JJ works as a Developer Advocate representing the IBM Cloud all over the world. He mainly focuses on the IBM Kubernetes Service and OpenShift trying to make companies and users have a successful onboarding to the Cloud Native ecosystem. He’s also been known in the DevOps tooling ecosystem and generalized Linux communities. If he isn’t building automation to make his work streamlined he’s building the groundwork to do just that.
He lives and grew up in Austin, Texas. A father and husband, trying to learn to balance his natural nerdiness with family life. He enjoys a good strong dark ale, hoppy IPA, some team building Artemis, and epic Gloomhaven campaigning.
He has recently dove headfirst into Fedora since IBM buying Redhat, but still secretly wants FreeBSD everywhere. He’s always trying to become a better web technology developer, though normally just uses bash to get the job done.
Past Episodes
In this episode, Chris is joined by JJ Asghar as they talk through lessons learned from cultivating open source projects and communities. Over the last decade, JJ has had the privilege professionally of building and cultivating some Open Source projects and communities.This isn’t a tools talk. This is a talk about the soft skills you have to have to be able to succeed as a leader in an Open Source project. JJ’s journey started tending the frequently asked questions for a small Linux Distribution called CRUX, and then years later professionally moved to the OpenStack-Chef project to build OpenStack clouds. He has grown other projects along the way, helped build tooling and communities, some successful and still running today, others were just flashes in the pan. He’s learned a ton on this journey; and still is, but has some lessons that are hard-learned and hopefully will warn against pitfalls that can cause wasted cycles and pain.
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