Open Source & DevRel | Kelsey Hightower  ## Metadata - Author: [[Francesco Ciulla]] - Full Title: Open Source & DevRel | Kelsey Hightower - Category: #articles - Document Note: --- tags: - #OpenSource - #DevRel - #Community Author: Kelsey Hightower Source: YouTube Interview Reference: [Open Source Software Community and Developer Relations - Software Engineer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfbmRePymDY) date created: 2025-08-27 16:15 --- # Title: Open Source Community & Developer Relations with Kelsey Hightower ## Table of Contents: - [📝 Summary](#-summary) - [📖 Main Content](#-main-content) - [🗒️ Notes](#️-notes) - [📖 References](#-references) - [🗣️ Paraphrase](#️-paraphrase) - [📰 Newsletter](#-newsletter) - [✅ Action Items](#-action-items) - [🧪 Hypotheses](#-hypotheses) - [📊 Methodology](#-methodology) - [❓ Questions](#-questions) - [🔮 Future Research](#-future-research) - [💡 Implications](#-implications) - [🧠 Learning Styles Assessment](#-learning-styles-assessment) - [📊 Accessibility Assessment](#-accessibility-assessment) - [🌍 DEIB Assessment](#-deib-assessment) - [✅ Logical Validity](#-logical-validity) - [🔍 DARVO Analysis](#-darvo-analysis) - [🔍 SEO Evaluation](#-seo-evaluation) - [🎯 Conclusion](#-conclusion) --- ## 📝 Summary: Kelsey Hightower reflects on his open-source journey, starting in the late 1990s with FreeBSD and Linux, highlighting accessibility as a key driver. He explains how public speaking became part of his feedback loop in sharing projects, eventually leading him into Developer Relations (DevRel). Kelsey emphasizes the distinction between activities and impact in DevRel, arguing that true success is measured by authentic communication with developers and alignment with business outcomes. He also touches on commercial open source, the importance of governance, metrics tied to revenue, and the future of open source as cross-disciplinary collaboration beyond software. --- ## 📖 Main Content: Kelsey connects his career to open source’s democratization of knowledge. What began with free CDs in magazines evolved into community meetups, public speaking, and shaping Kubernetes adoption. He critiques superficial DevRel approaches that prioritize vanity metrics over adoption and revenue, advocating for authenticity, empathy, and prioritizing user experience. He stresses communication as a fundamental career skill, often undervalued in tech. Bias against popular engineers (“just influencers”) is a recurring challenge he faced, despite deep technical contributions. Commercial open source, he argues, should not differ from regular open source if governance and intentions are transparent. Future open source will increasingly involve domain experts—healthcare, law, education—collaborating with technologists to solve complex problems. --- ### 🗒️ Notes - **[00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfbmRePymDY&t=0)**: Kelsey works on Google Cloud open source projects + Cloud Run. Security + serverless = core focus. - **[02:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfbmRePymDY&t=120)**: Early career → FreeBSD, Linux CDs in magazines. Accessibility made open source a gateway. - **[03:55](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfbmRePymDY&t=235)**: Public speaking = essential to communicate projects; forms feedback loop with community. - **[07:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfbmRePymDY&t=465)**: Public speaking tips: recreate excitement, keep it simple, avoid overdoing slides. - **[11:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfbmRePymDY&t=695)**: DevRel = philosophy of authentic communication. Impact ≠ activities. - **[15:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfbmRePymDY&t=929)**: Commercial OSS: governance & foundations (CNCF) provide sustainability + trust. - **[19:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfbmRePymDY&t=1146)**: Communication skills essential—poor communicators unknowingly limit careers. - **[22:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfbmRePymDY&t=1320)**: Bias: stage presence ≠ lack of technical skills. Prejudice against popular engineers. - **[25:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfbmRePymDY&t=1551)**: Metrics: Revenue = ultimate measure; stars, views secondary. - **[27:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfbmRePymDY&t=1620)**: Future OSS: interdisciplinary collaboration, openness > source. --- ## 📖 References: - CNCF governance model - CAP theorem (consistency/availability tradeoffs) - Kubernetes architecture (etcd) - Developer advocacy frameworks (impact vs. activities) --- ## 🗣️ Paraphrase: 1. Original: *“The best developer experience is invisible—like key bindings that fade into muscle memory.”* Paraphrase: The strongest developer experiences disappear into the workflow, where tools become second nature and nearly unseen. 2. Original: *“In DevRel, impact and activities are not the same. Impact is adoption and revenue; activities are just tweets, talks, or views.”* Paraphrase: Developer Relations should be measured by tangible results like adoption, not just surface-level engagement or content output. --- ## 📰 Newsletter: 🚀 **Kelsey Hightower on Open Source & DevRel** In a candid conversation, Google Cloud’s Kelsey Hightower shared how open source kickstarted his career—with CDs from tech magazines back in 1999—and why community storytelling is just as important as code. He’s blunt about DevRel: activities like blogs and conference talks matter less than **impact**. If adoption grows and revenue increases, DevRel succeeds. He also reminded us that the *best developer experience is invisible*—think autocomplete, key bindings, or frictionless APIs. As for the future? Kelsey predicts open source won’t just be about code—it’ll thrive when healthcare experts, educators, and lawyers collaborate with developers to build solutions together. That’s the “open” in open source. 