All right guys, welcome back to the channel. If you're new, my name is Bobby. Wow! I never thought I will say those words again, but here we are. How is everybody doing? I am back, which leads us to the question where have I been? Where was Bobby's perspective for around about two whole months? Guys, many conspiracy theories, many people online thought I got deleted. I got banned on YouTube. Some people thought that was because of my anti-vegan content. I was just too much of a bully. Other people, such as the Ghana Pains, think it was due to psychedelic drug content. All right, other people again thought that because of Francesca Tiffany, I got deleted on YouTube.  No, it was not due to Francesca. Francesca didn't sue me. Francesca didn't do anything. Francesca was too busy doing ungodly things to her own body in front of thousands of men for money. That is that. But this is not the topic of today. Guys, where have I been? If you are a true supporter of Bobby's perspective, then you already know where I was. Because, let's be honest, I announced this months and months ago. I announced that I'm gonna be offline for a while. That I'm gonna maybe even disappear off YouTube at some point. But definitely have a little pause. I said it numerous times. So, when I went offline, the hardcore supporters, they knew that I was taking a break. So, what was this break about? Guys, I went on a pilgrimage to the holy mountain, Mount Athos, in Greece. But that is another story for another day, for another video. Once I have the time to sit down, I will make a whole video about Mount Athos. The experience itself was nothing short of breathtaking, of course. So, that was the main reason I want to go on a pilgrimage. However, I didn't feel good about leaving my channel online whilst being away. I know that might sound a little bit strange, but it is the truth.  I just want to leave everything behind and die a digital ego death, if you will. And so I did. I had plenty of time to replenish my energy to recharge my batteries, so to speak. My channel, before I made that decision, developed into something that I myself didn't really respect any longer. I know, I know, you guys love the reaction videos, and I understand it to an extent. It is fun, right, to poke some vegans. I get it. However, for me personally, it became very, very monotonous, repetitive and just plain boring. At some point, I couldn't do it any longer. And even the positive feedback, which I have to say, I appreciate a lot. I love you guys. Thank you for your positive feedback. However, after a while, I found myself in a place where I couldn't even appreciate the positive feedback any longer, because I myself wasn't happy with the work that I was putting out in the world. When I look back on my life, I always had a huge change pretty much every single year, since I can think there was always something new in my life.  There was always a huge shift every year. And with being that anti-vegan, I found myself boxed in. Of course, I still tried to put out other content, for example about Christian orthodoxy, which resonated very positively with many people. But this showed me how much I would love to give you guys positivity and not to focus on other people. When I look at vegans nowadays, and even back then when I was watching and critiquing their videos, I felt true compassion and true pain in my heart. I felt really, really sad. If you really watched my videos in their totality, you would have seen that every single reaction video started on a positive note, it was light-hearted, it was fun. But then after a while, I would get sad. I would really get sad because I would feel the suffering of those tormented souls. I've been through it. I've been a vegan for four years. I've seen it all. And now, guys, Lent just passed by. And I fasted again for Easter. In orthodox tradition, that is eating vegan, believe it or not. Yes, God has humor. God made me fast vegan. The anti-vegan went vegan. And let me tell you, it was terrifying. Because all of that suffering that I've been through for years, I had to endure again. My digestion got wrecked. I got nervous, anxious, paranoid, brain fog, the whole spiel. You know exactly the side effects of veganism. I got them all in the matter of couple of days. It was terrible. I'm so glad, I'm grateful to God that I can eat meat again, believe me that. Anyways, I went on a tangent here, the point of the story is that I felt so much suffering, so much pain, agony, sadness, watching those vegans. And I'm not here to judge. Only God can judge. We can critique if we choose to. We have a free will, but we are not the ultimate judge. No matter what we say, no matter what we think about people, it does not matter. Only God can judge. Therefore, where is Bobby's perspective headed? What will happen now? More reaction videos? No reaction videos? More anti-vegan content? No anti-vegan content? More religious content?  We will see. I don't have any plans this time around for YouTube. And with that I'm returning to the true nature of Bobby's perspective. The way that it was in the beginning. Just me and my phone. When you listen to this video, I think we will still be in lockdown. Due to the lockdown, due to the... Oh, I can't even say it. Due to the... let's call it kuratz, let's call it kuratz virus. Because of the kuratz virus, my brates know exactly what I'm talking about. I had to leave Mount Athos and I couldn't return to the place that I was staying in before. I had to come back to Germany because I'm a German citizen. That said, I had to leave all of my stuff. I have no laptop. I left all my clothes. Everything. Everything. Everything that you can imagine. Microphone equipment, headphones, everything. So right now all I have is this phone. If I get lucky I can use the laptop to upload this. We came full circle. Three years ago Bobby's perspective started just like this. With no plan. With no direction. Just my perspective. Hence the channel's name. All I had was my phone and my mouth that would always run and never quit. Never stop talking. This is what God gave me. I have my mouth. Therefore, for better or worse, I will express my feelings, my thoughts, my perspective, yet again unfiltered, unedited, here on YouTube. So now I've been talking for over 10 minutes. I think I'm going to cut it off here. I'm sure that I forgot many, many things that I wanted to talk about initially, but that is alright. I'm sure you guys have a lot of questions as well. So please feel free to address it in the comment section and I will answer hopefully all of them. Now, for the near future, I really do hope that I can get a laptop in order to have another live stream with you guys. I miss the live streams more than anything because having a monologue here only goes so far. Interacting with you guys was always my biggest passion. That was always the most fun. It was amazing. I truly miss the live streams, the weekly live streams that we had and I look forward to the future and hope that we can have many, many, many more of them. Other than that, as I said, we will see where this channel is headed. If you have any ideas, hey, please let me know in the comment section as well. Alright guys, but this is it for today's video. Hey, if you like that I'm back, leave me a thumbs up. If not, leave me a thumbs down. Guys, may God bless you all as always. Much love and peace.


