About this talk
In this talk, Mima, a developer advocate at Grafana, discusses her journey of contributing to open source after the age of 50. She reflects on her initial fears of not being welcomed in the tech community due to her age, but demonstrates how her involvement in organizing tech communities ultimately guided her to start contributing. Mima shares her experience with open telemetry, focusing on how she began translating documentation into Spanish, which she sees as vital for making tech accessible to non-English speakers. She emphasizes the importance of finding a supportive community and encourages others not to shy away from contributing, regardless of their background or age. Her key message is that everyone can contribute in various ways, from coding to community organizing.
Full transcript
Hello everyone. Are we ready for the next uh speaker for the next lecture? I see people outside that are hesitating if they should be here. So, please come in and close the doors after you. No, no. Okay. So, our next speaker is from Grafana and uh she's been uh in the business for the last 10 years or even more. >> More than 25. >> More than 25.
Okay. So, you started as a baby >> Okay. [laughter] >> Okay. uh she's going to talk about uh the 50 plus first timer. >> I'm 51. So, >> okay. And uh I'm going to leave the stage to Ima and she's going to tell you everything about the uh next presentation. Please applause for her. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for joining. I don't see anyone with the lights.
Great. So first of all, I wanted to thank the organization for inviting me. I really it's the first time for me in this conference and I hope um coming back next year probably. So we're really happy to be here from Grafana. I'm Mima. I'm a developer advocate at Graphfana Labs. But mostly what I'm very passionate about is uh organizing communities. So I'm a part of uh several
communities in Barcelona cloud native. I'm a group of women called tech fans cl uh we organize an online conference cloud nativos uh I'm also an organizer in software craft Barcelona so I'm really passionate about organizing open source communities and also of course because I work at graphana I organize uh graphana meetups I'm also very passionate about uh recently about uh uh helping underrepresented groups in tech so
I also give a lot of talks about that and I like supporting underrepresented groups to be part of text. I I really believe we need diverse voices and I try to be a better ally to help people who have less privilege than me actually come to tech. So this is the agenda for the talk. I'm going to show how I started contributing open source after 50. So
uh I always thought it would be impossible like I felt I was too old or that my voice was not needed. But uh it turns out it's not that difficult. You can do it if you want. So I'm going to share my journey, what I learned in that journey and how you can contribute too. So uh about my journey, they tell me that uh in Bulgaria cats
are a thing that you really like cats. [snorts] So I grew on a isolate farmhouse with more than 40 cats and no electricity. So this is was my upbringing. uh my mother loves cats and so all the family loves cats and I became an open telemetry member. So that has been an interesting journey for me and hopefully you'll find it interesting. So it shows that anyone can
actually do it given the right conditions. Uh I studied at an boarding school so that's probably why for me seeing women doing maths or doing chemistry or physics it felt natural because the teachers were women. So I never had the problem of thinking, hey, women don't belong in tech because my Um, the first time I I started coding, it's actually was a little bit random because I
have an older brother and he wanted to learn coding and my parents sent him to coding classes on Saturdays and because they wanted to get rid of me. They said, "Okay, you two go together." So this is where I found that I really like coding a lot and I enjoyed that. So it I was the only girl in the class but I really had fun and finally
uh I decided to start uh studying engineering in Barcelona. So I went from an isolated farmhouse no well we had electricity when I was older but I went that to Barcelona a big city studying engineering so it was really a huge sense for me but I was able to make it. My past work is usually in companies, Spanish companies as a Java developer. I've done several things.
I've been in operations. I've been a CIS admin usually in insurance or banking companies. So very traditional. So it it was the usual thing a lot of guys in our teams uh so it was it's in that way I never thought of contributing to open source because when you work in those companies the code is secret. You cannot even share what you're doing. So you don't use
GitHub or you don't use anything that's public. And it's when I joined Elastic and Grafana that they actually realized, hey, there's a way of doing things in public. This companies support free software and open source. And this is when I thought maybe I could do that. But I felt I was too old because I was already 45. I was like, okay, maybe I'm too old to do
that. I'm lucky that I'm in these companies and they do that, but this is for young people. So I really didn't think about I started organizing uh communities. This is something I felt I could do. I enjoy organizing events. I enjoy enjoy talking to people. So this is something that if you want to talk to me, just connect to me on LinkedIn. I'm super happy to talk
to people and learn things. So I was very happy organizing but I in the back of my mind I still wanted to contribute to open source and for me contributing to open source was like do merge pull request like do something on GitHub and actually merge the code and see it in the open. So for me at the time it was like how can I do that?
