Lightning Talk: From Learner To Contributor: A LFX Mentee’s Kubernetes Story - Lavish Pal

In this lightning talk, Lavish Pal shares his journey from being a beginner to becoming a core contributor in the Kubernetes community through the LF x mentorship program. He discusses the challenges he faced, including multiple rejections, emphasizing the importance of persistence and learning from mistakes. Lavish highlights that open source contribution extends beyond coding, focusing on collaboration and community engagement. His experience refactoring the Kubernetes reference generator tool showcases how impactful contributions can be. He encourages aspiring contributors to start small, engage actively with the community, and view rejections as opportunities to grow.

Hello everyone. Thank you for being here for my talk and from learner to contributor and this is going to be lightning talk about my journey how I get into the LF x mentorship and I know it's the last session. It's one of the last session and you're a bit tired but bear with me for 5 minutes and I believe this is going to be really quick one.

So before starting here's a quick intro about me. I'm Lavish Pal. I'm core contributor at at CD and LF x mentor at Kubernetes. I'm also the part of Kubernetes release team for version 1.32 and I'm also a finalist student. So today I want to share a short story about persistent like how I went from someone to understanding open source to getting into contribute as a through LF

x mentorship program. But let me tell you one thing that this journey didn't start with success. It actually started with the rejections. And I believe that rejection is important in life because you will get to learn so many things from your mistake and so yeah, when I first discovered the LF I got really excited because it looked like an amazing opportunity to me to work with maintainers

and contribute to open source. But so I applied and got rejected and I applied again and I again got rejected. In fact, I got rejected eight times but here's the important part. Even though I was getting rejected from the program but I didn't stop contributing because I believe that hustle never stops. And I kept exploring Kubernetes issues, reading pull requests, attending meetings and joining the discussions and

trying to understand that how such a large project works and slowly I realized something very important that open source is not just about coding or code contribution. It's mainly about three things. First is learning, collaborations, and persistence. And but us all that effort wasn't wasted because eventually the things got changed and turned into the So, sorry. I forgot to share these are my the some of the

screenshot that I got rejected so many times, but the things got changed and finally persistence got changed into the opportunity and I got selected as a Linux Foundation at the Kubernetes. There I refactored the whole tool named Kubernetes reference generator, which is used to generate Kubernetes API after every release release. this experience really changed me how I understood open source. Because I got the chance to work

with maintainers and the people in the community whom I really look up to and learn how large projects like Kubernetes actually operate. And I also learn how the contributors collaborate and the pull requests are reviewed and how the community works to build a something build something which is used by millions of developers around the world. So, how can you get in? I will If you are someone

who wants to start contributing to Kubernetes or any open source projects, here are a few things that helped me. Like first, start small or you can start with documentation or any beginner-friendly issues. And engage with the community and be active in the community. Join meetings. I know they are full of updates and sometimes things go off the rails also, but be stay consistent. And finally, don't be

afraid of any rejections or feedback because every review and every comment will give you the opportunity to learn and because my journey started with rejections but persistence eventually opened the door and I believe that open source doesn't reward perfection it rewards Yeah, thank you and here is my LinkedIn. You can just scan this QR code to get connected with me and if you have any questions related

to open source systems and how you can get contributed yeah, DM me I will definitely reply there and yeah, if you have any questions then feel free to ask.