Welcome to the nonprofit show. We are so glad you're here. This is a dedicated week. It's a special unique week that we get to spend. This is actually our third annual nonprofit power week with the team of the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption.  Julianne Nichols and Julianne serves as the vice president marketing communications at Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption. And she's brought to us a topic that we don't talk about often enough and it's about changing minds in particular with researching and changing attitudes. Stay with us. Julianne's gonna introduce herself in just one moment but if we haven't met you yet we always like to remind you that we are here Julia Patrick and myself, Jared Ransom serving alongside as co-host here for the nonprofit show. We wouldn't be here if it weren't for our amazing presenting sponsors. So thank you so very much for the kind support not only for us, but truly for the sector at large for all of the 1.8 million nonprofits that are registered. So thank you to Fundraising Academy at National University, Blamerang, your part-time controller, nonprofit thought leader, American Nonprofit Academy. Also thank you to Staffing Boutique Nonprofit Nerd and Nonprofit Tech Talk. Again, these companies have been with us most of them from the very beginning marching towards our 1,000th episode which you can find all of these episodes on the various streaming platforms. You can download the app and find us there streaming broadcast as well as podcast. So pretty much wherever you binge watch or binge listen to your entertainment you just go ahead and queue up the nonprofit show. You will be glad that you did. There are tons, tons of episodes there at your disposal.  Again, Julianne Nichols is joining us as vice president marketing as well as communications. Have the Dave Thomas Foundation for adoption.  Thank you so much. It's great to be with both of you today and just wanna say thank you so much for giving us the opportunity to share a bit about the foundation's mission and a number of different topics with you this week. It's important to us year round and extra special in November because it is National Adoption Month. And that's a time that we shine a light on families growing through adoption and the urgent need for foster care adoption in particular. And so as you know, and we've shared with your listeners in the past, we're a national nonprofit public charity that is committed to dramatically increasing the number of adoptions of children waiting in foster care in crossing states in Canada. And so as you mentioned, I'm the vice president of marketing communications and I lead a team of marketing and communications and graphic design professionals. And we wear a number of hats in terms of supporting departments within the organization that lead a number of our strategic priority areas and really work to raise public awareness of our mission and then the cause of foster care adoption in a number of ways. And research has been a key part of that, a part of our strategic priorities from the very beginning of when Dave Thomas who was the founder of Wendy's restaurants and who was adopted, created this important foundation to be a national voice for the cause and support families growing this way through a number of initiatives. And again, research has been a key part of that. And so I'm happy to share a couple of examples today. Well, it's an interesting thing because I think a lot of times Julianne and Jared and I see this every single day on the nonprofit show that a lot of us come to the world of service in the nonprofit sector with a passion and a sensibility that we don't often back up with research. It's just a passion that we're like, everybody should feel this way, everybody should know about this, everybody should get involved. But I'm really interested to find out how you look at this and using this research model to move forward. Talk to us about that. Sure. So again, I'm gonna give you a couple of different examples and the first one really is about the evidence base of your work. So again, the roots of who we are as an organization is about advocacy and raising public awareness and that there are research components that I'll talk about that are part of that, but our president and CEO, Rita Sornan in the early 2000s also wanted to create a program that was more direct service. And so we developed a program called Wendy's Wonderful Kids and it worked to support the funding of adoption professionals who would serve the longest waiting children in foster care and using what we refer to as a child focus recruitment model that focuses on finding the right family for every child. And we felt good about the results that we were seeing but we wanted to make sure. And so we engaged a research partner to do a rigorous national five-year evaluation of that program. Wow. Yeah, and among the findings we learned that children who were referred to that program are up to three times more likely to be adopted. So that was critical research that we began sharing through reports on our website, highlights to the media, evidence to inform the training that we provided to adoption professionals and working with partners in the field and really to develop a business plan that would scale that program to make sure that there would be enough adoption professionals to serve the number of children waiting. And so that's an example of kind of that outcome base that is really important for nonprofits who are either funding or leading a cause that advances their mission. Another example I'll share that's a bit more audience-specific. So Dave Thomas also was a huge advocate in reaching out to business leaders to say, you're providing benefits to families who are having a child biologically but what about parents who are considering becoming a foster or adoptive parent? Why wouldn't you provide the same benefits? And so we started conducting a research survey encouraging employers to share what type of paid leave and financial benefits were they offering to employers. And so for the last actually last week we released the 17th annual survey of what we call the best adoption-friendly workplaces and it reveals kind of what are those best practices so that we can encourage other employers to do the same and inform their policies and developing like an employer toolkit of resources that helps them to inform their practices. A third example I'll share and this really gets to the public research question that you asked in terms of attitudes is called our adoption and foster care attitude survey. And so this research when I'm about to share parts of it are not ours but we know from other research resources that every year more than 20,000 youth age out of foster care without a family. And we know that the research shows that those youth that they don't have the support of a permanent family are more likely to experience homelessness and unemployment and just other negative outcomes. And it's just something that it's a cause that not everybody knows about. It's the sort of quiet crisis. And so the data points of these surveys allow us to have conversations with the media to be able to educate our supporters about challenges. So we have been commissioning this study every five years with an external agency partner since 2001 to again just gauge does the public know this information? What can we do to change hearts and minds? And so like two examples I'll give you from the 2022 survey was that 75% of the public survey to that representative sample size believe that the public we should be doing more to a support foster care adoption. And 68% say that if their employer provided adoption benefits they would consider adopting. So those research points kind of tie into our adoption friendly workplace study and survey that I mentioned to you. But again to make that point to employers of why those benefits are so important. Let me ask you a quick question. Can our viewers and listeners go to your website and find this? Because this is the sort of thing that 1.8 million registered nonprofits in America need to be looking at having this benefit as well for their teams. Can they find that to see what that looks like? They sure can. So on our website we have a research section that highlights a kind of a number of the different reports that we have done over time in those annual ones. And the best adoption friendly workplace. There's a program tab that you can see on our website that highlights the toolkit that I mentioned and some of those key statistics. And then the adoption and foster care attitude survey findings are you can find there as well. And a number of our national child welfare organizations across the country go to those and look to that data every year or every five years depending on which survey we're talking about to be able to make the case for the area in which they are supporting the cause. And so they're often citing us as a source. Appreciate having that research because it seems like a simple add on benefit for employers. It seems perhaps Julianne and maybe this is what the research concludes. It's simply a lack of education, right? The lack of inclusivity of adding that foster care benefit package onto an already existing family package that might come from a birth family. That's right. And this research isn't ours but from another HR group. Not that many individuals even take advantage of the benefit. So I think sometimes there can be this feeling particularly with smaller organizations of like, gosh, how much can I offer? And so that's where the survey data is really important and we not only have the reveal of the hundred best who are really giving that top line benefits but also benchmark reports that show what organizations are doing of different size. So small, medium, large, different industries so that you can compare yourself against your peers and figure out what is going to be, make the most sense for your organization but also be able to support your employees and attract them, retain them and really make them feel valued and that there's no one way to grow your family and that your employer is supporting them that. Yeah, I love it. Let's move into the attitudes, right? Like how do the attitudes, people's attitudes, employers' attitudes, everything really shift and shape your nonprofit mission. What does that look like, Julianne? And what are you seeing? So I can give you examples from a number of different ways. So the adoption and foster care attitude survey that I mentioned as an example reveal that, you know, 30% of the public feels that a teen will be fine on their own. You know, they don't need the support of a permanent family. They're almost 18, like they're fine. And only 3% would consider adopting a teen as their first choice. So that significantly impacts our mission because, in particular, our Wendy's Wonderful Kids program is serving children over the age of nine, sibling groups and children with special needs. And so if the public is thinking, well, that's not really needed, but we know there's 20,000 youth aging out of foster care every year, then we have a challenge. And we need to work to educate the public and sharing the findings of those surveys, those surveys, which we do in a variety of ways. And also educate our supporters about why, you know, their commitment to our cause matters so much to really, you know, move that needle. Another example of research that I'll share, you know, even relates to the child welfare professionals who we collaborate with. So we know that, you know, often the youth that they serve have experienced significant trauma. You know, sometimes it's just, you know, it's not an easy job to find that right family. And so we wanted to know is to be able to conduct some research with them to say, what struggles are you finding in your work? Are there any perceived barriers that you're facing? Are there best practices that are a compliment to what, you know, our program is doing? What type of messages resonate with you? What type of professional learning would you find valuable?  