And before I begin, I want to acknowledge where I am today in Northern California. Um on the traditional ancestral unseeded land um of the Ellos, uh specifically the Mutton region um below San Jose, below San Francisco and Northwestern University has this great quote that I'm gonna read.

It's important to understand the long standing history that has brought you to reside on the land and to seek to understand your place within that history. Land, Acknowledgments do not exist in the past tense. They're right now they're here. Um It's an ongoing process and we need to build our mindfulness of our present participation. My name is Amy June Heinlein. Um I use the pronoun, she and her Amy June is Title Camel Case all one word. Um If you yell Amy or a, you know, see me on the street, I don't usually answer to that. So it's Amy June. There's a QR code here. If you want to connect with me on linkedin, I use the profile Volkswagen Chick across all of the medias and you'll understand why. Um Momentarily as I get into the presentation and I'm not gonna really go into a lot about who I am right now because this is a presentation about my journey. So you'll, you'll hear plenty about me in a bit. Um But I will say that I'm the community manager on the editorial team for open source.com. Um I need to acknowledge Spot. Um His name is Spotty MC spots a lot. We call him Spot for short. He is on a diet and it is breakfast time.

So you may hear him because he's very upset with not having as much food as he's used to. Um So I just wanna acknowledge him if he comes on board. We also have Pantera. She's here somewhere, but she's kind of a ninja. So she's either hiding in the closet. You know, I don't think we'll see her but um she's around too. So day to day. I'm on the editorial team for Open source.com. I work as their community manager. I help recruit new authors. I nurture um existing authors. I help spread the word of open source and week to week. I build relationships through linkedin and event management and event attendance. So you'll see this um table of contents throughout the slide deck um Just to reinforce where we are in the journey. Um But I wanna talk a little bit about my life before open source. Um How did I get to be where I am today? How did I get to be on the editorial team and a community manager for open source.com? How did I become a drupal core um maintainer, you know, things like that. Um So let's look at a few of the things that I did in my past that helped shape my present. I grew up in northern California most of my life, I was raised by my grandparents. Um You know, there was apple trees and cows and marching bands. Um I went to the local community college and then to university. I'm the youngest sibling of many.

Um, but I come from a broken family. Um I never once lived with all of my siblings. I can't remember a time when all of us were in the same town, let alone the same room. Um We did not all lead the same kind of life. Um I was a ward of the state until my second year in high school when I was adopted by my grandparents. Now I did live with privilege to some extent, you know, I grew up white, you know, in northern California and all my basic needs were met. I was able to study, earn good grades, get scholarships to college. Um being the youngest sibling, you know, came with its own unique challenges. You know, one of them being when I was driving age, my grandparents were at retirement age at that point. Um And the only car left to hand me down to hand down to me was this, um really crappy Volkswagen bug. Admittedly that's a very first world challenge. Um But at every stoplight, you know, I'd have to get out of the driver's seat, run to the back of the car, fiddle with some wires, connect some tubes and yes, a Volkswagen engines in the back of the car. Um But I had this book called the Volkswagen Guide for the complete idiot. And following its guidance, I managed just fine having that car in high school. Fast forward to after college. I took a job at a Volkswagen machine shop in Santa Cruz.

And I learned how to tear down an air cooled Volkswagen and rebuild it from the original parts. Mostly with that assistance from that idiot's guide because the shop manuals at the machine shop made certain levels of assumptions that I actually had skills. Um, when I was young, I spent a lot of my holidays and vacations, um visiting relatives because we were very spread out. Like I said, we didn't all live together. Um We visited New York, Arizona, Alaska, Philadelphia. My mom was always in a new place every summer. Um, all over the United States during college, I took a much needed sabbatical kind of just needed to get away and be by myself. And I traveled all over North America living out of this, like really cruddy Dodge cab over recreational vehicle. Um I left Sebastopol with no money, nothing like a backpack full of stuff. And, um, I went with a friend and the only way we had of um gathering cash was we sold this jewelry that we made out of recycled copper wire and we only, oh, ever just sold enough to like get enough to eat, to sustain ourselves and get gas to go to the next town to do the adventure again.

