PurePerformance

Contributing to Open Source is easier than ever - especially because contributions are needed for documentation, demos, tutorials and code. But how to get started? Where to look for "first good issues"? Is everyone welcome? What are the prerequisites?
Tune in and hear from Diana Todea, Developer Experience Engineer at Victoria Metrics, on how within a year she made it from Zero to Developer and receiving the Contributor Award for OpenTelemetry 2025 at KubeCon Atlanta. Diana shares her journey, how she started, how she found the right topic and how she keeps herself motivated. Diana is also the Co-lead of the Neurodiversity CNCF Working Group and gives us insights into the Merge Forward community. 
And don't forget: Call for Papers for Cloud Native Days Romania and Austria are open and both Diana and Andi would be glad to see your proposals!
So - what are you waiting for?

Links we discussed:
Diana's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/diana-todea-b2a79968/ 
From Zero to Developer Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPrxpEE5GpY 
Contributor Award: https://siliconangle.com/2025/11/13/accessibility-meets-open-source-collaboration-kubeconna/ 
Her latest CNCF Blog Post: https://www.cncf.io/blog/2025/12/04/my-first-kubecon-cloudnativecon-a-journey-through-community-inclusivity-and-neurodiversity/
Start contributing to Open Source: https://contribute.cncf.io/contributors/getting-started/ 
Diana's Conference Talks: https://github.com/didiViking/Conferences_Talks 
Diana on Medium: https://medium.com/@dianatodea/ 
Articles on OpenTelemetry for beginners: 
https://medium.com/@dianatodea/the-unofficial-guide-to-contributing-to-opentelemetry-where-to-look-and-who-to-talk-to-9de04ae75fe0 
CNCF Merge-Forward: https://community.cncf.io/merge-forward
CNCF Neurodiversity initiative: https://community.cncf.io/neurodiversity 
Cloud Native Days Romania: https://cloudnativedays.ro/
Cloud Native Days Austria: https://cloudnativedays.at/

From Systems Engineer in Aeronautics via many clouds to becoming an SRE in Observability! That's the path from our guest, Alexandra Franz who is a Lead Product Engineer in SRE at Dynatrace. Tune in and learn how their team plans ahead for expected high traffic around Black Friday, Cyber Monday or the Super Bowl. We discuss how regional traffic patterns and differences in available hardware get factored in for capacity management and cost control. We also learn why global cloud outages are stressful - but - how those incidents can also be the reward for a good SRE.

Make sure to connect with Alexandra on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandrafranz/

If you are still treating your AI Coding Agent like a chat bot and not like a development team then this is one more reason to tune into this episode.
In his blog post series 31 Days of Vibe Coding, Jeff Blankenburg walks us through all the lessons learned when bringing an idea to life just with vibe coding. His idea was building a website for collectors of baseball cards. With now more than 950k cards from almost 10k players, he has proven that vibe coding, when done right, can truly boost the output of software engineers. 
Tune in and learn about how to effectively use Git Issues as the backlog for your AI, the importance of going through different phases in your conversation with the AI and why it is important to ask the AI the question: "Do you have any questions for me?"

Links we discussed
LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffblankenburg/
31 Days of Vibe Coding: https://31daysofvibecoding.com/
Collect Your Cards: https://collectyourcards.com/
Claude: https://claude.ai/

How many people have you met that implemented distributed tracing in the early 2000s? Make it one more after you have tuned into our latest podcast with William Louth. 
William, who can't seem to escape the observability space even though he keeps trying, has a track record in the space. He is an innovator and tool builder and is currently reimagining intelligent systems by shifting the focus from data collection to meaning-making. In our conversation we learn about situational awareness and how systems should use symbols to show their current state by also taking into account everything they are aware of happening in their ecosystem.
This podcast episode has been long overdue and opens a fascinating new world beyond metrics, logs and traces!

Links discussed
Williams LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/william-david-louth/
Humainary Research: https://humainary.io/research/
Humainary GitHub: https://github.com/humainary-io
Serventis Signs: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/humainary-io/substrates-api-java/refs/heads/main/ext/serventis/SIGNS.md

It started with the prompt: "Create an Uber Clone"! Several iterations and some months later Abhi presents his lessons learned when vibing a Ride Share Platform for RoboTaxis at Cloud Native Days Austria!
"Commit to one tool and go deep. Don't get distracted by all the options you have. Treat your agent like a human! Get better in expressing what you really want!", those are the many lessons learned in Abhi's journey applying the potential of the latest AI agents that are available for software engineers.
Tune into our latest episode and understand what Abhi means when he says: Context is important! Give it Macro Context and do Micro Incremental Improvements!

Links we discussed
Abhi's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abhimanyuselvan/
Cloud Native Austria Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjMPHWjawxM&list=PLtLBTEzR4SqU9GwgWiaDt10-yOVIN0nzM&index=9
Cursor AI: https://cursor.com/
OpenSpec: https://openspec.dev/