There's so many different roles that play into the advancement of our mission and this critical work. So research is just critical in that way to really advance our work. You know, this is a critical question, but how often are you, do you get research back that's like, holy moly, we didn't know that or we didn't think that? I mean, how often is this coming back at you and really re-informing your choices as an organization and not just data and metrics that helps you support what it is you're doing? Yeah, I mean, I think there can be surprises for sure. I mean, in the example of the survey of child welfare professionals that we did, you know, if you ask the question, you know, do you believe that every child deserves a safe and permanent home? The number's pretty high, but if you ask the question, do you believe every child waiting in foster care is adoptable? It's not as high as we'd like to see it. And so that's a surprise. And it's not because they don't believe that it's needed, it's the how and how hard it is. And so then that helps us to say, okay, what can we do to elevate the profession and help them feel valued? What type of stories and resources can support their work and help them make the case in their jobs? What type of educational resources can we put out there? So absolutely, there can be surprises and changes in the data over time. And the adoption and foster care attitude survey that I mentioned we do every five years to see how has that trend changed? And many times there have been celebrations with that, that more families are opening their hearts to adoption. And so we celebrate that and we share that, but there is still more than 51% who believe that children are placed in foster care because they've done something wrong. And that just couldn't be further from the truth. And that doesn't mean that they may not have behavioral issues at certain points, that's to be expected from the trauma that they've experienced. But that just demonstrates how much they need that support and guidance and resources to overcome that trauma and then their whole world changes around when they have that support. And so we attempt to share that through research findings but also through storytelling. And so there's a combination of those things that are used together to kind of again educate about the urgency of need and the problem, share that story of how a life was changed but then remind people what the research shows about the number of children who are still waiting and what we can do about it. You know, I really commend the organization for all of the research and you've talked already a little bit about the process but I'm curious, Julianne, if you can talk to us about the process in particular of the cost and the time, what is that looking like? Yeah, so that is a complex question to answer because research really comes in all different forms. So if your goal is to gather feedback from your supporters, for example, about why they signed up for your emails or what inspired them to support their mission, there are free or low cost tools that you can use from Google Forms to SurveyMonkey to gather that informal feedback. Other inexpensive forms of research might be if you are testing two different types of an ad to see, you know, did a message or a visual resonate differently or perform differently? Did you send an email in the morning versus the afternoon? Did that impact things? And so those are important types of research that inform your tactical implementation that are kind of lower cost and that you can kind of do in-house. But if you're using the research to make a public claim or inform policy decisions, engaging an external research partner is critical and that has an expense. But it's so important because they can help you make sure that the questions you're asking are truly going to accomplish your business goals or inform your business goals and prevent any unintended bias in the questions. So I might think like this is exactly how I want to say it and a research partner might say, well, you, if saying it this way is going to lead the answer, like maybe it's going to give you what you want to hear but it's not going to help enough. So again, finding a critical partner who has experience with a level of rigor of what you're trying to accomplish is huge. And then the cost is again, widely varies depending on how granular you're going to be and how customized you want to be. So we have certain surveys where we might have a set of questions that we ask every year and we fold them into a pre-existing survey of the public. Something like that could be in the $15,000 range and maybe take a couple of weeks of analysis. But if you're doing a survey where it involves focus groups and you want to know about findings from different roles in different states and more qualitative data, that could take three to six months. And sometimes what we've done is conduct a quantitative survey and get the analysis from our research partner and talk through that and say, okay, we want to probe deeper in these particular areas and so we want to conduct Zoom interviews with a representative sample of individuals who are going to help us get that. And that could be $50,000, $250,000. It could be multi-year. So it's hard to answer the question because it really depends but I guess what I would say is that that's where having that external partner, if it is something that is going to make a major policy or programmatic decision, that would be really important. And sometimes you're not the one to conduct it. You know, we also can in some cases grant fund organizations who are conducting research, like they'll reach out to us and say, hey, we want to know about this. And we're like, we want to know about that too. So this is an alignment with our strategic priorities and you're going to lead that with an external partner and we're going to work with you to think about the implications of what it reveals and think about the ways that we can also promote that around our shared goals. Well, I appreciate your insight on it could be as simple as testing two different advertisements, all the way to bringing in a third party person or company that's really going to facilitate that. And there's really no right or wrong, I think when it comes to research. I think any and all research is very helpful. But what do we do with it afterwards, right? So we've conducted this research, we've perhaps invested thousands of dollars and perhaps multi years. How do we take that research to change the attitudes? And the one that I'm stuck on, Julianne, is really the one that's like, our assumption is that children are in foster care because they've done something wrong, right? Like how do we change the mind and that attitude? And there's so many assumptions, I think, when it comes to a lot of different social challenges, how have you used this research to change those attitudes? That's a great question. And I would say this is one that is a multi-channel, multi-partner, over time, never ends, that particular question you asked. But I think it's true of research in general when it's something you're talking about attitudes and behavioral change. It's not something you can kind of do overnight. And you have to ask key questions sometimes about who's the right messenger to share what you're wanting to articulate, right? So we develop integrated marketing and communications plans, collaborating with our development team, collaborating with our program team, our business development team, all the people who are out in the field who are engaging with different audiences who have some influence and support of the youth and families who we serve. What we have really found is that a storytelling approach is among the most powerful tools in your toolbox.  And we launch public service announcements that we run every year through TV, radio, billboards, blogs. And very often, again, to that particular point that you were making, it's the voice of a 17-year-old girl sharing that she was weeks away from aging out without a permanent family, that she had given up hope that this was ever going to be a possibility for her and how adoption changed her life and how without that could have ended up on the streets and not had the support reasons. And that's reality. That again, we know from others external research of what happens. And so where we can share that story through the public service announcement, through their voice, through ads, through social sharing and kind of identifying influencers in the field who have larger networks than ours to be able to say, hey, can you believe that this is what people think? And we want you to hear this story and we want you to help tell people about it. And then that translates through earned media and reaching out to reporters to educate them and it translates into the distribution of adoption guides that we create and other resources to really help people think about it and even sharing maybe a parent who did adopt that team and say, I never thought about it before or I didn't know that this child was in foster care. I didn't even know that was a possibility that I could adopt them, but I can and I can be that support person for that child and I can encourage another person to do the same. So we definitely use multiple channels and making sure that we're sharing best practices that we've learned over the years and through that research to continue advocating for the advancement of our mission and why investing in our national awareness campaigns and the advancement of our programs is just so, so critical for an issue that just is not talked about enough and it's just, it's different than a cause that is sort of and I'm not saying that not all causes are important but when it's like a disaster relief and it's in the news and it's right now and you can totally relate to it or something that every family has experienced, it's just a different thing. And in this case, it may be something that every family has experienced in some way or knows someone who's adopted but maybe not talked about as much. And again, so those are why we take that multi-channel long game approach to moving the needle for our mission. Yeah, well, that's, I mean, it's needed, right? To be repetitive, to be consistent, to share that education. I just commend honestly you, the entire team, Julian, of the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption. We are so grateful to have, I think we have four different representatives joining us this week and a special non-profit Power Week, our third annual and the reason for that is really to bring education to the sector, to their communities across the globe about the benefits of adoption and foster care. So Julian Nichols has joined us today, Vice President of Marketing as well as Communications of the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption. Really thrilled to have you here. For everyone that's interested in learning more or looking up that research that Julian mentioned, go to DaveThomasFoundation.org, fantastic website that provides so much information but take a look there. You can hear, you can see, you can read these stories, that storytelling that Julian was sharing with us today. I know I always spend extra time on your website as well as at Wendy's because it just, you know, it's just a great fit. So thank you Julian for all that you do and to share this wonderful topic. You've been phenomenal to kick off this non-profit Power Week. Just so grateful to have this dedicated week with you and your colleagues. Well, thank you so much. This is another example of an important voice to shine a light on our mission and there are various ways to get involved. We hope it's in attracting people to become adoptive parents, but again, if you go to our website, lots of ways to help. So thank you so much for the opportunity. You know, this week is going to be really interesting because there's so much going on. We're going to be talking about experiencing trauma and then staying in the environment, working for the nonprofit sector when maybe you have a backstory that's just really tough. We're going to also be talking about the realities of founder syndrome and I can't wait to do that with Rita. Again, testing your marketing plan is going to be kind of an adjunct to this and how we actually look at the different ways we can understand how our work is navigating us towards our mission vision and values. Again, today we talked about researching and changing attitudes and then on Friday, we're going to wrap it up with an ask and answer with Rita Soren and the CEO and President of the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption. Again, I'm Julia Patrick. I've been joined today by the nonprofit nerd herself, Jared R. Ransom, CEO of the Raven Group. Again, nonprofit Power Week is a special thing. We only do it a couple of times a year and we have the ongoing support of Fundraising Academy at National University, Blue Morang, Your Part-Time Controller, American Nonprofit Academy, Tech Talk, Nonprofit Nerd, and Staffing Boutique. These are the folks that joined us day in and day out. Wow, you know, Julianne, you really kicked us off in a meaningful way for the whole week and I suspect, Jared, that we're going to be weaving back some of her comments as we move forward every day, don't you think? Absolutely. Yeah, we typically do and I always learn so very much from these conversations. Last year, Julianne, I was serving as a professional interim CEO for an organization. I was so grateful to help bring some of the foster care and adoption benefits to the policies that had previously never been part of that before. And again, I wouldn't have known about it if it weren't for the show. So thank you. Well, together we're stronger. So thank you so much for that connection and I'm grateful to hear that those resources were helpful. You know, it's amazing and again, this is only day one of a full week so join us back every day. And if you can't join us live, you can certainly connect with us on our archives and we hope that you do because I think this is really a powerful nonprofit power week. So as we end every episode, we like to leave with this mantra. And again, it means a lot of things, it means something different every day when we say it. But especially it resonates, I think this month as we celebrate the Dave Thomas Foundation for adoption. And it goes like this, to stay well so you can do well. We'll see you back here tomorrow.


