PurePerformance - From Zero to Open Source Contributor with Diana Todea

Episode Date: February 16, 2026

Contributing to Open Source is easier than ever - especially because contributions are needed for documentation, demos, tutorials and code. But how to get started? Where to look for "first good issues"? Is everyone welcome? What are the prerequisites?Tune in and hear from Diana Todea, Developer Experience Engineer at Victoria Metrics, on how within a year she made it from Zero to Developer and receiving the Contributor Award for OpenTelemetry 2025 at KubeCon Atlanta. Diana shares her journey, how she started, how she found the right topic and how she keeps herself motivated. Diana is also the Co-lead of the Neurodiversity CNCF Working Group and gives us insights into the Merge Forward community. And don't forget: Call for Papers for Cloud Native Days Romania and Austria are open and both Diana and Andi would be glad to see your proposals!So - what are you waiting for?Links we discussed:Diana's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/diana-todea-b2a79968/ From Zero to Developer Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPrxpEE5GpY Contributor Award: https://siliconangle.com/2025/11/13/accessibility-meets-open-source-collaboration-kubeconna/ Her latest CNCF Blog Post: https://www.cncf.io/blog/2025/12/04/my-first-kubecon-cloudnativecon-a-journey-through-community-inclusivity-and-neurodiversity/Start contributing to Open Source: https://contribute.cncf.io/contributors/getting-started/ Diana's Conference Talks: https://github.com/didiViking/Conferences_Talks Diana on Medium: https://medium.com/@dianatodea/ Articles on OpenTelemetry for beginners: https://medium.com/@dianatodea/the-unofficial-guide-to-contributing-to-opentelemetry-where-to-look-and-who-to-talk-to-9de04ae75fe0 CNCF Merge-Forward: https://community.cncf.io/merge-forwardCNCF Neurodiversity initiative: https://community.cncf.io/neurodiversity Cloud Native Days Romania: https://cloudnativedays.ro/Cloud Native Days Austria: https://cloudnativedays.at/ 

It's time for pure performance. Get your stopwatches ready. It's time for pure performance with Andy Grabner and Brian Wilson. Hello everybody. Welcome to another episode of Pure Performance. My name is Brian Wilson. And as always, I have with me, they're very fashionable but injured. Andy Grabner today.

How are you doing, Andy? Well, I really like it that you say it's a fashion statement. Because I never thought about this year. It's like a little scarf or like, what's it called a buff? What is it called? A gator. We call it a gator here for a ski gator. Yeah, I have an injured muscle on my back and my massage, the lady that gives me massages on the back.

She also tells me that I need to keep it warm. The muscles need to stay warm so that I recover faster. And so I follow the advice on what other people tell me. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I guess you don't have a segue from that, do you? Maybe I do because let me think about this. How would I say the advice?

The advice that the medical profession comes up with is shared and developed over time. And it's not proprietary. It's open. It's open. Giving people. And developed and developed and developed until it becomes a standard of care that everybody accepts. Yeah. I would say we both stop trying to find.

a good segue and just introduce our guest today. Diana, today we met each other several times now over the last couple of months. The most vivid memory, and I just watched and re-watched the video, at least the first couple of minutes from Cloud Native Days, Austria, where she presented on from Zero to developer my one-year serendipity journey with Open Telemetry. And Diana, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's a really inspiring story that you have, and I really want to give you a chance to talk to our audience that we have here on how you started contributing to open source. I mean, you picked open telemetries project, but really that there's so much more from a contribution perspective than code contribution.

Now, I think you can tell this much better. I would like you to start with a quick introduction about yourself, who you are. what is your background and then we go over to the topic about how to contribute to open source. Yeah, perfect. Hi Brian. Hi Andy. Nice to see again. Of course, my name is Dana Todaya. I'm a Romanian living in Valencia, Spain. And I've been working in tech for like 16 years altogether for the last four, five years as an site reliability engineer in observability. And very recently, like in the last six months or so, I changed my profession to developer experience engineer or how people say developer relation or developer advocate.