I could have gone to Europe. Um But a friend of mine reminded me of how our own continent has cultures that are really vast and unique. Uh Kansas and Texas are nothing like Northern California or Central Oregon. And you know, if we talk about North America, Guatemala and Belize have ecosystems that Vancouver just can't reproduce. Now, I hold a few degrees in different things. Um But caretaking has always been a very important part of my life. Um at the Quaker Church, I'm a Sunday school teacher. I work in the nursery. I mentor the youth group. I am a nurse. Um And yes, even though I have a tech job, I'm still a nurse and I still practice. Um But I started out as a volunteer in high school at the nursing home, you know, serving Friday coffee and every July pushing the residents around in their wheelchairs. At the county fair, I would visit sick and elderly, you know, neighbors, I delivered meals on wheels. I worked at state facilities for a while as a nursing aide to put myself through college. And eventually I moved into nursing through a series of circumstances that I went to school for mechanical engineering and I got a degree and I decided I didn't want to work with my, my head. I want to work with my heart.

So I went back to school and got my degree in nursing and I dabbled in restorative therapy. Um I worked in the intensive care unit. I worked on labor and delivery. But the first time someone passed away when I was with them, I knew hospice was my calling. I felt really blessed that this person at this specific time chose right then with me to pass away and I was with them for that journey. I am the mother of two Children, although they're not really Children anymore. Um We've lived through poverty, divorce disease and some really poor decisions on my part, you know, they're grown now and they're on their own making really good decisions and they're doing a fantastic job at being good humans uh later in life. Um After nursing, I went back to university and studied communications. Um I studied intercultural uh small group and interpersonal communications. And I worked in the human resources department at a Bay Area college and I love to see things grow. Um plants are a lot like my Children.

Um But I've been gardening way before my Children existed, you know, um but like Children, you're, they're kind of grown from that seed. You provide the right environment and the nourishment and they really flourish and grow I don't wanna like allude to anything and don't get me wrong.

There's times when things get lost in the weeds, you know, months after harvest, there's this certain feeling of awe when I go out in my backyard and there's a squash laying underneath some debris or there's a hidden carrot that I didn't catch and it's, you know, inches across and a foot long.

Um, just remember we sometimes get lost in the weeds. So what did these experiences teach me? It doesn't matter who you are where you come from, we all die. We all meet our makers and everyone poops. Ok. That's really important. And I'm gonna say that again, it doesn't matter who you are, it doesn't matter where you come from, we all pass away and we all go to where we think we need to go and everyone poops. We are all the same yet, we're different. So every person has their own sense of self and beauty. Things can look the same on the outside and be very different on the inside. Um There's a picture of a row of Volkswagens that all look like they're split windows. Um There on the, I don't know if it's mirrored, it's on my left. So maybe it's your right. I don't know. Um But the black and white picture here, now those Volkswagens all look the same, but the interiors are different, you know, they might have a radio or they might have a radio block off plate. They could have a 25 horsepower engine, they could have no back seat, they could have seat belts, all sorts of different things. And then we can be very different on the outside and yet be very similar on the inside, you know.

So I have this color picture of the Volkswagen vans lined up and a lot of them look the same or a lot of them, you know, they're different colors, they're different styles, but the inside is basically the same. It's about self expression. You know, it's important to create opportunities to help folks of different ethnic and cultural groups, you know, excluded communities to find common ground, you know, respect differences and appreciate what people can bring to conversations. We all experience love and fear, we and we all have our own circumstances.

You know, our past is not always reflected in our outside appearances. We can never really know what someone else's journey was like. You know, I felt my privilege when I go visit my siblings and I'm, I was actually embarrassed by my privilege. You know, they weren't blessed with the luck to have all their basic needs met. You know, there was poverty abuse neglect. And then I wanna finish off that we all have our own beliefs. You know, it goes back to when I talked about going to our maker that we, you know, uh that we go back to where we think we, we we need to go. So my journey into open source, you know, I don't have a computer science degree. I don't have full command of any programming language. Um Sure, you know, like many my age, um I had the obligatory wordpress blog in college and when my kids were growing up, I took some HTML and CS S classes at the community college when I went back for nursing because it wasn't required the first time around. So I have that basic, like, you know, I can make a table and turn it yellow if I want, you know. Um But surely that's not enough to be where I'm at in open source. Is it?