What makes for excellence in heart care? It starts with one of the most amazing teams of heart surgeons and cardiologists that I've seen assembled under one roof and the region's leading technology in a new $40 million facility. This is the nationally recognized Heart and Vascular Institute of Eastern Kentucky at Pikeville Medical Center. With Hillbilly Days just around the corner, Pikeville City Police wants everyone to be safe and aware not only during the festivities but also in the days leading up. Well of course Wednesday starts the bringing into the vendors parking the vendors in their spots they've they've been allotted. Be patient we're going to start Wednesday morning around nine o'clock in the morning getting some vendors into the bottom of the parking garage downtown. We're going to have some roads blocked a few streets blocked but nothing where people are going to sit a long time in traffic we kind of got that figured out by now. Parking will not be allowed in downtown Pikeville after five p.m. on Wednesday April 19th. During the festival parents should take photos of their children place their phone number in their pockets and set up a meeting location in case you get separated. ATVs and side-by-sides are not permitted on Main Street and anyone wishing to drive a golf cart must have a paid permit from the Pikeville City Police. People tell us sometimes kids get away from their parents and they tell us it's a it's a seven-year-old blonde child well there's probably going to be 10,000 seven-year-old blonde children in downtown so you know just make sure you get pictures make sure you know have a place where you guys a safe place to meet say if we get separated here's where we're going to meet at.  Officers will be posted in various locations around the city as the festivities go on to ensure everyone has the best and safest hillbilly days yet. For Mountain Top News I'm Kelsey Dean.


We're going to talk today about how your work in open-source can and should help you get a great job, advance in your job, grow throughout your career. This is my fourth time being here at DevConf. This is my vintage DevConf scarf from 2016, so really happy to be back here again. I've given a lot of different talks here at DevConf, usually on the community track, things like leadership, influence, stuff like that. But one thing I've noticed over and over again is the hallway conversations you have afterward. I meet so many people who are students or maybe work in a day job but don't get paid to work on open-source. And they spend a lot of time and energy contributing to open-source, but they do it because they care, because they're interested, and they're not necessarily getting much of a career benefit out of it. And sometimes it's hard for them to see the connection between the job they're applying for and the work they're doing. And that's a real shame because a lot of what you learn in open-source development and open-source projects is skills that are really needed in your day job. And so we're going to talk about how do you make that connection when you are talking to your manager or when you're talking to a hiring manager? How do you help them see that what you do in open-source actually is giving you skills that are of interest to them? But first, a little bit about me. So almost two decades ago I was a student in a university, much like this one. I had a lot of different interests, but I didn't really know for sure what I wanted to do for a career yet. And so in the United States, university is a very expensive thing, and so your parents want you to figure out what you're going to do pretty quickly. And so I was taking some different courses trying to decide, and I remember taking an anthropology course, which is kind of the study of human cultures and how people come together, how they make connections, shared history, shared meaning.  Just what makes people work together cooperatively or go to war with each other? How do cultures form? How are they sustained? And my dad said, well, no one's going to pay you for that. So study that, but maybe the computers would be a better way to go. You like those two and people will pay for that. And so of course, like most parents, he was a little bit right and also a little bit wrong. Nobody was going to pay me for that back then. But technology ended up giving me a path into a career where that is actually now a lot of what I get paid to do. It's to think about culture and what kind of culture does a company want to have, how do you sustain it, how do you help people work together within it when they don't get along. So I started out as a web developer and ultimately I focused today on Red Hat's culture. That means a lot of things. I'm a people watcher, catch herder, conflict resolver and reluctant dispenser of free and probably dubious and bad advice. So you get what you pay for and money back guarantee today. And so I think that my story is actually a really good example of what I want to share with you today, which is that career growth is not a steady straight up and down ladder kind of climb. I think that's often how we think career growth happens. You look at someone who has the job that you want or seems to do really well and you think, well, they must have decided how to get from where I am to there and just done it. But actually it's a lot more like rock climbing. Does anybody climb rocks? Yeah, a lot of you. So you know you kind of from the ground have a sense of maybe which way you're going to go up, but as you're climbing you're really only seeing the next couple footholds, the next couple handholds. And so sometimes you go a little bit in one direction and you realize, oh, this isn't going to quite take me as far as I thought. So maybe I move a little bit down and then off in a different way. And that really is what career growth is like. You kind of move in the direction of what interests you and you figure out, can I make more out of that? Or maybe not, but it was a helpful experience along the way. So as we think about that, one of the things that I love about Red Hat is you can email the entire company, all 15,000 people who work there. We have a mailing list called MemoList. It goes out to everybody. And so as I was working on this talk I said, you know, I have a couple ideas of what I want to do, but let me ask, you know, a lot of other people who work here, what do you think?  Tell me how Open Source helped your career. So I made a couple stories. Okay, thanks, bye. And a few minutes later I had 30 plus responses, really, really long emails full of stories. And I said, wow, you know, thanks everybody. This is great. I'm all set. I've got what I need. And then they just kept sending me stories. And so I said, no, seriously, this is good. I've got enough. 100 plus later I had lots of really fantastic stories and had to kind of cut it off and write the talk. But huge shout out to everybody at Red Hat who sent me their stories. I think it really speaks a lot to the passion people have and how much Open Source does help people in their careers. I was really looking for what are the skills that you have in Open Source or you gain in Open Source that you might not be putting on your CV. You might not be talking about it a job interview. But people sent me all kinds of inspiring stories about how Open Source helped them in ways I didn't expect to. So I'm going to share a little bit of that with you before we dive into the practical stuff. So I got stories like this one from Alicia. She works in documentation for Ansible. And she said, you know, contributing to documentation is actually one of the best ways early or midway in your career to really demonstrate skills and support Open Source projects at the same time. So even if you're brand new to a project, you can make a contribution. You often, as a newbie, can see gaps in documentation that somebody who's more experienced can't see. They already know the undocumented stuff. And if you're more experienced, you can contribute more complex use cases. You can add details in that other people might not know. And really, anybody can fix a typo. So there's somewhere for anybody to start. It's a good way to kind of find your path in. And what she pointed out that I had never thought about was a documentation pull request can showcase a whole bunch of different kind of skills but it's public, so it's something you can share. You know, if you're early in your career, you're trying to show I have a lot of ability but you don't have much out there, you can show your writing skills. You can show your technical understanding. You can show familiarity with things like source control, right? Editing tools, different platforms, all kinds of stuff. I thought that was really interesting. She shared a lot about kind of how her path moved through that. Another really, really inspiring one from Adam Williams, anybody know him from Fedora? Long time Fedora guy. I've known Adam for years and I didn't know this about him, so I thought this is a fun one to share. Adam said, you know, the only jobs that he had before he started at Mandrake, Mandrebo, which is where he was before Red Hat, were Paper Delivery Boy, Library Assistant, Bookshop Assistant, Supermarket Assistant, and Administrative Assistant. I have a theme developing there, Perpetual Assistant, right? Adam's degree is in history. It's what he studied in university. He doesn't have any formal training related to software development. In fact, didn't even learn to write code until about 2014, which I found shocking if you've ever seen the work that he does in Fedora. In fact, Adam started out as one of those people who just hangs around forums helping people out, new users trying to figure things out, and ultimately he wound up doing that as a job for Mandrebo. Then he developed into release management, then into QA for Mandrebo, and then ultimately Red Hat where he is today. So really neat to see how you can kind of move in through open source, follow what interests you, and potentially build a pretty awesome career out of it. Felipe is a local here now. In the end of high school, he started contributing translations to Genome. That's an easy way for many people to contribute who may not have a lot of technical knowledge yet. He didn't know how to code, but being able to see the code and look at it kind of grew on him. And so he decided he was going to study computer science when he went to university. Then he started contributing to, the code that he contributed to Genome actually helped him get an internship with Google Summer of Code. And I loved his stories. His internship gave him the chance to travel abroad for the first time. It was the first time he ever flew on an airplane. First time he ever spoke at a conference. Really life-changing experiences for him. And he said, you know, he didn't have those kind of expectations for himself growing