Anyway, and I'm working currently at Victoria Metrics. Yeah, what I can say more about myself? Yeah, like you said, very well, for me, open telemetry always was like, you know, the new kid in the block. I started to hear so much about this project actually a couple of years back due to the devrels that were making a lot of noise. I think Dotan Horowitz was one of the first ones telling about open telemetry and how it's going to become a soon de facto standard for observability.

So I was getting more and more curious. More companies were adopting it in production. They were sharing stories. So obviously as a Situability engineer, I was like really keen to start working with it. So this is how I got curious about the project. And last year, actually in 2024, I saw Linux Foundation putting a post about searching for observability,

subject matter experts to start contributing to the Open Telemetry exam certification. And that was how I started basically. Like a bunch of us got together. It was like a community. We started like creating questions, revising questions for this exam, checking like the official documentation, obviously, and also not official documentation, getting together, putting our ideas and, you know,

getting started with this project. From my perspective, yes, I didn't have a, any, let's say, prior knowledge or prior experience with open telemetry. So for me, it was a perfect introduction, right, into the project. It was also really great because I got started with the documentation, learning more about it, talking to the people, you know, like really getting curious about, like, you know, who's the maintainer, like, who's contributor,

who's, like, doing what in open telemetry. and slowly, you know, I got more involved. Yeah. And fast forward. I mean, I was just reading up on some of the postings that you recently did. Last time we met was at KubeCon in Atlanta, where you have received the contributor award 2025. I mean, that's quite an accomplishment. And it's amazing how short of a journey, but a year later, you are being awarded for the work that you have put back into the community.

Yeah, that's true. And to be honest, I was like also surprised. Also my other colleagues that got the same award were like really happy and surprised in the same time. That, you know, basically all of us did amazing contributions. Some of us with code contributions, some of us with non-code contributions. So it was really, really nice that after all the effort, at least the community knew that we were. doing something and that was like pretty amazing yeah yeah i got a question for you now because you just mentioned it some of your colleagues did code contributions some of one contributed documentation demos whatever there else is i think there's a big misconception still i guess that open source contribution is often focused just on code whereas and this is why in the picture i was wearing my captain hat and i was putting my uh

Open feature, Mark into the camera. You obviously, we contribute a lot to open telemetry. If I think at all of these projects, people that start new, they basically heavily rely on good documentation,

good getting started guides, good tutorials and working demos. And I remember our early days at Captain when we kicked this off, the biggest challenge was to keep exactly these getting started guides and tutorials and demos up to date because there was so much changing on the code and we all wanted to code

and not so much then making sure that everything else runs. We were focusing on building new cool things. And so this is why it's a great reminder for all of us that open source contribution is not limited to just code. No, no, that's true. And actually, how can I say many people can get into, for example, code contribution or non-code. contribution but divert to the other one. It really is like a circle, right? So it depends like how much you get, you're trying to get involved, how much time you spend in the project, no, and you understand a bit, you know, you get to a maturity level and you understand, yeah, no, I think that developer experience or, you know, this community contributions are really important because,

you know, you are the voice in the end. You are exposing that developer work to the outside world. you are inviting more contributors. So both type of contributions count. Yeah. Did you have a moment? I know you said, obviously, your background is observability, right? You've been, yeah. I'm looking at your LinkedIn profile.

You had a couple of years at Elastic as a site reliability engineer. You had another site reliability engineer enrolled in the EQS groups. Obviously, you've been working with that type of technology, for a while and you wanted to learn open telemetry. Did you have a moment where you were saying, where you're feeling like you cannot really contribute because you don't know enough? How was this initial hurdle?

I could understand that the initial hurdle might be a little bit tough to take. How did you manage that? Yeah, no, definitely. I think it really depends on each person's background, right? So if obviously you're like a software engineer or you're coming from like a programming, we have like a strong or let's say like a programming experience, it's easier for someone to immediately start, let's say, with code contributions, right?

Because you're thinking like that. You have projects. You have the expertise. It's something that's natural to you, right? But for let's say like other professionals that don't necessarily work on a daily basis with the code, you're looking more like on a practical level, right? So does my company or within my projects, can I use open telemetry? Can I use this in production?