Um I know this isn't a Drupal conference, but my roots are in Drupal. Um And this image has been recreated a few times and I'm gonna describe it in a moment. Um It's a chart of the learning curve of Drupal taken from this blog called the Seven stages of Drupal's Learning curve. And I have the link here. But if you, if you search for um the seven stages of Drupal learning curve, it's a, it's a creative little analogy of how hard it is to learn Drupal. Um The top line of the graph reflects Drupal and the colored lines beneath are things like Jumla wordpress and some other um content management systems. But this Drupal curve is so steep that the curve actually goes backwards and there's stick figure people hanging from nooses and falling off the cliff and there's like debris and um spears at the bottom of the cliff. But not only that, once you get over that backwards hump and are kind of on this plateau, we see that, you know, the, the curve flattens, but folks are getting bulldozed and pushed off the line.

So why would I want to move from a comfortable career in nursing to this? Some of the story is too personal to share during a presentation that's gonna live on the internet forever. But really it was time for a change. And ironically enough, the fact that everyone poops is one of the reasons I got out of nursing, getting home to discover that someone else's poop is on my elbow. I can only take it so many times before I packed up my ball and go and went home, literally someone's poop on my elbow. So it started with some content entry on a personal site that was built in Drupal, you know, but content entry wasn't enough. I wanted to be able to dictate more of the look and the feel of the site. I remember back from my HTML and CS S classes that, that was something I might have control over. Um I learned what fields were in the back end, the back administrative user interface for Drupal. I wanted to control how the content was displayed. Um I'm married into Drupal. Um So I had some unique uh experience. So I attended my first tech event before I was in Drupal. Um But because I was in Drupal through marriage, I attended my first tech event. It was 2015 at Stanford Web Camp because I live in the Bay area and Bay Area Drupal Camp.

We call it bad camp for short. Um It was much different than any nursing symposium or conference I'd ever gone to. Um Yeah, by minute three, I discovered that these were my people. It just clicked and this was the group of people I was meant to be around and to learn from and to, to just be with, you know, and so after some research, I decided to take the dive and learn how to make those changes, I wanted, I attended um uh Drupal Easy Career online and went eight weeks and learned how to do Drupal.

Um But with learning Drupal, I wanna show this learning curve kind of the same way, but a little bit different. Um You know, it's just another version of that learning curve. The traditional timeline started like mine, you know, content entry and site building. That's where you're, you know, you're in the you administrative interface and not doing any code. Um But then I moved to code um I graduated Drupal Easy and they helped me get an internship at a mission driven agency which aligned with my goals, which was really nice because I left a very not quite altruistic but a very um heartfelt field. And I wanted to make sure that when I was in technology, I could make an impact. So I work for a mission driven agency, but I had a really tough time code was not for me. Um If any of y'all are familiar with setting up local environments, you know, or doing work and code, you have to have a local instance on your machine to do the development so you can push it up to the, to the environment and the hosting environment. Um This would lead to tears and heartache. The other developers made it look so easy, but I struggled and I couldn't understand why I'm this smart person with multiple degrees. I finally risked vulnerability and asked for help.

Now, the reason I say vulnerability is because um this first agency I worked for, there was only two women coders out of 12. And so I felt like I couldn't ask for help because of the stereotypes that come with women in tech. So I risked vulnerability and I asked my mentor, his name was John Houlette. Um And he said, you know what I know, you don't know anything. I've been waiting for you to ask and it got easier once I knew that it was OK, that I didn't know what I was doing and it took that being vulnerable, open source technology can be hard, you know, but you know what open source is not just about the code. And I discovered the code part wasn't for me, I learned to be confident in knowing that I didn't know everything. And we should remember that confidence is specific to its domain. You know, I had to learn to have the confidence to tell folks that I was a novice or beginner or that was outside of my skill set. And that is something that really shaped my path to contributions and those unique experiences brought unique opportunities to my life. You know, I'm a very firm believer that when we include everyone, it builds a better world. Um and this extends to the web and our digital assets as well.