up. It wasn't the kind of life he even imagined he could have someday. Four years ago, he moved across the ocean to Bernal and wanted to really start a new life over here. Still working on the Genome and the desktop team at Red Hat. And for him, it's been a dream job and it goes all to free and open source software. So you can imagine just story after story like this pouring into my inbox. I was like, wow, this is incredible. And there were so many more. I had to cut like six of them out of here so that we actually talk about what we came to talk about. But if you ever get a chance to talk to Seth Conlon, or Kenlon, he has a really interesting story like this. And what I would encourage you to do is talk to some of your heroes in the community. Talk to some of the people who you would really admire kind of what their career looks like. How do you get started? How do you end up where you are? You might be really surprised to find out kind of how they got their path in. And so I wanted to ask in the room, because I know we have a lot of folks who have been contributing for a long time, what stories or examples would you add? How did you kind of find your way into open source? How has it helped you in your career? Everybody's avoiding eye contact. All right, 9.32 early. Fine, we'll go practical tips. All right, so kind of break it down, right? How do you actually do this? I think there are three basic steps, right? I mean, good presentation has three steps, so I think number one is get the experience. If you don't have the experience, there's not much you should be selling about the experience you don't have. So that's the easy one, start contributing. Most of you probably are already doing that. Then from there, it starts to get a little bit trickier. So how do you summarize that experience that you have in a very succinct, meaningful way that other people can understand? So what does it look like on your job application, on your CV, when you're having a very brief conversation with somebody about a job? How do you talk about what it is you do in a way that they can see the connection to what they're looking for? And then the third thing is, how do you then illustrate that? When you have a chance to talk more about it, how do you bring it to life for people? What are the stories you share? What are the examples you share? What are the pull requests maybe that you share as examples of your work, right? So pretty basic stuff, but it's kind of a one, two, three. So as I was asking Red Headers, tell me about some of the skills that you've got in open source that maybe you didn't recognize you were getting along the way. These are the kind of things to go back and look at your CV and say like, does this stuff actually come through? Are there things that I've gotten really good at in open source that I don't actually have on my resume today? And often that is the case. You tend to jump straight to the technology, right? Like here are the technology skills I have. We don't necessarily move into what are some of the other skills that they might actually be looking for. And I'll tell you, one of the most interesting things to me is when you ask people what they're looking for in a prospective employee, what am I looking to hire? They'll usually start with the technical stuff. And that's great, right? That's baseline. You have to have the technical skills. If you don't have those, the job's probably not going to work out for you. But if you look at the difference between somebody who really excels in a job and somebody who gets kind of stagnant and they can't really grow or even doesn't work out so well, it's not very often the technical skills that are the problem. It's can I work with this person? Does this person have the vision that I need to be able to understand the bigger picture of what we're doing here? Can they communicate with others effectively? Does nobody want to work with them? Because they're really difficult, right? There's a lot of things like that. And that's the stuff that you don't usually get feedback about in a job. You just get stuck and you're not moving forward. So that's where I think open source is a really, really interesting way of developing skills that people don't always put into words. So one that jumps out to me is, I kind of try to put, okay, how do you take skills that you have in open source and put them in words that somebody who's not an open source enthusiast would understand. So one of them is a global or cross-cultural perspective. Many, many companies today, no matter how small they are, I'm talking like a couple hundred people, they're often distributed across different locations. And being able to understand that your way of thinking, your way of seeing the world, isn't necessarily the same as everybody else's, isn't necessarily the one right way of seeing things. Being able to communicate differently to different people matters a lot. So what that could look like on a resume is saying, look, I'm a team player who has experience working across different cultures, different groups, different time zones. You would be surprised how hard that is defined and if you are a globally distributed team, it's really, really important. The second one is stakeholder management. So in open source land, what does it look like to manage expectations of different people? Right? Most of us, if we are contributing to a project, we all the time have, people have very strong opinions that conflict with each other. We have different opinions about what should happen from here. We have very strong, you know, this is the right answer, no, that's the right answer. And most of the time, the longer you work in a community, the better you get at having conversations with people who disagree with each other. Well, guess what? In your day job, that is often one of the most challenging things that people face in technical roles, but in any role, is I have people who have different opinions about what needs to happen here. Often there's not very clear lines of who's actually in charge, or maybe one person's in charge, but another person can kind of subvert it if they don't like it. So being able to work cooperatively and talk to people about, okay, here's what you want, here's what I want, what are we actually going to do here, is a really valuable skill. And it's one of those things that I think comes to you over time and open source. You get better and better and better at this if you're in a pretty busy project, but you don't always think to talk about it in interviews. So thinking about, this is something that you're like, yes, I do this in my project all the time and I've never had a conversation in a job interview about what that looks like. Think about some of those stories, right? How would you share them? Third one that jumped out lots and lots of people sent in is being able to give feedback that is useful, that is respectful, that is helpful, that other people are open to hearing and on the flip side being able to receive feedback in a way where you don't get upset, you're not defensive, you just consider it, right? Everything from code review type feedback to feedback about design, feedback about UI, right? Being able to do that is surprisingly a difficult skill and it's really, really something that gets in people's way as they're trying to progress in their career. Being able to share that this is a skill that you have and talk about examples of where you've done that goes a long way in an interview. So I thought, okay, how do you make this show up in just a couple of words, right? So typical CV, what you might have in a little summary at the top of yours is something like, hey, I'm a Python engineer, one year of experience in designing and developing web apps. Great, that's awesome. It's a good summary. However, if you're a Python engineer who has a lot of experience in open source and some other skills, you could look at what are they looking for in this job and what do I really want to highlight for that? If you want to kind of tailor your CV to fit the role. So let's say that right away you look at the job description, you look at the company and you see, okay, this is clearly a company where they work across multiple teams. They talk about you're going to have to be able to, you know, work with customers and work with apps, right? You're going to have to be able to do these kinds of things. I might say I'm a Python engineer with two plus years of experience because let's take some credit for what we do in open source here. If I've been contributing to open source since I was starting university, I probably have at least a year of experience if I spend a lot of time on that. So two plus years of experience working across different technologies, different teams, different time zones to develop web apps. All of a sudden I'm a little bit different from every other Python engineer with one year of experience who has their resume sitting in front of you. Or maybe, maybe I do a lot of work on OpenStack in my free time, but it's not necessarily connected to my day job. I could talk about I'm a Python engineer and an OpenStack contributor who has two plus years of experience in web app development and code review. If I have a maintainer, I'm probably taking a look at people's code. So think about what do you do in open source and in that side of your life? What do you do in your day job and what are the commonalities between them? And we'll talk about how to do this comfortably. You don't want to do this in a way where you feel like you're deceiving someone. You don't want to be dishonest about your experience, but you do deserve to take credit for what you're doing. So before I jump into other practical stuff, what other skills would you add? What are the things that you see people develop in open source plan that actually are really helpful in the stuff that they get paid? Communication skills are the right things. So communication, how to write stuff. Say more about that. Describe not just what you did, but maybe your motivations or what you're trying to accomplish. Yeah, so I'm going to repeat it back because I know we're recording. So what Tim said was being able to describe not just what you did, but what your motivations were behind it, what you're trying to accomplish, right? And then to the bigger picture of what other people are trying to do. You know, it's interesting. One of the things that came up was somebody said, you know, the difference often between a okay pool request and a great pool request is the little bit of explanation about what you're trying to achieve with it makes all the difference for the person who's reviewing it. It's a good example of where you develop a lot more communication skills inside what you do in open source than you might even in your day job unless your day job involves pool requests too. What other skills? Time management because of time zones. Say more about that.  