Can I test it? Can I see the benefits of it? So you're basically as a contributor as a person. You're like dependent on your company's overall strategy. So if your company really accept open telemetry or wants to experiment with open telemetry, then obviously you get a use case, right? And you can use that use case and provide. back to the community, like through your feedback.

But obviously, if you don't have a use case, it's really difficult to implement this in your home lab or start doing anything like really in-depth. So for me, that was the hurdle. So like I said, I started to contribute first to the exam with documentation. Then I had a moment, actually, at EQS, when I POC it's open telemetry. So we wanted to switch basically to something

open source for application performance monitoring. So I came with this idea, okay, look, there is this amazing CSF project that is taking the top shelf right now. So we should, you know, implement it. But it's really difficult sometimes, you know, to make companies adopt specific tools in production, right? There is a lot of going on in the background, a lot of, you know, infrastructure changes, a lot of time, dedication from engineering. So how can I say an engineer is as much as successful in adopting a CNCF project or an open source project as its company. So unless you want to go home and start doing this in your home lab, then you know, you don't really have that much sense. You don't have that much, you know, feedback to brag about.

So for me, it was like a cliche, you know, it was like, okay, I want to work with this, but my company doesn't. How do I solve this, this, you know, controversy? And then I thought, okay, but that doesn't matter if my company doesn't adopt OpenTelementary in production. I can just go ahead and start contributing to the project anyway. So like the first thing I saw or like one of the things that really drew my attention was localization. Localization that means translating documentation in different languages

and helping, you know, the ecosystem expand. right, from English to other languages. And for me, this is how it started with the first PR contributions to Spanish. And fast forward into Romanian as well. Maybe we should, even though I have big ambitions to improve my Spanish, it's very limited. Maybe we should also ask you for, for Winston's Open Feature, which is really a a project that we have been driving over the last couple of years with many other contributors. I'm not sure if there is much effort going on in translating the documentation or demos into Spanish.

Obviously, Spanish, a large population of the world with a lot of folks in Latin America that are leveraging open source technology. So if you know anybody else, Diana, that wants to translate stuff into Spanish, let me know. or maybe a call to the listeners. If you know Spanish or French, Italian, Romanian, did you also translate anything into Romanian? Yeah, yeah. We started recently, yeah.

Well, then I think this is a great call to everyone. As you can see, open source contribution can touch anything from coding to translating documentation, demos, tutorials into these languages. Brian, have you ever contributed open source? Not to an open source project, no. I'm too busy with, I'm also just not as tech anymore. But I can't translate. I can translate from English to English

or from English to really bad Spanish all in the present tense with, you know, it would be quite a joke. But no, I have not. So everybody listening can throw rocks at me if you see me for not having contributed to any open source projects. Well, maybe Brian. If Diana and I were doing our job well today by the end of this podcast, you will have opened up your browser and you're browsing on GitHub and finding some of these open source projects

that are looking for first contributors. Which brings me Diana to the next question. Let's assume somebody like Brian all of a sudden wants to put. contribute. What is a great place to start once you have identified, well, actually before you identified your tool, in your case, it was clear and easy, right, open observability and open telemetry, but for people that may have different topics that they're interested in, do you have any recommendations on how to find projects that are looking for people? Yeah, of course. So, yeah, actually, it's a great address that because I,

Just today I got a message from somebody wanting to contribute to open telemetry and cloud native and open source. And they asked me, you know, like for beginner tips, you know, where to start, where to look. So I wrote an article about this just today. And for me, I found that it's really nice to look for their specific directories that list cloud native projects that have opened good first issues. which are really excellent for beginners. So if you go to such websites, I mean, you know, you can Google them. They will come out pretty fast.