You know, being a hospice nurse, I understand how some folks have challenges processing the web or digital assets or even something like email. Um Imagine someone, you know, really close um to closing their eyes forever trying to check their email, but they have to have a nurse read some very private material to them. Um But, you know, uh not only folks with physical disabilities have access um difficulties accessing the web.

There's people who live with cognitive and behavioral challenges as well and it goes back to making assumptions. You know, there are all kinds of ways to surf the web, but think about all of the ways that we develop the web as well. Not everyone has access to high speed internet or computer with enough power to run something like the local environment like Docker. Um There are social and economic barriers as well and I found that most of the ways I gave back to open source came back to making sure that everyone's included, you know, regardless of gender, race, cognitive ability, knowledge level, you know, all of those things um to talk a little bit about assumptions, but assumptions is really important to me, you know.

Um I ha I, I always wanna stress the point that I do have privilege and I acknowledge it. You know, I'm like I said, a white woman in Northern California. But can you tell from looking, just looking at me that I come from a broken home? Can you tell that I had to rely on sports scholarships and academic scholarships um to go to college? Can you tell from looking at me that I live with hidden disabilities? I might have worked at a machine shop. Um But did you know that they told me I had to stay in the back? So customers wouldn't know a woman was working on their engine. Um I might be up here on stage now and seem confident, but I used to be terrified to go in front of folks to give a presentation and making assumptions about a person or a group of people can really build walls. You know, we should never assume a person's political stance um or gender or socio-economic level, family composition, sexuality, pronouns, you know, again, it goes back to that slide where we acknowledge the differences and we appreciate the similarities and this really comes down to removing barriers that come from when we make assumptions.

Remember they build walls, you know. Um And it's not about lowering the barriers. You know, people talk about lowering the barrier to tech all the time. It's about removing the barriers and it's a really long haul. Um An example I like to give um is I uh help organize an event called Midwest Drupal Camp, Mid Camp. And um you know, we have this um diversity statement that we welcome speakers from all different backgrounds, religions, all of the things. Um So all religions are welcome. But then the organizers make sure that there's foot washing stations in the restroom so our Muslim friends can practice their religion the way they'd like. Um And you know, there's quiet places for prayer. So being invited is one thing and including people is really different, falling down.

Um These are a couple pictures of my kids falling down. Um I hate that I took a picture rather than help my kid the one time, but it just happened to be, that's the picture that clicked when he was on the pole. Um If we think about all the times we've fallen, we've gotten back up for the most part. And one note on failures is failures don't land so hard when we have the support of a team or a mentor, mentors can be anyone who has helped us through an adventure and let us where we are today. And this is a picture of a few of my mentors. I'm not gonna get into who they are. But um mentors have really driven my path. So you've learned about my experiences, you've learned about, you know what I've learned. So how do all of these things, especially those failures lead to triumphs? You know, um it's been a long journey for me. Um And I'm gonna take a sip of coffee because it's still only in the six o'clock hour here. But it really came to having compassion for myself. So have compassion for yourself. You know, it helps to take, it helps us when we're compassionate to our own selves and to others. It allows us to take risks because we know that it's ok to fail.

Sometimes confidence is really linked to action to doing. Um and experiencing failure brings resilience under confidence, usually results in a lack of action. So remember, confidence is linked to doing that action and it's cyclical, you know, failures lead to triumphs. And it's sort of like the, the Volkswagen bug with the 25 horsepower engine trying to get uphill. Once you get momentum, you can start really, you know, going on your journey. Um Again, you know, my roots are in Drupal and I didn't touch the Drupal core code base for a while. At first I stuck to contributed projects. Um These are extensions or sometimes they're called plugins in different um in different ecosystems. Um I felt more comfortable sticking with like, not like the drupal but the extensions when I felt more comfortable, you know, after about a year, I tackled an issue that was marked novice, you know, for a beginner painstakingly went through the code looking for spelling mistakes because this was a spelling mistakes issue, felt accomplished.