That's great. So I'll paraphrase for our mic here. What he said was time management. Often when you're working across time zones, the flexibility to schedule things early in the day or late in the day to accommodate other regions really develops your ability to get things done in a compressed amount of time, right? Because if you're just adding on those meetings on top of the work that you're doing full time, you're probably going to burn out. So learning how to adjust that. So I'll hand over here. Issue reporting and troubleshooting. Issue reporting and issue troubleshooting. So say more about that. Well, it really helps a lot if you see that the person is a higher manager to see that the person knows how to file an issue like with all the information even maybe with the reproducer. It also helps a lot to see that if the maintainer is dismissing how they argue about the issue even more if they relate about the user experience they are trying to allow the other members of the community to have. And also if you see them participate on IRC and somebody has a question and there's no maintainer around and they say, hey, have you tried this? Have you tried this other thing? So those are very valuable skills both in interaction and in-depth in the technical side. Yeah, that's a great one. I'll try to summarize just in case the mic didn't pick it up. But starting about how you respond to issues, how you work with other people. And I think one of the things that you point out there too is that for most projects this stuff is kind of public record, right? So not only can you say, hey, I'm pretty good at handling issues. I'm really good at routing people appropriately kind of diagnosing what the problem is. And here's an example if you'd like to see where I did that or how I work in the community. So it really shows people you can demonstrate to a higher manager this is what I'm going to be like to work with. And that's a really big thing, right? Because that's the biggest thing when you go to hire somebody, you just really don't know what are they going to be like when they get here? How are they going to interact with other people? Are they going to be helpful? Are they going to turn out to be kind of a jerk, right? You just don't know unless you can actually see some demonstration. So you actually have a long history that you can point to where people can see how you behave. I saw another hand that went up. And back. So say more about kind of how do you develop that in open source. Communities. For example, you can see ideas floating but not necessarily a path to get to them. So by being able to see the overall picture of what it's wanted and become kind of a model. Yeah, it's a really good example. I think one of the most underrated skills that people develop working in open source is the ability to deal with ambiguity and to navigate very complex system and figure out how do I make a case for something and move it forward. And as much as companies can seem very much like a hierarchy where it's easy to figure that out, it isn't always, right? There's what's on paper. There's what's officially stated. And then there's the reality. Have we all seen situations where you can see one person in a company who's really good at getting stuff done and other people who just get stuck even though they have really good ideas? Yeah. So that's something that working in open source often helps you come up with how do I detect kind of the path forward here? How do I work with people who have strong opinions and accomplish something? That's great. What other skills would you add in the back? Yeah. I think, you know, that's a funny one too, is that as much as working in open source kind of develops your confidence that you can make something happen and that you are empowered and can make a difference, it also sometimes can help reinforce for you. I may not love what we're doing here, but okay, I can go along with it because, you know, at the end of the day I also care about what we're trying to achieve and maybe I'll try to convince you to do something different, but I could just hop on the train and move it forward. What else? Yeah, that's a great one. It really develops your ability to mentor others, to coach them, to do paired programming, cold review, lots of things like that. And I think as you become more senior and especially if you're a developer or engineer, that becomes more and more important to your role being able to talk about that, being able to do that. And it also becomes a skill that kind of sets you apart from other people who might be trying to get that same job. It's something that's important, but it doesn't necessarily come naturally to everybody. Anything else? We've covered quite a bit there. All right, so tips and tricks and a few mistakes to avoid. Big one is don't assume that they know whatever. Don't assume that they know what your project is. Don't assume that they know what languages you code in because you work on this particular project. Don't assume they know anything. Just include when you're talking to somebody a very brief explanation. What the project is, what your contributions entail. They may not know what a maintainer is. They may not know what community management is. Don't assume they know. But keep it short. Keep it specific. But don't get down too far into the technical stuff. You kind of gauge these conversations. Give them just enough that if they know nothing, they get a little bit of it. And then you kind of want to read, are they leaning in and asking me much more detailed technical questions? I know where I can go from there. Or do they look a little like, I'm not sure I understand. Maybe I can take a step back and simplify a little bit. Start with the explanation you would give toward more technical or even more simple as needed. This is a big one, though. I see this a lot. People will put on their CDs. They'll put, you know, maintainer for this open source project. But they are just kind of assuming that that's enough information for someone to understand. Or they're thinking, well, if they don't know, they'll Google it. Well, if you're a hiring manager, you're not usually going to take the time to Google something unless there's something else on there that got you interested to begin with. So don't make them do the work. The second one is really respect your contributions. This is something I see a lot. People tend to downplay what they do in open source if they're not getting paid to do it. So describe what you do just like you would any other valuable work-related skills or experience. So let's say you're in a job interview. This could look like saying something, you know, in my work on Anaconda, the Fedora installer, I review code for blah, blah, blah. I can say that and deliver that in the same exact way as I might say, in my work at Red Hat, I do blah, blah, blah. And if you present those things as equally important and valuable contributions, if you treat it as if this is work you do, because it is, the person you're talking to is much more likely to see it in that way. I don't know if any of you saw there was a study that came out not too long ago in Czech employers talking about whether they would count open source work as kind of work experience for students. And the answer was something like 80% said, no, no, no, I wouldn't count that as real-world experience. Well, a lot of that has to do with how you present it. If it's just in a footnote on your resume right next to I know how to use Microsoft Windows, okay, that's probably not going to get you very far. If you put it in the experience section of your, of your CV along with your employment and you don't sort of differentiate it out, you can put it on them to ask the questions to understand it. You're just listing it as experience. So this is a big one too. Don't inflate your role, right? If you don't feel like I have this particular skill we've been talking about, don't put it on your CV because that's going to lead to a very uncomfortable question in a job interview that where you say like, oh no, I just saw on a conference that I should say I had this skill. I don't really know what it means and I don't know if I actually have it. But do take full appropriate credit for the work that you've done. So this I think is much more common is that people downplay the work that they do or the skills that they have because they're afraid of appearing overly confident. So my friend at Red Hat, Sue Moynihan Cox she calls this learning the art of humble self-promotion which is you need to be able to promote what you do but in a way that isn't, you know, in your face and ugly. The fourth one is really highlight related knowledge and skills that you have. So Evolven Source has given you for example things people sent in an appreciation for good documentation, a better understanding of testing, more understanding of how automation should work, whatever it is, talk about that. Talk about how and why the work that you do in Evolven Source has contributed to that and why it makes you a more valuable employee. So for example you might say oh I see that you're moving in to see ICD. I've actually made a couple answerable contributions lately would you like to hear more about that? So there are ways that you can bring in your Evolven Source work into that conversation and really intrigue the employer to want to understand more about what you do. So with that I'm going to move us over to Q&A. I'm not going to pretend I have all the answers to everybody's questions but I imagine in the room somebody probably does. What questions did everything we talk about today spark for you? How do you get started as a contributor? Really good question. I think we have a room full of people who got started at some point who would like to give some pointers there. Yeah so I'll repeat back for the mic. So a good example is find a project you're already interested in, maybe something you're already using, something that relates to work you do already and just start small. Some of the examples that we gave in here earlier starting with documentation. My first thing might just be I found a typo in a doc. Great that's easy. I can walk through, maybe I have to submit a pull request to fix it so that gives me a chance to learn that if I've never done that before. Then over time maybe I answer some help questions. Maybe then all of a sudden I come across oh it does it this way. I have an idea for how it could do it that way. Let me try to submit it. So you can let your contributions grow over time and I think it's really neat actually how many of the stories that people sent in. That's exactly what their path in looked like.  