Mentoring is a quintessential element for career advancement in the community, as teaching and helping to hone talent serve as a major contribution in the software development industry. Mentorships as way to boost contributions to Kubernetes is a case in point. In many respects, the future of Kubernetes depends on active members in the community.

On hand to discuss the essential role mentoring plays in Kubernetes’ growth, Libby Clark, editorial director at The New Stack, hosted a podcast at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America in Seattle. Her guests included:

Paris Pittman,  a developer relations program manager at Google Cloud who is also a coach at and subproject owner of special interest group Contributor Experience. “Contributor Experience is literally what it is: the experience of our upstream contributors,”  Pittman said. “And one of the subprojects that I do own is mentoring.”

Tim Pepper, a senior staff engineer at VMware’s open source technology center. Pepper has been involved in Contributor Experience as well and his aim is to do “anything I can to help make it easier for new folks coming on board.” He is also one of the chairs of the Kubernetes SIG release, and as part of that, “we try to really practice the cycle of mentorship,” Pepper said.

Nikhita Raghunath, a freelance software engineer originally from India who just over two years ago “did not even know what Kubernetes was,” before securing an internship at  Google Summer of Code last year. Today,  Raghunath helps run the Google Summer of Code and Outreachy Internship programs.