OpenTelemetry Contribfest at KubeCon North America 2023
This year marked many milestones for the OpenTelemetry project. The project achieved the goals it had set in 2019 by announcing the general availability of of the logging signal, the last of the signals it had originally committed to. In addition, the project continued to grow the number of contributors, being the second most active project in the CNCF for a second year in a row, behind Kubernetes.
What’s Contribfest?
In an effort to bring more contributors to the table, OpenTelemetry maintainers
hosted the project’s first Contribfest at KubeCon
North America 2023. The goal of a Contribfest is to bring people with all levels
of experience together with community members to work through the steps needed
to make a contribution to the project. This year,
Juraci,
Anthony,
Tyler, Daniel,
and myself volunteered to host the event and
guide newcomers. The hosts of the session prepared ahead of time by combing
through various repositories and labelling issues with the Contribfest label.
Since the session is only 90 minutes long, it was important to try and find
items that would be appropriate to tackle in that time. Some slides were also
prepared, to give attendees an overview of the project, help them navigate the
repositories, and explain the process of submitting code.
The event
When the day of the event arrived, the room was completely full. After a few minutes to cover the content in the slides, contributors were ready to write some code, and questions came in fast. Questions from contributors ranged across all levels of expertise, and many OpenTelemetry community members came to the session to help answer them. The session began with 53 open issues, and by the end of the session, 2 pull requests had already been merged with another 11 pull requests having been opened.
Even more importantly than the contributions themselves, many great conversations and much learning stemmed from the collaborations both for the hosts and the attendees. The planning has already started for the next Contribfest. Thanks to all the participants for making this inaugural event such a success.