They just started out with hey I use this. Let me figure out how to make it a little better. Figure out how to help other people who are getting started. Anybody have other tips? I see up here. Bug reports are a really reasonable and usually it's not too hard to find one to report so it's a great one. Back here. So before you submit your first patch with code in it you might take a look at other people's code and start there. It's great. Anybody else have something they want to add? A few maintainers to love you. A good one is to go through the open box maybe a bit oldish ones and try to see if they still reproduce. If they don't, stay so. If they reproduce and the steps were not clear and to like that and to help a bit the team try it. That's always good. And it gives you a better perspective into what the maintainers are doing with and it gives you then a path forward and forwarding questions about the developers and so on. Because investigating it may be able to find that they're actually doing the same things. Yeah, so that's great. I'll repeat it back for our future watchers. Talked about if you want to win the love of maintainers everywhere go ahead and take a look at older bugs that are out there and see if you can reproduce them. You can add comments about yes I was able to reproduce this, it is a problem or no actually this version and my setup it didn't happen. That starts to think about triage of bugs and things like that is a really good path in. And I will say too look for projects if you really are like I want my first contribution to go well I'm nervous. Look for projects that have some documentation that's geared toward how to get started on the project. A really good project tends to have information about what's a great way to get started as a newcomer, what do you need to know, where do you go to do this stuff. If you want to jump into kind of a very busy and disorganized project that might be a bigger hurdle just figuring out how do I contribute but many many projects have taken the time to show themselves as newcomer friendly and you can also identify yourself this is the first time I've ever done this that tends to make people a little more gentle with you they understand you're just getting started. That's a great one. What other questions do folks have or stories you want to share? So very good question is if you're applying for a company that's very much a proprietary company as far as you know they're not engaged in source projects is it worth mentioning that you contribute? Well I have an opinion but what do other folks think? Big enough there's still a wide field of fields that are important and of course quality fields are important and shepherds maybe some buck along so that it gets sold is also important as important as a proprietary environment that is important. Yes I'll repeat back for the mic the answer was a solid yes this stuff is still going to be very relevant to them and it's okay to ask questions about does your company contribute to open source are you familiar with it and kind of gauge where they're coming from and then that will help you understand how much explanation do you have to provide you know this is what open source is you never know if you're talking to a recruiter you might need to provide that if you are talking to somebody who's a hiring manager maybe maybe not it would depend on what their background is and you know it's interesting one of the things that some folks sent in ideas and whatnot was they talked about I don't remember who it was that sent it in I probably credit him at the end but if I did sorry Red Hatter I'll go find out who you were but he talked about how having coded in proprietary systems for years and years and years and also done open source that things that he worked on for 10, 15 years that were proprietary programs for an employer are no longer around and he put a lot of his life into it but he can't even see the code and sometimes can't even talk about the work that he did whereas even very small in his words not so great code that he wrote for open source projects years ago it actually still lives on you know a decade or two later and I think that's one area where open source is really a valuable thing to share with your employer because you can point them to look at code that you've developed you know if you're someone who writes code you can show them here's what my code looks like you might not be able to do that you know if you're working in a for a proprietary company you may not have code to show which um or that you have permission to show anyway so I think that's an area too where you might even intrigue them if they're not engaged in open source already and they might be kind of interested to know oh wow I can actually look at your code and not just you know in a here's a test kind of way but in actual real code that's out there in the world over here yeah that's really true um what he said was that when you're showing you know your code you're not just showing your code if it's open source you're showing how you communicate how you give feedback and that kind of stuff when you are looking at you know prospective hires you're trying to decide who should I hire it's going to give you a much clearer picture of what this candidate is versus somebody who just can tell you a little bit about you know I work for this other company and I work on stuff I can't talk about what other questions do folks have thinking about what brought you in here in the first place right I probably want to work on my CV I want to make sure I'm getting credit what questions did this raise for you and not answer it's great that's true and often open source conferences give you a lot more chances to speak just things like this DevConf I think is one of the best conferences where you've never done a technical talk it's a really great one it was my second or third talk I ever did anywhere was at DevConf and I only ever had one heckler at any talk I've done in many many years so you learn how to handle that too which is fun but it's really good and many times if the talks are filmed or if you have the slides that you share afterward you can also show people an example you know here's a talk I gave and here's the slides I used and you know that's one of those things that I think the longer you work in open source communities the more you take for granted that people just speak at conferences about what they do but in a lot of companies if it's a proprietary company many of the people who work there don't ever get up and speak at a conference about what they work on they might go to a conference but they may not actually have a lot of experience doing that whereas you know in front of a crowd full of strangers if you can get up here and speak you can definitely get up in front of you know your management team and talk about a feature you're working on what other questions or stories people have okay it's up when I first came from a proprietary company they were using a tool that was very impressed with the amount of effort that was so anyway I'm just mentioning not to lose that emphasis on you know CICP or resource yeah it's a great comment thank you for future watchers he was talking about how the appreciation and skills that you get in open source for code review often really are you know leaps and bounds in a proprietary environment and still very valuable skills that that people benefit from even in a automated world test and roll other questions back yeah it's the age old question right I've done so much how much do I put on the CV I don't want to be the one who shows up with the six page CV alongside everybody else's that's two pages so let me ask folks in the room when you are thinking about what you put on your CV how do you make that decision what makes it on what does it yeah so summarize what you do and highlight couple examples on there and you can always give a hint on the CV that there's much more you can talk about what I would do is take a look at the job you're applying for and try to decide out of all the stuff I've done and all the contributions I've made what might be most relevant and most interesting to this particular employer it takes effort to do that right you're applying to three different jobs it wants to kind of tailor what it looks like but it really will make your CV stand out from all the others because it's clear you're interested in the role and you've learned a lot about it you can also ask questions of the hiring manager so in the interview ask some questions to understand a lot more about the company about the job and that will give you the opportunity to share specific examples that you might not have put on your CV but what would I want to be if I would read the CV that would be important to me and a lot of the ways it works yeah so that's a really good litmus test too if I'm the employer and I'm looking for that CV what are the things that I would want to read on here and what are the stuff that I'd be like okay that's nice that's the stuff that you leave off and stuff you put on go ahead I would encourage you not to focus on the PR or the cognitive that are most technically impressive also with the ones that you actually have to fight for like the one that you had some interesting discussion the one that ended up with you having to throw it away and make a different approach because this shows much more development in the year otherwise it could just technical stuff it could be definitely in the light of the other box yeah so that's a really good point I'll just echo back very shortly don't just put the really technically interesting stuff on there put the stuff that you had to think a lot about maybe the stuff you've worked hard at but decided oh ultimately this isn't the right answer I had to go in a different direction really really good points and I would also say too if you are applying for a job what are the ones that you worked on that made a big difference for the person using the software for the end user those sometimes are not the most technically interesting things but often are things that show a perspective that maybe not every other person applying for that role would have so talking about the impact of what this contribution was what was the difference that it made to the project to the user that can be a really good thing to do before you go in for a job interview is to spend some time practicing like you're going in for a job interview so you can recruit your mother you can recruit your boyfriend you can recruit someone who loves you and is willing to sit in the chair and ask you tough questions but take the time to anticipate what kinds of questions might I be asked and practice answering them if you want to be able to share stories and examples it's really hard when you're nervous and you're sitting in a chair to come up with those you're like I know I have one but where is it but if you've told that story a few times over if you know in your head here's the couple of skills I really want to make sure come through then that's a really valuable