Um submitted a review to the patch because I wasn't ready for a patch yet, but I was ready to review someone else's code. Um But then a core maintainer made a comment asking me if I had gripped the issue and um wasn't very nice about it, assumed I knew what Grep meant. Um I kind of know what it means now six years later, but at the time, I had no idea what it was. Um remember this issue was marked novice for beginners, you know, it. But her comment and the way her language came across to me kept me out of Drupal core issue. QE for quite some time, they use language. I considered gatekeeping like phrases like just do this. It's as easy as this. And when you're first starting out, not a whole lot is easy. Um So again, I stuck with con control projects and about a year later, a new version of Drupal came out and I was doing something for a client and I noticed a typo in the U I and I was like, oh my gosh, how did this escape people?

So it was a U I, it was forward facing very exciting stuff. Um And I was the one that caught it. I was so excited. I created an issue and I submitted a patch, but I was so intent on that one little mistake. I found that I, I found that there were other mistakes later on in the same sentence that had to do with grammar. So I submitted another patch and then I thought I had to submit a patch for a different version and it was just a hot mess in that issue. But when I posted the issue and the solution, I commented that this was my first patch and core and the maintainer was so nice and so understanding and walked me through the process again, that vulnerability of letting folks know that I'm a novice, right? Then with their response to me in the issue queue, I knew I could be a mentor. I wanted to be the person that inspired and empowered everyone to contribute. And now there's always some developer in the crowd that says, oh, it's just a Typo, but that's very reductive. And our path to contributions have to start somewhere. And in software, our clients and our perspective, users see the user interface and documentation first.

So when we give demos and when we evaluate our projects, um they're evaluating the code and grammar and punctuality, readability and spelling all matter just the same as code, all of it gives the project credibility. This is true. A typo can break the whole code base or a space if you're using twig. Um, but all of these things give the project credibility and it's just as important to maintain the high standards with the forward facing side of drupal as we do with the code, Uh, conflicts happen. You know, I'm like I said, I'm the youngest sibling of many. Um I once had two teenage boys at once. Um Well, they're in their twenties now and they pretty much act the same. Um I've had a job and employers react in bad ways. You know, words can be tricky and emotions can run high. Um There's one specific thing I wanna talk about one before I talk about this community health group is I had an employer have a less than ideal reaction when I handed in a resignation one time they were threatening in a physical space, but they also slandered me online. I had to file a code of conduct incident report because they were damaging my reputation um by accusing me of things I didn't do.

And when I was applying to speak at conferences, folks asked me if this was true and I was like, I didn't even know that was out there. So I filed this code of conduct um report. Um but the resolution was weird and convoluted and that person continued to be allowed to show up in my spaces and be threatening through microaggressions that not a whole lot of folks could see unless they saw the, knew the story behind it. You know, again, conflicts happen, especially when we have all kinds of folks from all different avenues collaborating with each other. I work a lot in issue cues and um uh and I'm in chat a lot. You know, I see first ho ha hand how language can break down from the use of hey guys to people who use language that takes the shape of gatekeeping or maybe English isn't their first language and something doesn't translate, right? So I really became interested in helping with the Drupal Code of conduct. So I joined the Drupal Community working group on their community health team. I've been there for a couple of years now and on the community health team, I and a few others are really responsible for developing and producing community health initiatives including um online because of the state of the world. Um And in-person community health workshops.

Um We've created these like issue cue nudges for um when people, when emotions run high, we have these nudges that you can put in place to remind people to take a break or maybe how their language might not be inclusive. Um I proactively work together with the Drupal community to make a safer and more welcoming place for everyone. And that stemmed from, you know, having that conflict live demos are weird. Let's all admit it. You know, think about all the things that could go wrong and they will.

Um I like to give pragmatic talks. This is kind of a new talk for me talking about myself and like the sort of inspirational part of it. But historically, I like to give pragmatic talks where folks can walk away with a skill and it usually comes from a demo. Um They used to make me nervous, you know, uh This circles back to falling down. I demoed creating a patch and it was empty. I've demoed a tool but the tool happened to be under maintenance at the time I gave the talk. Um The internet's not always reliable. I've been demoed an accessibility tool on a website that I swore was inaccessible and then found out during my demo they'd corrected a bunch of issues and I had nothing to demo. After doing these demos for a while, I realized that we're all the better for when we witness people make mistakes. And there's a couple of reasons for that first. It shows that we're all human. You know, my, my heroes in tech have given demos and they're making mistakes. So it makes me feel ok that I'm making those mistakes too.

