Paris Pittman, Developer Relations Program Manager at Google sat down with Kaitlyn Barnard, Cloud Native Computing Foundation(CNCF), to talk about cloud native, trends in the industry, and being an Ambassador. Below is their interview. You can also view the video.
Kaitlyn: Thank you for joining me today to talk a little bit about your work in the community and our CNCF ambassador program. So do you want to start off by just giving us a little brief introduction about yourself?
Paris Pittman: My name’s Paris. I work at Google Cloud. I’m a Developer Relations Program Manager and the Kubernetes community manager. I work on strategy as it relates to the community and do a lot of operations.
Kaitlyn: So how did you get started in cloud-native?
Paris Pittman: Yeah, it actually started in Baltimore when I was living there. I had a meetup group there. It was called Charm City Linux. I think it was like 2015, I started hearing rumblings of this thing called Kubernetes. Of course, I also at the time knew that containers were a thing and that this whole new way of thinking about this abstraction layer was going on. That’s sort of what piqued my interest in learning more about the community, and here we are.
Kaitlyn: So what type of work are you doing in the cloud-native community right now, and why did you want to be an ambassador?
Paris Pittman: Yeah. I think the most obvious thing is that I am a Bay Area meetup organizer, the largest physical meetup in the world for Kubernetes. There’s definitely some others that are inching up, which is awesome, because that’s exactly what we want. I knew that it was going to give a spotlight onto my community and another avenue there for communication network.
Paris Pittman: Then of course support from the CNCF with the awesome program that you all have for meetup support. I do all upstream Kubernetes work at Google for community, so I just thought it was also just a really great fit with my work as well.
Kaitlyn: Are there any kind of trends or goals you have going into the next year?
Paris Pittman: I think my goal next year is actually to get more project management both in my life, as well as my special interest group’s life. We are launching things like canons right now, and it would very much benefit our community to have a little bit more project management. While I don’t necessarily think we need to install the agile manifesto, I definitely think that communicating more via launch timelines and strategy documents and things along those lines would really help us.
Paris Pittman: So that, I think, is a trend that we’ll also see with other special interest groups in the upstream community, and also growing our contributors. We have so many different kinds of personas right now in contributor land. You work with the docs team, so you know that they also have a ton of different personas. Now we’re so large we’re seeing other ones. Other ones are the casual contributor, maybe the code review contributor, the docs contributor and things along those lines. Those people need different pathways into the community, so we’re going to be working on a lot of mentoring initiatives and a lot more doc initiatives.
Kaitlyn: Awesome. I’m personally very excited about that. I’ve also been helping out with the release team these past few cycles. All right, thank you so much for joining me today.
Paris Pittman: Thank you.
Paris Pittman of Google will be speaking at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Barcelona. Paris is featured in three sessions.
Intro: Contributor Experience SIG (with Elsie Phillips, RedHat) – Tuesday, May 21 at 3:55PM – Learn More
Deep Dive: Contributor Experience SIG (with Elsie Phillips, RedHat) – Wednesday, May 22 at 2:00 PM – Learn More
State of Kubernetes Contributor Community – Thursday, May 23 at 11:05 AM – Learn More
Paris Pittman of Google will be speaking at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in Shanghai on Tuesday, June 25 at 2:10 PMIntro: Kubernetes Contributor Experience SIG – Learn More