58:50

done. No, it's not going to get done. The

58:53

other advice that I found very interesting or

58:55

very cool, I think, from Nikita was, if

58:57

you're coming as a new contributor, do your

58:59

homework. Come in with an idea of what

59:01

you want to do. Yes. Because that would

59:03

help the existing contributors help guide you. Exactly.

59:06

So if you already know the area you want

59:08

to work on, generally speaking, it doesn't have to

59:10

be technical, right? It can be the contributor experience.

59:13

Then people would be able to help

59:15

guide you, navigate kind of like the

59:18

whole complexity of the project, I guess. Yeah,

59:20

nobody knows everything that's happening over

59:23

here. But we can

59:25

try to help direct you to the things that will

59:27

be of the most value to you as best we

59:29

can. And if you're doing something that you feel is

59:31

valuable, you're going to be more successful at it and

59:33

more driven to keep getting involved with

59:35

it. So we want to help you find those things.

59:38

Exactly. And then Paco, we

59:40

had a good conversation. I think the

59:42

two things that stand out from that

59:44

conversation was, A,

59:46

the fact that Paco said that they took

59:49

KEP as a process and they implemented it

59:51

inside the company where he works. Oh,

59:54

interesting. I mean, the Kubernetes community

59:56

as a precedent,

59:59

as something to be able to do. I love

1:00:01

those stories because the Kubernetes community is

1:00:04

something else. It's such a large community

1:00:06

and there's so much organization and process

1:00:08

that's gone into it at this point

1:00:10

that we have some really good processes

1:00:13

that were created for this community. So

1:00:15

I love hearing things like that. Yeah,

1:00:18

and especially that it's not something you

1:00:20

hear very often that people take stuff

1:00:22

from open source and apply it to

1:00:24

enterprise. It's usually the business. Yeah, exactly.

1:00:27

So that was pretty cool. Awesome. And

1:00:30

I was a election officer,

1:00:33

I believe, for the one where both

1:00:36

Nabirun and Paco became members of the steering

1:00:38

committee. So I was kind of excited to

1:00:40

hear from them now that they're in their

1:00:42

steering roles. I feel like a lot

1:00:44

of folks, I might have said this before, I feel

1:00:46

like I've said it a couple of times recently then,

1:00:49

but I feel like folks often don't quite know

1:00:52

what they're getting into with the steering committee. Because

1:00:55

it's really hard to kind

1:00:58

of condense it down into a single sentence,

1:01:00

like I was saying with Nabirun. It's

1:01:03

really hard to describe exactly what the steering committee does

1:01:05

in a way that like clicks with people. So

1:01:08

I was excited to hear from them now that they're in it. And

1:01:12

Nabirun also have been involved for quite some time,

1:01:14

including working with you on the K2BX SIG. And

1:01:17

he'd even been on the podcast before as a release lead. Yeah,

1:01:21

the folks in this community, they are amazing.

1:01:25

Yeah, yeah. So many folks do

1:01:27

so many things. I love to see it. Yeah, it's

1:01:29

super cool. It's like the contributors and

1:01:31

it's just everybody's so humble and so

1:01:33

nice and so kind of willing to

1:01:35

help. So it's very, very humbling to

1:01:38

be involved. So we hope that

1:01:40

for the 20 year anniversary, probably

1:01:43

not us, but whoever is

1:01:45

running this podcast then we'll interview some

1:01:47

of you out there. Yes. We'll

1:01:50

carry on for sure. The tradition of doing the release

1:01:53

leads, that's for sure. We'll

1:01:55

try to get the community on the podcast as much

1:01:57

as we can. We of course have to balance out

1:01:59

the. you know, the guests. But

1:02:02

for me, it's just like these three episodes and the

1:02:04

next one have been super humbling to be able to

1:02:06

talk to all these people. It's just pretty cool to

1:02:08

be able to do this show. It's

1:02:10

so cool. And it's also eating away

1:02:12

at me how many people were on our list

1:02:15

that we really wanted to talk to that we

1:02:17

didn't fit into this series. So I'm hoping we

1:02:19

can maybe fit some of those into future episodes

1:02:21

someday. I hope so as

1:02:23

well. Well, thank you very much, Kaslin.

1:02:25

That was great. Thank you, Abdell. And thank you to

1:02:27

all of you out there listening. We'll see you next

1:02:29

time. That

1:02:33

brings us to the end of another episode. If you

1:02:35

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