And then when you, when your demo kind of fails or doesn't have the anticipated results, it's a live troubleshooting event where everyone can help and you can get, you know, audience, you know, participation and things like that. Um Because if they all come across the same issue later, then they already know how to fix them. My passion for keeping vintage Volkswagens on the road translated really into this methodical and logical approach that drives much of how I code and how I approach uh Q A and problem solving. Um I'm not so much of a code developer, but I am a developer. I do a lot of Q A and a lot of accessibility testing. Um Not necessarily in the position I have now at open source.com, but in some agency life before. Um but one of the more straightforward ways to give back um to our open source projects when we're not yet coders or don't plan to be coders is through documentation. And I love contributing documentation, you know, um it comes back to that past life as being the Volkswagen enthusiast, you know, being a woman at the machine shop was hard.

I relied on technical manuals to extend my knowledge because I was too fearful to ask for help from the other shop shop people. Um But if steps were skipped on how to perform a service, I was stuck. And it really made me aware how documentation should be written for everyone and who better to test documentation and improve them the new contributors or people who aren't familiar with the with the process, just as much as our failures lead to our triumphs. You know, our passions can lead us there too. You know, have your passion be your compass. Um contributed projects and modules. This is a list of uh projects I maintain on drupal.org. I have other projects too. But again, you know, most of my roots are in Drupal. Um It's important to work on things that excite you, you know, develop community projects. You know, there's a list up here of all the projects. It's a long list, but only a few of them are code projects. The rest are events and community focused. You can see up here, there's a Drupal coffee exchange like how, what does that have to do with tech? Well, we have birds of a feather boss. The Drupal Coffee exchange brings people together through coffee. I've met so many wonderful people because of our love for coffee. You know, we take a break from our tech event and we go exchange bags of coffee. We run a mail exchange a few times a year and we meet in person.

Um I'm a very passionate person and I love everyone, you know, and I love empowering people to contribute. Drupal runs on what 3% of the web and wordpress, 40% of the web. Think about how many millions of websites a person has influenced by contributing back without able, inspired volunteers. A lot of our open source projects would wither and die. It's gotten a little bit better over the last few years where organizations are paying for contrib time, but we're still basically volunteer run, you know, and mentors are the key to success for the maintenance of a lot of our open source projects. Mentoring is part of Drupal's, one of Drupal's core principles, fostering a learning environment. It's about getting a person to contribute. Well, it's not about getting a person to contribute. Actually, it's about empowering them to be a long term contributor. Um I, so I, I am inspired to lead first time contributor workshops from the lens of a non developer which really helps um people get into, you know, our human resource people, our sales people, our um site builders, you know, and our content editors can all give back to Drupal because I frame it in a different lens.

You know, I've worked my way through the through the ranks. Um I'm now a Drupal core mentor and coordinator and I lead those first time contributor workshops at the regional national and international level. I mentioned this before. Um local environments are a nightmare for me, you know.

Um But you know what, you don't need a local environment sometimes to give back to your code bases. And we, I didn't need one to help with Drupal. I discovered the Simply Test me project and my confidence was boosted 1000 times. Uh This is a browser based server for everyone and anyone who could spin up a project, test features, test patches and test, test, merge requests and you can use it to market and collaborate with others. It's a very dynamic project. But when I first discovered this project, it had the forecast of cloudy with a chance of deprecation. And that really scared me because this is how I you know avoided that local environment and tears. And this led to me being an advocate for the service. I now help test the new platform. I help with documentation I market and coordinate talks. You know, I act as their community manager and I'm an inclusion and accessibility ad advocate because one of my passions is the community is stronger when everyone's included, not just invited but included, you know, I used to be terrified presenting at conferences, but now I'm not.