They will give you like a list. You can select whatever the projects. For example, Yeager, Prometheus, OpenClementary, etc. And all the GitHub issues, good first issue will open up. So it's really very easy to identify them. So for me, that would be the first thing I would check. Besides, obviously, the official documentation before getting into the whole realm of documentation. Yeah, I'm just, and also, Diana, if you have any of the links that you want to share,

we will definitely add it to the description of the podcast. If I quickly do a search, I find the start contributing to open source, which is a page on the CNCF website. And as you said, there's many different things. There's also, it seems, some issue labels that have been specified exactly such as a good first issue label that maintainers should put on their GitHub issues. And folks, obviously we talk a lot about observability here, and we keep mentioning things like you just said, Yeager, Prometheus, open telemetry,

but there's so many other projects out there, right? if I think and also look at your at your resume on LinkedIn you have worked with tools like Argo CD, right? You've worked obviously with Kubernetes. There's so many projects everything from

from I don't know from coding to testing to deploying to orchestration. There's plenty of opportunity in any type of area. Yeah, exactly. So one thing that I would recommend

for someone like, you know, before really putting the finger on one specific project is be like really broad, right? So look at like, you know, what really interests you here and why do you want to do this? Like, what's your objective in starting with these contributions? Do you want to work on a skill, on a technical skill that you want to improve at your work? I know at your company you are specifically asked to contribute to open source or are you interested in specific tools? or do you want to improve your programming scales, whatever. So be very specific because I think this will help you in the long run, right? So if you have like a strong motivation and, you know, very clear objective,

then you know, okay, then maybe I need to improve my goal programming skills or my Python programming skills. And then I need to know to look at this, this and that, which, you know, might intersect with a bunch of projects. And be very personal in your pick. I mean, for me, it was something really personal. I wanted to just like, okay, I'm really curious about this project. Everybody's talking about it.

I want to know if it's the truth or it's just hype, you know? So it was maybe like a very personal challenge that I took on myself. And that worked out because you're going to met a lot of frustrations. That's also something you ask, a lot of hurdles, a lot of moments you're going to maybe be demotivated to start to continue contributing. you're going to have some downtime, you know, due to X, Y, Z reasons. And then you remind yourself, oh, I haven't contributed in a while to this project. What happened? Am I still interested in it? Should I go back?

Something new changed, you know, or is something else that I'm doing at the moment that might get me back on the road? So there are very, very different reasons why you want to contribute in the long run. And like you said, there are a lot of operations. not only code and on-code contributions, but just like, you know, writing articles, writing articles about something you experimented at work or in a project and putting it out there. There are a lot of websites where you can just simply add your explanations or like a tutorial or technical issue, just explain. And you're going to have a lot of feedback from the users.

This is what I really love. Once I really started to get out there, be a bit more vocal and involved with the project, many people just ping me. So how did you get started? Where should I look to what Slack channels? Should I start writing? Who do you recommend? I should contact? And that actually motivates you, brings you back in the game. Obviously, it feels good when people see you as an expert and want to help. Yeah. And not because the expertise comes with time. I think this is very important. It's not, I mean, obviously being a contributor for a year or two years, to be honest, it's not that long, especially if you are doing this in your free time, it's very, very opposed to if your company basically pays you to do that open source work.

So for me, I'm an individual contributor, which means I contribute whenever I have free time. So luckily, you know, a year can be, I know, as much as 10 or 10, or 20 PRs. You know, that's not a lot, you know. It really depends on your investments, on your personal motivation. But normally if you take it like as a whole and you analyze it, you're like, oh, it's just 10 PRs a year, you know. So that's really important. You cannot be an expert on a specific project within a year or even two years.

You really need to go deep dive. You need to check a few more other complex situations. I know that for now I had only time my free time for localization project because that's only the limited free time I have. But I know that next year I want to contribute with code. So I have already set my eyes on a couple of initiatives in Open Telemetry and Kubernetes and I'm already laying the work or, let's say, like the groundwork for what's next. Yeah, I think it's interesting that how do you motivate your,

yourself. The same like you go, for example, to the gym, you know, and sometimes you're like, oh, I don't feel like going to the gym. I want to stay home and rest. And, you know, one day goes into, you know, like a week and months and you're never going to work out. It's the same with open source contribution. So you need to like work on your motivation. It's fascinating. Because I find myself not wanting to come down to my studio to work on stuff all the time, so I get the gym thing. I was curious, you know, we've been, and I'm not trying to do a big thing,

I'm bringing AI into this because I only bring it for good reasons. We've been talking about AI a lot. I imagine, as you were talking about contributing, right, people might look to contribute but leverage AI to help them contribute, and I'm wondering what you're seeing in terms, maybe two types of

submissions coming into open source projects and if there's any reaction that you're seeing to them. The first would be if somebody is using AI to help them either with a translation or with code, but obviously cleaning it up and making it good, is that something that the open source community is generally receptive, using AI as an assistant, but not just to do it and submit it as is, but as a helpful starting place to assist.