I don't feel very comfortable. I'm a Java developer but uh in banks and insuranceances you work with Java 8 everything is very old. So it's like okay I don't feel like I belong in in this new I I I started learning Kubernetes luckily in my last job but I felt like I was like too old to do that but uh luckily for me uh my company supports
graphana supports open telemetry and they actually pushes us to contribute to said okay my company is pushing us they are not asking me what hi am so I can do it and I started uh I thought first let's join the kubernetes operator because I really enjoy Kubernetes and the concept of operators is something that I am really interested in but my experience there was not really good
and probably my fault as well because I didn't investigate a lot and say okay I'm just going to join the Kubernetes operator meetings and I'm going to chat with the people and it's going to be very easy to contribute and I joined one of the the the calls they did and I they didn't even ask me who I was or why I was there and I felt
very uncomfortable I was like hey I'm doing something wrong here this maybe there's another way I need to do these things. So because I was actually starting to read all the documentation for the operator and for open telemetry said maybe there's a way I can actually do something useful while reading the documentation which is translating to my own language Spanish. So then I was looking into open
telemetry and there's actually a new group that was translating into Spanish the documentation said okay while I'm reading the documentation why not translate should be an easy thing you can do and this is actually the group that I belong to now it's the the group that's actually translating the documentation for open telemetry into Spanish it's a great group of people they are very welcoming they just received
me super well they gave me instructions on how to how to do my first contribution and I find it super easy to do that once they gave me those instructions and they are very very supportive. So for me it was very easy to start doing pull request and even if it's documentation I felt hey I'm I'm actually contributing to open telemetry. It's something that the community needs
because I care I care a lot about underrepresented groups. really resonates with me because creating documentation in Spanish allows people who don't speak English to actually access the technology. So for me it felt like it was a good thing as well to do. And I was also very lucky because Carol Valencius is the one leading the the group uh actually has this documentation that's very nice as
a starter kit if you want to do translations in Spanish of course. Uh and that helped me a lot because it really explains all the steps for someone who is new what you have to do how you have to do it and it's very useful because they also tell you don't do big pull requests do a small things start doing that learn how the reviews go learn
from the reviews and the next pull request you'll do better so I started doing a small contributions and it was really something that motivated me to continue to a point that after I I think it's the first month of doing pull requests. I mean, I took some times on Fridays to just focus on that in the afternoon. I sit down, I only do that for the afternoon.
And every week I was doing one or two pull requests. And after a month, one of the uh maintainers reach out and say, "Hey, I've seen that you've been doing great work. Do you want to become a member?" It was like, "Oh, that's now I feel like I belong to the community." So, they sponsored me to become a member. and I'm I'm I'm a voting member of
open telemetry and they are now asking me do you want to be a reviewer and approver so they are very helpful in in making you feel connected to the team and say hey you can actually stay here we want you to stay here and we're happy to have you here so actually now thanks to them I have good contributor card with some contributions to open telemetry the
cloud native foundation and my depth stats are going a little bit up not too much so I felt like I'm actually achieving something. These are very nice URLs if you're contributing to the CNCF to find out how many contributions you have. But when was preparing this talk, I was uh but actually you've been contributing to open source way before this because you don't have to do a
pull request to actually be contributing. When you organize a community group, you are contributing to open source. So I had been doing that for a long time and I hadn't realized that hey really you've been contributing for a longer time. It's not only about pull requests and code it's about more. So what are my learnings from this time? The first thing is try to find the right
project for you to start because if I had stayed with the operator I didn't feel connected to this team. So I probably had say okay I'm not going to contribute it's not for me. So even if you don't like the first project you join or the first team you join, try to find where you feel comfortable and where you feel supported, where you have sponsors that would
actually believe in you and say, "Hey, you can do this." So that was my first learning. It's like, hey, I'm sure I will go back to the operator, but I really wanted uh I will stay in the documentation team for a while because I really like the team and I feel really connected to them. Other things that I learned is listen to contributors. The first time I
did a pull request, I took like I'm going to do a lot of translations at the same time. So I took like four or five pages and I translated all of them in the same pull request and then the reviewers have a lot of work to review mistakes that you are repeating in all your pages that you are translating. So I tell you please don't do pull
requests that have like five pages. Do one, learn from this one and then continue contributing. And the other thing that's important obviously is reading the contribution space which this is very well explained and you can actually learn from that and also be realistic with your time and being consistent. For me why they offered me to be a member is because I have been contributing every week consistently.