way if you've told them a few times in practice you're going to be able to tell it much more easily in the moment and another thing too is to remember not just them deciding am I good enough to hire you want to know do I actually want to work in this place and so really taking the time to ask questions about what is the team dynamic like what kind of work would I be doing I ask really tough questions when I interview for a job so I'll ask questions like okay let's say six months from now I am wildly happy with this job you are really happy with the work I'm doing why is that the case what made the difference between me let's say six months from now I'm really unhappy here why do you think that would be right you can start to uncover there is sort of a toxic environment that I want to know what I'm walking into and you can tell how people answer and what they don't say right if they're just very like oh no you're going to love it you're going to love it maybe maybe not I don't know if you're not willing to talk about what are some of the challenges that's actually probably a tip off for them too let's say six months from now you know I've got the technical side of my job down but you're still not real happy with the work I'm doing what would be the most likely reason you know a year from now if I felt stuck in this role I wasn't advancing why do you think that would be I don't make them a little uncomfortable that you ask those questions but it actually will kind of get them to open up and it will give you a chance it will help you understand what are the challenges that they're facing what has been tough for them often they're filling a role that they've filled before so you know somebody who wasn't successful in it why was that the case really really good stuff and also it helps kind of humanize you and the person who you're talking to so you actually get to know each other as people which in the end makes you more likely to get the job even if you weren't at the top of the list going into it having those questions what other questions people have your interviewers in direction themselves contribute to this yeah it's a good question so you could ask the interviewer have you ever contributed to an open source project what's been your history with it and you might be surprised especially if it's somebody who is older of its interviewer many times they did years back and they haven't in a long time or they might say you know I've never contributed it's kind of it's really surprising how ubiquitous I think open source is now and how many people are involved in stuff it's a really good one you can also ask them questions about kind of their career journey in a company so you could say like tell me about how did you start out here how long have you been here you know what's been the most what's your favorite thing about working here what's the biggest challenge you have about working here the bigger picture that you can get of what this role is like the more you take this emphasis and it's more of a conversation of are we going to kind of make each other happy are we going to be able to give each other what we need whether anybody have stories they want to share about kind of how they got started in open source and what that's done for them go here say it real loud I have a very important question I was listening to some teachers so I said come here I thought there was only a problem I had to send them an email to actually and he doesn't use the project to support up the monstrosity so I hope that will work and use my work I would say so I mean it's something you can show you may not you might not position it as here's an example of an open source contribution I made but it might be here's an example of some work I've done it started out as you know an open source project and I was I couldn't get what I wanted in that project it didn't meet what it does now I think it would be an interesting thing for people to see go in the front I personally always ask the question in the interview about such things like probably about the time but in the data why was it like why were you about it it's a good experience to have yeah so it's definitely how it's received might depend on who the interviewer is but certainly if it's somebody who works in open source they'd be interested to see that what's the shift that I think kind of many open source communities it used to be that forking a project was kind of seen as like not a good thing so much it was we want to kind of keep one central thing but now I feel like it's just so much more like yeah if it doesn't meet the objectives that this project has why not that's why it's open source so we can my acknowledgement slide I mentioned there were a hundred plus emails that came in ideas in particular that I took from Red Hatters this is who contributed a lot of them and there were many ideas that came in from five or six different people too so it's kind of proof I think that a lot of this stuff really people find it to be helpful to them and that our experience is working in open source actually or sometimes they're more universal than we would think so I think


What is going on guys welcome back to the channel critical overlord here some huge breaking news today in regards to the future of the Halloween Franchise we are going to be getting two sequels back-to-back Halloween kills, which will be coming out next year on October 16th in 2020 and then Halloween ends on October 15th in 2021 now, I'll say right out the back. I hope these are not the official titles that they're going to keep the entire time I hope these are just the titles for the sake of announcements. These titles don't really do anything for me I mean Halloween ends is fine, but Halloween kills that doesn't Not they're not that and It's really not that shocking I'm not even going to be that upset about the titles because they've done so many Halloween movies I mean what else could you really call these movies at this point? They've done so many sequels to the original that it's ridiculous Jamie Lee Curtis is going to be back John Carpenter everybody. They've tweeted out this stuff Jason Blum gave the announcement I think this was made official Alex, San Diego Comic-Con or it's probably done just on Twitter if I'm not mistaken one of those two This is just huge breaking news, and I'm really excited that this is happening. I Recently or not recently but last week Nick Castle said he had news for the fans in regards to what John Carpenter Just told him that he was gonna disclose an event. He was at that weekend. He did not do that I'm assuming that's because they wanted to save the news for this weekend during the Comic-Con craze and all that good stuff They bring more attention to it. I don't think Blumhouse had a panel at Comic-Con Correct me if I'm wrong in the comments below, but I don't think they had a panel this year at the San Diego Comic-Con I'm really I'm not necessarily excited that we're getting more sequels as I am excited to see What they are going to do because I do love the character of Michael Myers I could do without these two sequels But I am excited at the thought that not only are these two back-to-back sequels But they're being done by the same creative team apparently David Gordon Green is back to direct David Gordon Green Danny McBride and Steven team will actually be or I think that's the gentleman who Reports came out earlier this year saying he was pending a treatment for a Halloween sequel All three of them will be working together on this new script. So Danny McBride and David Gordon Green, they were a nice combination for this 2018 film that we just got It was a huge success. I think they can tone it down a bit as far as that the comedy is concerned Maybe just have some instances where it's not just a Bust out laughing moment as opposed to just something that'll crack a few chuckles here and there I Think team this new edition of teams He might be I'm interested to see what he does what he brings to the table how all three of them can blend this Blend these two sequels together. I do not think that Daniel Harris will give back. I've seen her say she has some interest in coming back to the franchise This is only gonna heighten her interest more than likely I don't think she'll say anything. She might say something in the future But I don't expect her to say anything regarding these projects if she does come back She won't be in the role that of I think many of us are familiar with seeing her in I'm not necessarily all that thrilled about Again them giving us these two sequels as much as I am just to see what is going to happen How are they gonna wrap this story up because the other one's called Halloween in so that already tells you that in Halloween kills Michael Myers are gonna somehow either escape or that's what what that's what we'll let to assume Michael Myers He's gonna die in one of these movies That's pretty much a guarantee even if he doesn't die Halloween in sounds like a like a Like a conclusion like I'm finally getting what I want I wanted this series to end for so long and I hope it ends properly And I do believe this is the first trilogy that we have to the original film Yes, we have the Thorne trilogy, but the Thorne trilogy is a trilogy to the first two movies not solely the first movie I'm really just interested see how they can wrap this up even though I could live without them even doing these two more sequels I do not I still do not feel a sequel to the 2018 film is necessary, but if it's getting made it has my interest I love Michael Myers. I'm looking forward to see what they do I'm glad this is the same creative team behind the process of these two movies because I feel like that was one of the biggest Detractions from the franchise they had all these People coming in and constantly making their own spin on the franchise adding their own style adding their own flavor each movie felt different And while that can be yes refreshing And it doesn't feel like you're watching the same movie over and over it also is it also has shown to be a hindrance because these People are just writing things off the fly and they're leaving things for other people to pick up on that's what led to the countless Reboots as we let us to where we are now, so I like to see that consistency. I like to see that consistency with films Let me know what you guys think about the news down in the comment section below Are you looking forward to these two howling movies? Are you excited? Are you not what do you think about all this? If you haven't already make sure you subscribe and turn on post notifications So you never miss a video in the description. I have links on my social media accounts on Facebook Twitter and Instagram You can message me there to let me know movies news reviews You're like me to cover in the future all that in mind guys. I will see you in the next video