But also on the same time, how much are you seeing where people who want to contribute just whip something up in AI and submitted it without checking it and just pretending like, yeah, look, I'm contributing? Is that something you're seeing in any of these projects? Yeah, yeah, definitely. So only in OpenClementary and only in localization, we've seen both trends, definitely.

So, yeah, right now, I think that we cannot really, how can I say, limit people not to use AI if they want to use AI. The idea is like people well said, use AI as an assistance. So, I don't know, let's see like a good place to start to lay the groundwork, but you need to be involved there consciously, be aware, go through it, polish it, etc. So definitely that happens because it depends also on the volume of the work, right? So let's imagine you have like multiple pages or a page and you want to, you know, put a structure to it.

That's totally fine. We are not against using AI as, I know, your assistant or your pilots. We even encourage it. And I think we recently also created like AI specific assistant to search through the docs. We also like different, you know, maintainers contribute with guides, how to use for technical writing, AI. So, you know, we try to make it as responsible as possible, right? But then we also get the every now and then contributor or wannabe contributor that just pushes a PR and you definitely see like, I don't know, some kind of line there that, you know, puts like a footprint, like a footprint that was

generated by AI and was not really, you know, digested by any human brain. And then obviously we, we tend to frown upon this type of contributions. And we are here to educate ourselves and try to be a bit careful, right? Because in the end, it is our work. Once you publish this, everybody's going to see it. If you're going to do a mistake, then you want to go back and, you know, just going to multiply the work. And in the end, we want to be respectful as possible for the entire community.

So, yeah, AI is great. just let's use it responsibly. I never thought about Brian. It's an awesome thought. I never thought about obviously using AI to generate PRs that may or may not get accepted because it always depends on the reviewers. But if you want to kind of quote unquote earn a reputation for contributing, you could misuse AI to just come up with PRs.

And I guess that was your thought, right? I mean, this is the... Yeah, there's a way to use. I mean, I guess you'll earn a reputation either way. If you use it poorly, you'll learn a reputation as, oh, that guy over there just keeps submitting AI slob to our code base, right? But I mean, knowing how good AI assistant coding has become, I would assume that you can probably contribute some really good code changes, almost fully automated.

And then, so my thinking now goes into a direction where if you build a lot, you build a build up your own GitHub profile and you're using AI to contribute to a lot of different projects and let's assume with a good AI model behind the scenes, many of them get accepted. You can really create a GitHub profile that looks from the outside like a really legit contributor. And then this can be used in multiple ways obviously, right? Because then you might be able to contribute to projects where you need a certain level of community engagement to contribute and all of a sudden they're engaging.

engagement is there, even though you may have never really contributed something that came from your brain. And yeah, so really, really interesting. Hey, Deanna, I have another question for you. Looking at some of the stuff that you've posted recently, I was intrigued by your involvement in Merge Forward. So you have, you've been involved with that group. Can you tell us a little bit about Merge Forward? Yeah, of course. Yeah, thanks for bringing up.

and the merge for this, it's actually a CNCF initiative that supports and create safe spaces for underrepresented groups in tech. Actually, let's say, it blossomed a few months back just before KubeCon Atlanta. They were already created some of, let's say, diversity and inclusion working groups, but then this like new initiative got emerged and maybe like a rebranding also took place from a marketing perspective and we added I mean not me myself the CNC have added more working groups which is great because besides the let's say some of the well-known like blind and visually impaired or deaf and heart of hearing stuttering you know and speech disabilities we also got like other new groups like neurodiversity, friends of Dorothy, and yeah, other like black roots and

other initiatives, very good initiatives to unify, you know, to make this more global. And basically what it, I didn't know that all these groups were actually present until CNCF became a lot more vocal about it. and I joined the neurodiversity initiative because I'm a neurodiverse person and I really liked this initiative and I think a lot of us are neurodiverse people working in tech. And yeah, it was really great to see this type of involvement and acknowledgement. Why I think it's important because we also need to think about the human side of engineering, right? We are not just like a perfect robot going to work and producing and being efficient, etc., etc.