👉 Full interview: [YouTube Link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfbmRePymDY) --- ## ✅ Action Items: - Frame WordPress DevRel around **impact-first metrics** (contributor retention, adoption, sustainability). - Apply Hightower’s “authentic communication” principle in contributor onboarding + governance proposals. - Highlight **revenue alignment** in OSPO advocacy: map contributor activity to business outcomes. - Incorporate **public speaking coaching** in contributor mentorship programs. - Use WordPress examples to showcase “invisible DX” improvements (frictionless onboarding, seamless tools). --- ## 🧪 Hypotheses: - H1: Authentic communication increases trust and adoption in OSS communities. - H2: Measuring DevRel by revenue-linked metrics increases organizational buy-in. - H3: Bias against “popular” engineers decreases once technical contributions are visible. ### 📊 Methodology: - Compare adoption metrics pre/post authentic storytelling campaigns. - Track retention/adoption rates tied to governance clarity. - Survey developer perceptions of credibility vs. popularity. ### ❓ Questions: - How can WordPress balance contributor recognition with guarding against influencer bias? - What DevRel metrics resonate most with OSS funders and corporations? - Can WordPress governance integrate CNCF-like long-term sustainability models? ### 🔮 Future Research: - Impact of revenue-based DevRel metrics in OSS ecosystems. - Cross-disciplinary collaboration models (tech + domain experts). - Bias reduction strategies in OSS leadership. ### 💡 Implications: - Strengthening open source sustainability through **impact > activities**. - Adapting CNCF governance principles to WordPress. - Positioning OSPO leadership around measurable outcomes, not vanity metrics. --- ## 🧠 Learning Styles Assessment: - Visual: Lacked diagrams → add DevRel impact frameworks visuals. - Aural: Video format helps auditory learners. - Verbal: Strong—storytelling, metaphors, simple phrasing. - Kinesthetic: Weak—no hands-on tasks → add workshop exercises. - Logical: Clear frameworks (impact vs. activities, CAP theorem). - Social: Meetups, talks → strong. - Solitary: Encourages self-reflection on career trajectory. - Naturalistic: Absent → could link OSS ecosystems to natural ecosystems. --- ## 📊 Accessibility Assessment: - Transcript exists, needs semantic tagging. - Ensure captions + alt text for visuals. - Recommend high-contrast slides and acce - Summary: Kelsey Hightower, a distinguished engineer at Google Cloud, discusses open source, developer relations (devrel), and public speaking. He explains how open source projects like FreeBSD and Linux provided accessibility for learning and launching a career in tech. He emphasizes the importance of public speaking in the open source community to communicate ideas and build relationships. Hightower also highlights the role of developer relations in understanding and advocating for developers' needs, as well as the distinction between evangelism and advocacy. Ultimately, he believes that devrel should be authentic and focused on building trust with developers through live demos and understanding their needs. - URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfbmRePymDY&ab_channel=FrancescoCiulla we have Kelsey Hightower from AtlantaGeorgia he call himself a distinguishedengineer at Google Cloud he calls inSurfer minimalistic so I'll keep thisintro short and we have many things totalk about open source the Royal and ifyou don't know him you should definitelycheck it out yes so you can see pleaseintroduce yourself so let's startbecause honestly it's hard to checkeverything you are doing I tried but you do so many things that I'm asking youdirectly now like what you're currentlydoing and then we start asking moreabout the past and we talk about ofcourse open source and Gabriel yeah Iwould say currently I'm working on a newopen source project at Google with theteam that's launching something you'llhear more about that relatively soon inaddition to that on the Google Cloudside where I've been for about sevenyears I spent a lot more time onserverless technology so Cloud run is anarea where I spent a lot for those unfamiliar with Cloud run it's a way torun containers with the serverlessParadigm right so it scales to zero payper use but the idea is that you shouldbe able to run more than just functionsand so we support normal containers nomore runtime so if you want to run Rubyand rails you can do that if you want toscale to zero you can do that and someof the things that we're working onright now that are in probably beta orAlpha for some people are the ability torun your applications more in the styleof kubernetes so that's sort of the current things security and serverlessare my big areas and of course still atGoogle Cloud making sure that people canactually adopt the cloud amazing becauseit's I I really want to to test that asto whether you are you are saying sothank you thank you so much so let'smake an introduction because I wanted toknow more like about your your life likeuh how did you become a developer howdid you get involved for example in opensource so let's start with maybe talkingabout the open source how did impactedthe all your whole life if this had an impact on your on your on your life yeahI got into this field around 1999 theyear 2000 and so for open source for meis more about accessibility so when Iwanted to learn this stuff at that timeuh FreeBSDand Linux were