I mean I don't do a 100 pull requests and then I disappear. It's just I keep appearing there when there is a meeting. We have bi-weekly meetings. So I appear in the meetings. If I cannot make it, I'm going to say, hey, this week I cannot make it. But I try to be there when we discuss things. So I think that gains trust and that's why the
team thinks, hey, this person is here to stay. It's not just randomly helping with this and she's not going to stay. So for that, I think it was a good thing that I learned. And more importantly, I think all contributions are contributions. So when you organize a conference, an event, a meetup, like [snorts] the organizers of openfest, they are contributing to open source. So it's like I
I hadn't thought of that like it's not about just code. Contributions can be of very different things. Uh you can be responding to if there is a community forum with questions, you can be responding to those questions. If there is a Slack channel where people are asking questions, you can respond to that and it's also a contribution. So it's not just about how many pull requests I
do on GitHub. It's about uh helping the community based on your skills. The other thing that's why I'm so lucky is because I work for a company that actually Rafana Labs that supports open source. So I don't have to find time outside my office hours to contribute. It's part of my work. So that's a really lucky thing that I have and that actually has helped me a
lot. Otherwise being consistent it probably would happen outside office hours in in my weekends and maybe one week you cannot do that because uh you have other things to do. You have a life. So it's it's very useful if you have a company and there are companies that actively support open source and it's part of your work to contribute. And don't forget to have fun because it's
not just work. This to have fun with your colleagues and enjoy. I really like the relations that made with with uh my uh the other people in in this in this group. We are actually even presenting talks together at conferences and we really feel like we have a good connection and we enjoy. So I think that's also very important. Don't just do it because you have to
do it. If you're not having fun, if you're not enjoying, you're probably not going to stay doing that. >> [snorts] >> So now I guess to the good part for you all. I don't know uh who's contributing here to open source already. Probably most of you raise hands. One [laughter] not many people contributing. Maybe another one. [snorts] If if you count the organizing conferences that's contributing to
open source. But yeah, my idea with the talk is try to convince you that you can contribute to open source that it feels really good. When I was working at banks and insuranceances, I felt that we were using this software but we were not paying forward. We were not doing anything to actually support uh all the volunteers that were actually building the software that we were using.
So I feel that it's very important and I'm happy that I worked for a company that values that. But yeah, I guess when I was working at the banks and insurance, I should have thought of that and maybe used part of my old time to do it. But I didn't know how to start when I joined these companies, you have the support because your colleagues are already
doing that and they can help you navigate the projects like, hey, this project would be for you or I can go there with you and I can introduce you. So it's it's easier for you to actually gain some trust because you go with someone who they already trust. So it helps but it I guess it's doable if you don't have that. So for me the way to
start was the cloudnative uh computing foundation because I was already organizing meetups and I had a lot of connections in the community but there's many many other projects that you can work for. The cloud native is under the Linux foundation. It's the one that takes care of the open source ecosystem under cloud native. Uh it's also there to promote community and collaboration and it tries to standardize
and educate uh get best practices for the community when using cloudnative technologies. I've been a fan for Kubernetes for a while. I know that it's not very popular but I happen to to enjoy Kubernetes. So it was a natural fit for me to try to be in that Uh actually if you look at uh this is the 10th anniversary of the cloud native uh computing foundation and
there's a huge amount of contributors almost 300,000 a lot of code commits pull requests so there's a lot a lot of people and here I think it's one of the important things that applies to any project this what we were talking about there are code contributions and things that are contributions even if it's no code so in the case of the cloud Native Foundation they have the
technical advisory groups they have sub projects and they have uh uh a lot of projects where you can work the one I work in is open telemetry it's the second most successful project in the cloud native after kubernetes it's growing really fast but there are a lot of other projects that if you like promise is one of them so you can contribute to any of the projects
that are there and the one URL that's really useful is this contributor defaf that actually tells you who is looking for help in some issues and you can use that and we'll see it later that you can actually use this to start contributing and there's no code contributions which is for me very important you can write a blog post you can uh help with the documentation of
all the projects there is a glossery in the cloud native community there is ctographers who takes care also of the landscape I don't know if anyone remembers the landscape of the cloud native foundation that's it started being small and Now it's impossible. You need to zoom in to see anything with so many projects. But it's uh it's something that also people who are not contributing code are