We also have a human side. We also have our things that make us special and make us unique. And we are very multifaceted, right? So this part is it's also a bit about human understanding, empathy, inclusion, diversity, etc. And one cool thing was that we prepared a lot actually. before Cubicon Atlanta, we became more visible. We had actually a few panels at Cubcon Atlanta, a few sessions. We had a kiosk actually going on, if you remember, like all the kiosk with different

open stores projects. We had there a kiosk with our working groups, talking about what we are doing, and we are meeting monthly. And that's really, really great. Things are starting to happen and more people are joining us. That's awesome. fantastic because it's, you know, I'm sure you hear a lot of stuff about what's going on in the United States these days, right? But most companies have been forced to drop their DEI initiatives, especially if they want to do any business with the government. And so in the corporate world, at least you see all the improvements towards inclusion that were made, you know, at least on paper getting cut. right now I think a lot of companies are still encouraging inclusion but not officially as a statement

right but to me especially when I was looking over some of the stuff you were doing you know in the notes you sent over I was really encouraged to find out that it's more at a corporate level but when you're going to the communities when you're going into the you know the conventions the open source projects that there's all this inclusion still going on because as you said, there's a lot of people that are neurodiverse working in tech, and I think that's actually one of the strengths, right? Because you need somewhat different brain wiring to look at the challenges of coding and computing in a different way and in a new light. So I think it's just beneficial for everything from that point of view. So I'm just happy, especially, you know,

living in the environment I live in these days. Yeah, no, and that's totally the reaction we got from people when we started to talk about this. I mean, physically when we were on site at Kupon, Atlanta, that people approach and say, hey, you are doing like a wonderful thing. You know, I never spoke about with anybody about this. I wish, like, you know, we could take this moment and get this going. And it was really nice because administratively we put a lot of effort, you know, like we did a bunch of podcasts.

We had the panel, we talked with people. Right now we keep the momentum going for KubeConnor, Amsterdam. So definitely we already starting to lay the groundwork. The moment we are creating like best practices, let's say, yeah, best practices documentation that we want to polish and submitted to CNCF. Like this, you know, employers, employees can take a look and see, these are the best practices for the neurodiversity group. So we need to be careful about this type of issues or we need to embrace this.

We need to be careful. You have like resources. You can go to this particular website or. And I think that's, that's amazing. Once you like open the gates and the communication, a lot more support is happening. I can now encourage every listener that might be new to the topic, neurodiversity and also merge forward. We will add also the links to the description

just to make sure that everybody finds the content. I have one more topic to cover, which is an event that you are also actively engaged in, which is coming up in May. I'm talking about Cloud Native Days, Romania. And I remember when I rewatched The recording from Cloud Native Days Austria, you had your first or second slide up and it says, like, everyone is a volunteer as a nice motto. From your words, Maisie, basically, can you tell us a little bit about that event that you're planning in Romania and maybe encouraging some of our listeners, whether they are close to Romania, whether they always wanted to come to Romania, whether they always wanted to speak about things and take this as an opportunity to put in a CFP called for

papers. Tell us what is cloud native days Romania? What can people expect? And what is your kind of contribution to it? Yeah, of course. So first of all, Romania is my home country. And I stumbled upon Cloud Native Days Romania by by chance as an event this year. When I submitted a CFP, I submitted a talk. Actually, and I got accepted this year in May. I went there as a speaker and I really liked it not because you know like I saw so many speakers and so many people organizers involved from my own country but the fact that the event itself had a lot of spread right so it had like 400 participants it had a day full of workshop a day full of talks people coming like talking about very like new topics AI and

security and many many different cool things and I was really happy you know that my country is organizing this. Clonative days is like, let's see, an umbrella of events, right? Right now we have many events throughout Europe, especially Clonative Days, Italy, etc. So we have loads of them. We are taking the momentum. There are, I think, former KCD events. So some of them like transformed from KCD and they accepted, well, they rebranded into Clown Native Days.

