Meet Our Contributors - APAC (Aus-NZ region)

Authors & Interviewers: Anubhav Vardhan, Atharva Shinde, Avinesh Tripathi, Brad McCoy, Debabrata Panigrahi, Jayesh Srivastava, Kunal Verma, Pranshu Srivastava, Priyanka Saggu, Purneswar Prasad, Vedant Kakde

Good day, everyone 👋

Welcome back to the second episode of the "Meet Our Contributors" blog post series for APAC.

This post will feature four outstanding contributors from the Australia and New Zealand regions, who have played diverse leadership and community roles in the Upstream Kubernetes project.

So, without further ado, let's get straight to the blog.

Caleb Woodbine

Caleb Woodbine is currently a member of the ii.nz organisation.

He began contributing to the Kubernetes project in 2018 as a member of the Kubernetes Conformance working group. His experience was positive, and he benefited from early guidance from Hippie Hacker, a fellow contributor from New Zealand.

He has made major contributions to Kubernetes project since then through SIG k8s-infra and k8s-conformance working group.

Caleb is also a co-organizer of the CloudNative NZ community events, which aim to expand the reach of Kubernetes project throughout New Zealand in order to encourage technical education and improved employment opportunities.

There need to be more outreach in APAC and the educators and universities must pick up Kubernetes, as they are very slow and about 8+ years out of date. NZ tends to rather pay overseas than educate locals on the latest cloud tech Locally.

Dylan Graham

Dylan Graham is a cloud engineer from Adelaide, Australia. He has been contributing to the upstream Kubernetes project since 2018.

He stated that being a part of such a large-scale project was initially overwhelming, but that the community's friendliness and openness assisted him in getting through it.

He began by contributing to the project documentation and is now mostly focused on the community support for the APAC region.

He believes that consistent attendance at community/project meetings, taking on project tasks, and seeking community guidance as needed can help new aspiring developers become effective contributors.

The feeling of being a part of a large community is really special. I've met some amazing people, even some before the pandemic in real life :)

Hippie Hacker

Hippie has worked for the CNCF.io as a Strategic Initiatives contractor from New Zealand for almost 5+ years. He is an active contributor to k8s-infra, API conformance testing, Cloud provider conformance submissions, and apisnoop.cncf.io domains of the upstream Kubernetes & CNCF projects.

He recounts their early involvement with the Kubernetes project, which began roughly 5 years ago when their firm, ii.nz, demonstrated network booting from a Raspberry Pi using PXE and running Gitlab in-cluster to install Kubernetes on servers.

He describes their own contributing experience as someone who, at first, tried to do all of the hard lifting on their own, but eventually saw the benefit of group contributions which reduced burnout and task division which allowed folks to keep moving forward on their own momentum.

He recommends that new contributors use pair programming.

The cross pollination of approaches and two pairs of eyes on the same work can often yield a much more amplified effect than a PR comment / approval alone can afford.

Nick Young

Nick Young works at VMware as a technical lead for Contour, a CNCF ingress controller. He was active with the upstream Kubernetes project from the beginning, and eventually became the chair of the LTS working group, where he advocated user concerns. He is currently the SIG Network Gateway API subproject's maintainer.

His contribution path was notable in that he began working on major areas of the Kubernetes project early on, skewing his trajectory.

He asserts the best thing a new contributor can do is to "start contributing". Naturally, if it is relevant to their employment, that is excellent; however, investing non-work time in contributing can pay off in the long run in terms of work. He believes that new contributors, particularly those who are currently Kubernetes users, should be encouraged to participate in higher-level project discussions.

Just being active and contributing will get you a long way. Once you've been active for a while, you'll find that you're able to answer questions, which will mean you're asked questions, and before you know it you are an expert.

If you have any recommendations/suggestions for who we should interview next, please let us know in #sig-contribex. Your suggestions would be much appreciated. We're thrilled to have additional folks assisting us in reaching out to even more wonderful individuals of the community.

We'll see you all in the next one. Everyone, till then, have a happy contributing! 👋

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