So I help mentor by leading diverse speaker workshops and writer workshops for excluded communities. I love sharing what I know I love empowering people and um women and people from excluded groups to talk at our meetups. And you know, the more we see people that look like ourselves, the more inspired we are. And remember, I'm a hospice nurse by trade. So I know firsthand, you know, it's hard for some folks to access information. So I run a couple of meetups. One of them being Ally Talks, that's accessibility talks. We have people come on once a month um and talk about accessibility I help with my local Drupal user group as well because I wanna make sure that there's a balance of experienced and first time speakers presenting to our group and a balance of highly technical talks with community talks as well.

And here I am today, you know, the community managers of one of the most trusted sites for sharing pragmatic information about open source. Do I know everything about open source? No, not at all. Um Am I the best author on the planet? Hell no. Um But I don't have to write to empower others. You know, my passion for Drupal and o other open source software empowers me to give back to the wider community. Um The wider open source community just look at our logo, you know, it's the dandelion and we're spreading seeds, you know, isn't that just a really lovely concept? It can be organic with the wind or it or we can blow the seeds ourselves, you know, um in a particular direction and I prefer a little bit of both. Um I know the phrase easy is gatekeeping, but I pulled it from a fortune cookie, you know, years ago, begin, the rest is easy. So I like to say begin, the rest is easier, you know, because that first step and blank page can be overwhelming. So where do you start? You know. Um There's a common phrase that we hear in the Drupal community come for the code. Stay for the community. And it's about community. You know, it's about connections, connecting people through code and any other ways that bring folks together coffee.

You know, and one of the ways we discover is our passion and how we fit into the wider community is to attend events and attendance can turn into more active participation. You know, my first tech event was not, it was such a delight, not just because of the content delivery, but because everyone was so welcoming, but I know not everyone has the same experience. So I make an effort to greet at least three people I haven't met before each event, even every day. Um I remind folks when we're in groups to stand in that Pac Man versus a circle. So there's a space for someone to come in and easily join us without having to hang on to the peripheral. And what do I do as a, you know, community manager, you know, or ambassador at these events? Well, it depends on the camp, but I do just about anything. You know, I volunteer, I speak, I provide trainings. I organize contributions. I ask if they need help because I figure I'm already there. I might as well help them out in some way. And becoming a volunteer or event organizer is more straightforward than most folks think. We don't have to know all the things, but we can give back in a way that helps a team, it helps distribute tasks, it makes the load easier for everyone.

Social media, marketing, volunteer outreach, monitoring the sessions that you're already gonna go to because you wanna learn something. Um And if you want a quick way to meet a lot of people at once, I love working the registration desk, you meet so many people as you're checking them in and when it comes to going to those parties at events where you don't know anyone, remember you've met a whole bunch of people when you check them in and there's some familiar faces for your networking event.

Um So how do you contribute to an open source project? You know, it's not just about code, you know, there's, there's that documentation, I was talking about read mes and how to guides. Um you can run linting and uh check coding standards. You don't necessarily have to know all of the code, but you can learn, know the coding standards, you can write unit tests. Um You can help design logos and design the look and the feel of the project. You can help with marketing the project and getting new contributors. There's also testing it, you know, making sure that the user experience is OK? And that the at the and that the the project is accessible not only for the people using the project, but the people developing the project as well. And then translations. Remember we work in a on a global stage now, especially during the pandemic So translations is super important to, to, to be as inclusive as possible to our friends across the globe. Um I want to wrap it up because I know we're at time. But I want to think about, I want you because I think about it a lot. I want you to think about all of the things in your life that brought to, brought you to where you are today. And imagine if you took your failures and use them in a way that benefits others. And isn't that really the whole idea around open source? We all work together because we have our unique skills and visions and our own experiences and lens on the world, you know.

Um I have it up here. We play to each other's strengths and that's how we build community. Um So we went through all of those things and I wanna say thanks again, here's the QR code um for connecting with me on linkedin. And again, Volkswagen check across all of the spaces and then I do work at open source.com and I love new writers. So if you feel like you want to write for open source.com, I have a link here um that takes you to how you can participate um in being a writer for open source.com. So thank you. Um I was afraid I wouldn't have enough to talk about but turns out I did and um I wanna just remind everyone that it's OK to make mistakes and that's how we learn. Um And I think most of my journey in tech has been from failing and having people help me and being inspired by their help to help others.