and why I joined as an organizer this year because to be honest, the whole organizing team really motivated me and energize me. And I was like, oh, these people are doing this volunteer work, they put so much work, like organized everything, went through so much preparation to just give opportunity to people to speak, to share knowledge, talk about clonative technologies,

and for me that was great. I wanted to be part of it. So this is what I'm doing now. We are definitely preparing the whole event. The CFP is already open. It's open until 7th of February. We definitely want to have more women speakers. Speakers from, like I said, underrepresented group.

So, you know, definitely we encourage that. A lot of topics as well. We have workshops. We have also a lot of tracks for three tracks for the talks. And yeah, from the perspective of where the event is in Bucharest, the capital. So if you've never been like to Romania or if you wanted to see like another capital in Eastern Europe, there is your moment. So you can definitely cross that and put it on your on your to-do list in your map. And I'm also very much looking forward to it because I will be there as well.

Because thanks to you and the organizer team, you reached out to have an MC. So I'm very happy to be there on stage and welcome the speakers on stage and do my roles in MC. So folks, the link to Cloud Native Days, Romania is actually very easy. Cloudnativedays.ro, which is the top level domain for Romania. it's May 18 to 19th next year a beautiful city of Bucharest and very much looking forward to being there and so great that you are

not only contributing to open source but to the whole community so that's just encouraging so Andy I got to say that you know in the 1980s an MC was you know someone who rapped as well so I hope you take that to heart

when you emce at the event and maybe come up with something to do there. It's probably, rapping might even be better than yodling because obviously as an Austrian, I could yodel my way around the stage, but I don't know

how to yodel. I may be able to pick up some tips from rappers. We'll see. We'll see what happens. People will be able to find it on YouTube, I'm sure, because everything is recorded. Awesome.

Did we, well, thank you so much for the conversation. Did we miss anything? Any final words, any final thoughts for encouragement for people that now, like Brian, you can already see Brian. I think he's already secretly, he has opened the CNZF page for open source projects to contribute. And what else do we need to tell Brian to actually make the step to sign up for his first good issue? Yeah. Well, I think for me was like also intimidating the first time, like seeing the documentation

there that sometimes can be too, how can I say, it can hit you, you know, like being too broad, right? And you don't know, like, hey, where do I need to go? What should I do? Like too many good first issues. Just talk to people, right? So you have like Slack channels, you have the community, write something in the channel, find something that, you know, you can, you can, you can, you can be empathic, like, from a human perspective, or even use your frustration about something that is not going right. Like, you know, you turn up the page on some projects like, oh, this issue is not the way I want it. It's a bug or I want to improve this. Do it. Turn your frustration in your first good issue.

And I think that will be work wonders on yourself and your contributions. I just want to dig into that a little bit. So I think, you know, I'm just thinking from, obviously I've never done any of this stuff, right? But thinking from the GitHub model, and obviously a lot of projects are hosted in a repository like that. So what you're suggesting is if you're using one of these open source tools and you come up with, you come, you run into a problem where something doesn't seem to be working right. Instead of just opening an issue to say this isn't working, what you're saying is, hey, try to fix that and then submit the fix. for it, right? Which is, I think, a fantastic, because we all run, no matter even, you know, commercial code, there's always issues everywhere, right? So I think that's just a fantastic

great idea, especially if you're looking on the development side or even in the documentation side, right? If you're looking and it's like, oh, this is how you use it and it doesn't make sense. We've all run into documentation that doesn't quite make sense or is a little bit outdated. And that's another great easy step. See, Andy? I'm giving myself ideas even, but. Yeah, look it to you know, just go through. And if you find something that doesn't seem right, submit a fix. Worst thing that happens is it doesn't get accepted, but you've tried and you've submitted it.