helping. And there's of course there's all the documentation for all the projects. So it's not only open telemetry or kubernetes there's a lot of projects. So for example people in Bulgaria if you want to have a translation of the documentation you can start uh that translation and then you would have the documentation in Bulgarian. So it's something that anyone can start like for example uh there was
Diana to is helping us with the Spanish translation but she's Romanian and she recently started a group to translate to Romanian said okay we have he found like some contributors and now they started a group to translate open telemetry to Romanian something that is useful for your community because it gives access to other people to the documentation and something to start contributing and then once you do
that you can decide Where else do you want to move in that project? For cloud native, if you don't know about it, there's several ways to join. We have the community groups that we organize uh conferences, meetups. Uh I I'm in the Barcelona one. We have a Slack where everything happens. So if you want to help in any project, you should join a Slack and you you
will see the channels for that project. You can introduce yourself there and say, "Hey, I'm here. I want to help." And people will respond to you and we'll help. And more importantly they have a good mentorship program. So if someone doesn't know how to start contributing you can apply as a mentee and they will assign you a mentor and then that person takes care of you. In
open telemetry we have mentees very often. So they have projects for four or six months and one and the mentors help them with that project and the project can be code things or can be things that are no code depend on what the person wants to do. So this is very useful if you're not sure how to do it. I probably should have done this before, but
I I guess I had the misconception that I'm too old to be a menty and it's not right. I should have been a menty and then probably it would have been very very easy for me compared to this. As I said, this is a good URL if you don't know where to start in cloud native because they publish here all the new issues that are asking for
help. For example, I created an issue asking you know that the documentation when you translate it to Spanish when someone updates the English documentation you it drifts and then you need to update the Spanish one. So we have a process to know which pages need to be updated and I created an issue to track those pages. So people when they want to contribute they say hey I'm
going to update this page that it's updated and now it's updated. So I opened this issue and actually someone from the community reached out to me in Spanish and said hey I saw this in contributor can I help you with that said yeah yeah go ahead and help us so this is a good place where people will find things that you need and we'll offer to help
so you can also go there and try to find things where you can help I probably think that the main thing is everyone needs time to contribute it's not easy and for that uh One of my favorite things of course is trying to find a company that supports open source. If you don't know which company support actually do more comets or work more for the CLCF, there
are some Graphana dashboards [snorts] that show you uh which companies are actually actively contributing. So maybe when changing jobs, if you're interested in a project, you can go and look whose companies are contributing to that project. Maybe you can try to work for those companies. So for example, Grafana is collaborating a lot with maintaining promises with open telemetry. So if you're interested in one project that you
know you can actually get to know whose companies might be more interesting for you to work because they track who is contributing more for each And the main recommendation probably is find the the project that you really love because if you're not passionate about it, you're probably not going to stick to it. So find something that you really like and try to do that because otherwise just
contributing for contributing it's probably not going to be very motivating. So you really should find the one thing you love. Of course yeah at at time [laughter] advertisement you can also contribute to graphana. You can contribute to any project that's open source. We happen to have a good page as I said always read the contributing pages on on the projects. They are usually very extensive and they
will tell you how you should work, how who how to the different ways. For example, we have a a section for technical contribution. We have a section for non-technical contributions or non-code contributions like you can go to the graphana forums and respond. You can go to Slack and respond to people. You can help with issue triage as well. So there's a lot of task that you can
do without coding. And finally, I wanted to share some takeaways. Most of it, it's never too late or even too early. I mean, if you're young, I feel, hey, I'm not experienced. I cannot contribute. The mentees I see are very young people and they are actually contributing. So, it's just finding the way to do it. And if you want to do it, you can do it. Find
a project that you like. Think that there's not only code contributions, you can do. so many different things. Just find the project and see what you like. You like writing blog post, write blog posts. Uh you like more of the communication side. Uh whatever you like. Some people do videos for the projects, showing things. So there's different things that you can do. You can give talks at
conferences about that project. So that's also contributing to those projects, raising awareness about those projects. So anything that you want to do, you might be able to do for a project and helping that open source project. Also start small, not do like I did a huge PR that is very difficult to review. Be realistic with your time. Don't overcommit like hey I'm going to do this and
