dod_vancouver.md

DevOpsDays Vancouver Talk Submission

Friday, March 31 - Saturday, April 1, 2017 UBC Robson Square

Bio

David is a Cloud Architect with Kovarus and lives in Boston, MA. He has a background in operations for government, higher education, research, healthcare, and SaaS organizations. David is passionate about open source and contributes to a number of projects primarily related to Puppet.

Title

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Contribute to Open Source

Abstract

I basically fell into this profession. I went to school for political science, not computer science. I didn't learn my skills in a classroom, I learned by screwing up. As I started working in the field, I started to develop a crippling fear. I was convinced I had no idea what I was doing. I was petrified that my boss would wake up one day and realize that I was dead weight and fire me. But then I started to realize, on some level, that I was doing something right and recognized the cognitive dissonance. That didn't really help assuage my fear. As I began to recognize that my feelings weren't justified, I started looking for ways to overcome them. This is when I found open source. Being a part of an open source community helped me fight my impostor syndrome. I'd like to share with you how I learned to stop worrying and contribute to open source.

It creates community when you talk about private things and you can find other people that have the same things. Otherwise, I don't know - I felt very lonely with some of the issues that I had or history that I had. And when I shared about it, I found that others had it, too.
-- Carrie Fisher

http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=503580112