And next time you're becoming part of the community. And I just want to say, too, I think the community thing is great. We've seen this time and time again in the IT community where everybody shares, right? Not just in the open source projects, but in general, people going to conventions and speaking and sharing knowledge. Of course, people love to share things that went very well, but we also see in love when people share things that didn't go well, right? These are the mistakes we made, and this is what everyone learns from it.

And now with the inclusion community that you're helping and all that stuff going on, it just never stops. It's always, I'm going to sound corny here, but it's always the people who are doing the right thing, right? you might see stuff from governments or corporations or whatever that are cutting these things out. But if you're part of the communities, the community of the people, you're always going to be around people who are doing the right thing. So it's fantastic to see it's still going. Absolutely. I mean, this is one of the things I got close to it.

And like what Andy said, like you get so close to frustration and hurdles. Because, you know, life is life and things happen. But then something comes up and, you know, you get a notch from somebody. You get a question. You get frustrated about something. And then you get like a really cool, awesome idea. And it's like, oh, yeah, I'm going to fix this. I'm going to turn this.

Oh, why did I never thought about that? So you get that human perspective and it's really nice. Or you're laying your bed, I don't know, at night. And you're like, oh, I'm thinking about this talk. I could, like, create this awesome CFP about a panel and get my friends or my colleagues. and we can start contributing. So there are different ways to be creative, you know, and motivated, get, you know, motivated about the contributions.

I'm blown away, Brian. Thank you so much for also chiming in and being obviously inspired by what Deanna said earlier. No, thank you so much. Also, I have one thing, another venue for you, Deanna, to spread your enthusiasm about this topic. because Cloud Native Day is Austria, you spoke to this year, we just opened up the CFP for next year. We will be back in Vienna at the same venue in September.

So we're looking for contributors. I'm sure there's going to be topics again that you could present to inspire our local folks here in Austria. That would be great. Yeah, definitely. Excellent. Yeah, I think with this, I'm looking forward to seeing you again. I assume we will see each other. at KubeCon Amsterdam, which happens end of March.

Do you have talks accepted already? Are you waiting for the co-located events? Yes, I'm waiting for the collocated events. Yes. Yeah. Same here. Same here. That's going to be January 6th, I think, is when they're sending out the notifications.

Yeah. Everybody's like, ah, cannot wait. Yeah. Totally. Yeah, and I'm looking forward to meet the community. obviously I think for me last time Atlanta was the first KubeCon so I got a bit emotional yeah definitely I'm looking for for the next one in Amsterdam awesome Brian I'm looking forward to your first pull request to your first

I can contribute music and photography that's my open source hey you know what every open source project needs a good promo video honestly well that's video editing. Yeah, I'm talking about photos or music. I could do, I could do theme songs for their Yeah, yeah.

Come up with an open telemetry theme song, gazing into the stars or, I don't know, something like that. That's something. I'll keep that back of my head if something starts coming.

I just might have to do that. That would be a really awesome thing. Or on feature flakes. Flip my switch. Oh, baby. You can flip my, yeah. And you should be a pop

I can see the MC in you right now. Exactly, here we go. There you go. All right. Well, it was great talking to you, Andy and Brian was really amazing. And yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing you next and apply to Clarnative Days, Austria, and you know, get the ball rolling on the open source contributions. Sounds good.

Oh, and before I forget, our last episode that we did was the first one of the New Year, but this is the second one. We hadn't said, happy New Year or anything. Oh, happy New Year. Happy New Year. Oh, yeah. Happy New Year. Oh, this was also, this is our 251st episode. So we also, we missed New Year's and our 250th episode last time. We just totally blew by. So, yeah. Diana, you are the first episode on the road from 250 to 300. So. Amazing. Thank you for helping us usher in that. Let's see if we can make it to 300. Thanks everyone for listening. And Deanna, Thank you so much for being on the show today. We really, really appreciate it.

Keep up all the great stuff you're doing. Andy, as always, I don't know. Good luck being an emcee. And thank you. I will keep my patience and heal. And heal. All right, thanks, everybody. Bye-bye.