Growing in Your Kubernetes Contributor Role

New open source contributors often struggle to orient to a project’s processes and cadence, and Kubernetes is no different in this regard. Approaching such a large and dynamic project can be daunting. While a relative newcomer to the Kubernetes project, the speaker will draw from their experience to demonstrate ways other newcomers can grow as contributors through involvement in the release team.

Over the course of one year the speaker went from a newcomer in the Kubernetes community, to a secondary "shadow" role on the 1.10 release team, to leading bug triage for the 1.11 release team, and then to leading the 1.12 release team. This embedded service to the community within the release team, especially because its members have cross-SIG roles, provides a unique opportunity for contributor insights.  This talk will not be a project status, project update, or release retrospective which is common in other conferences.  Instead it will go through the Kubernetes release process, its phases, how the process is evolving, and give specific examples from recent releases to highlight areas ripe for new contributors to engage and grow their involvement within this community.

Two of the most Frequently Asked Questions in the Kubernetes community are:

* What is a SIG?

* How can I get involved?

This talk will answer both of these from the perspective of the Kubernetes Release Team, because we want your involvement!

Together we are a globally distributed set of open source collaborators on this dynamic and large Kubernetes project.  We deliver quality code on a regular cadence on do so better when more contributors are enabled, come together, and are a part of the team.