this and this and this. When I started I was like yeah I'm going to translate all this and all this and all this and I kept in all the issues I said yeah I'm going to take this and I'm going to do this one at a time don't worry if you have time only four hours a week whatever you have be be realistic with the time you
have and more importantly this is what helped me become a member is be consistent that they see that even if you only do a pull request every week you keep doing one pull request after the other and that you keep improving because you get the feedback you learn from the feedback back and you apply it for the next pull request. If you can see companies that uh
support open source because then it's going to be easier for you. But if not uh you can figure it out probably I should have figured it out before and don't wait to do it. That's one thing I also especially women but I guess everyone sometimes we think oh no if I want to contribute to this project they are go experts and I need to know this and
this and this and this I need to understand all that and if you try to learn everything you think you need to know to start maybe you will never start I was trying like hey I need to oh they will not warn me in open telemetry there's so many things I do not know yeah but there's always something you can help with and while you are there
you will learn new skills. For example, now that I'm doing documentation, the next thing that I'm thinking of is either the operator or the team that is doing semantic conventions in open like uh so the thing that I will try next pair with someone who knows semantic uh conventions and maybe they will help me actually get introduced to that. So try to find the things that you
need to learn because it's also learning opportunity if you don't know wool. Actually when I was talking to my uh a new teammate we have he said oh you're going to contribute to open tele uh studio operator in open telemetry I don't know woolang but we can learn together and I said oh that's that's right we don't know wang enough to do that but we can learn
so this is a good re good motivation to learn woolang it will take more time but it's something that can actually give us an opportunity to work together and learn something so don't wait until you have all the skills uh use it also to learn skills. Take a very easy issue. Talk to the maintainers and say, "Hey, I'm going to take this. I'm not an expert. Do
you think I can do this?" And if they say yes, go ahead. I think they are more open than we think in terms of allowing people to learn why they they contribute to open source. Otherwise, sometimes it it's it makes no sense to contribute if you're not learning anything new. So, for me, that's what I will try to do. try to learn something new while I continue
and [snorts] yeah what I would ask you now so there's so many people here who hasn't contributed yet that you take some time and you think of what project would you like to contribute to and how you can do it in the next week or the next month or the time frame that you have try to after this talk think about hey I'm really passionate about this
and I'm going to look into to it and see how could I contribute to that something that we use in the our day-to-day that we know is open source and maybe they need maintainers for me for example I thought that the Kubernetes translation to Spanish was already covered and I found out that it's that they actually need more people so if we really like something just investigate
maybe they need people and uh you can actually help them uh continue with the project makes it more sustainable different voices that add to the project. So that's it from me. Thank you very much. These are the slides if anyone wants >> Yeah, thank you very much. And uh if someone has a question, we still have time. We have a spotlight over there where the mic is
and you can go there and ask your question. >> No, no, no. >> I need to give something. Uh I need to bring some some gifts to get questions. >> Ah [laughter] yeah we have to volunteer. Good. >> So thanks for the presentation really inspiring and uh let's not forget that it's October so Haktoberfest continues and there are a lots of opportunities. So please contribute and this
most of the time this opens a lot of doors in your for your career. So >> thanks for reminding me that because I wanted to put it in the slides and I forgot. [laughter] >> Thank you. Okay, >> because I was thinking that's actually the right time to say this October 1st and they are looking for new contributors and it's the right time to >> Okay, >>
thank you. >> Thank you. Thank you. >> Hi, I have a quick question. What is the relation between elastic and graphana? >> I work there mostly. [laughter] >> That's what only that >> they are similar companies. I mean they are in the observability space is similar for me. Elastic was the first time I worked for a company that supports open source. Maybe not in the same way
as Grafana, but but I didn't feel there that I was supported in a way that I could dedicate time for that compared to when I joined Graphfana where I can dedicate time for that. But they are very similar companies in the same observability space. Yeah, but uh Aastic is Aastic commit to Grafana or no >> Aastic Aastic commit to open telemetry and graphana as open source. >>
All of them contribute as splank contributes Microsoft. So if you look at the dashboards I shared >> you'll find Detra a lot of companies because open telemetry was to be bendor neutral. It's the standard for uh collecting telemetry signals and sending them. So this is the part that all the vendors agree on. So all of them are contributing. So any company that is contributing a lot, if
you were there, they should allow you to contribute to >> You're welcome. >> Is there someone else? We're done. >> I think we are good. So, let's give another round of applause for IMA. >> Thank you. I think