very popular open sourceprojects the most accessible you candownload them you could buy a magazinefrom the store and there will be a CD inthe magazine and you can use that CD to install one of these open sourceoperating systems so if you were aroundin 1999 or starting your career if youwanted to learn Unix this is going to bethe fastest way so Solaris was stillsomething you have to pay for AIX onlyreally worked with proprietary expensivemachines that only organizations orbusinesses could afford and so for theaverage person looking to get into Techyou know internet was not necessarily aplace you would go to try to downloadthis stuff it'd probably take forever and so you would go and buy a magazinethat had a copy of some distribution andso that was my first intro into opensource and so from in my mind I tookthat term free software to literallymean free because I didn't have to payfor it and from there I think I learneda lot that methodgot it certifications a pluscertification Linux plus certificationand use that to start my career inmainly tech support and so for a lot ofthe things that I was doing I tried to use Linux to progress in my career and Ithink the last piece here is gettinginvolved with the community Soeventually I started to find meetupsright a place you could go give talksand just learn from other people and sothat was my kind of entry point intothis whole idea of giving public talksand just learning public in generalnice so it all started let's say withthe little magazine and say a magazineSCD but then of course there has been anevolution and to be honest I'm also interested in the into the the speakingpart that's because I saw you you stillmake like amazing videos presentationsso how is this award that I'm kind ofknew of public speaking just six monthswhen I am almost one here maybe beconnected with open source because asyou say that you participated in manyevents so something more about thepublic speaking experience and then Iwill step into the develop because Ithink we are going there in the opensource world just think about it for a moment most people are contributingsoftware to some place like GitHubthere is no way in the world that anyonewould know what you're building justbecause you put it on GitHub no one'sjust going to just browse GitHub one dayand probably find your project you'regoing to have to communicate to the realworld and So speaking is just the thingthat humans have been doing forthousands of years to communicate allsorts of ideas politics anything andopen source is no different so if you have an idea right there's a saying somepeople have ideas and some ideas havepeopleand the only way that people will learnabout your idea and decide if they wantto participate in those ideas is for youto communicate with them and I stillthink one of the best ways ofcommunicating with people is beingaround them right of course you can makevideos of course you can make a blogpost but there's something magical thathappens when you're in the same placewith them and so for me going to a Meetup was about thatI don't know what I don't know I don'tknow what questions to ask and so I justwant to be in that room and see whathappens and so for me in the early daysof giving a talk I think the first timeI gave a talk it was at Georgia State orGeorgia Tech University and I justwanted to prove myself right I'mwatching other people speak and thequestion I had was can I do this tooright and so my first talk was at apython Meetupin Atlanta and I gave a talk about python versus Haskell and we weretalking about the details of listcomprehensions right a lot of pythons uhsyntax comes from languages like Haskelland so I gave this presentation it waspurely for me to be able to prove myselfthat I was able to get in from thepeople and speak about technical topicsbut eventually it became an Avenue toshare what I was working onand so when I was contributing to opensource projects like uh you know toolslike virtual in and pip the package manager for python well whatever I wascontributing I would go to the Meetupand show people what we were working onshow people what was coming and givethem ideas on how they can help and soit became a feedback loop you do theworkand then you talk about it and I thinkfollowing that pattern whether it was ata large conference a small Meetup Ithink a lot of people gravitated to thatstyle hey here's the thing that I'mworking on let me show it to you and sothat's why I got into public speaking as part of the feedback loop for the actualworknice Kelsey I love that and the waterseeing we can see that it's it's simplelike like you put it in simple wordslike if you want to to have acommunication with someone you shouldspeak about your projects I'm speakingabout what you're doing but then puttingthis in action is not the same thingsometimes and then we don't knowprobably because there are some blockersor maybe I don't know we feel that weare not good enough for example something like am I good enough to jumpon a stage and talk about this that Ilearned last week so what do you thinkabout this should someone be a publicspeaker just because they want to sharetheir experience or they should at firstbecome very excellent into something andthen apply to become a public speakerwhen I'm thinking about content I'mthinking about a person standing next tome that is interested in learningsomething so my style tends to say ifI'm working on something and it makes me excitedthen I know that this is probablysomething that I feel that I would liketo talk about and try to recreate thatemotional response that I had like I'mreally excited about this and if I cando the same thing on stage then thepeople in the audience well they getexcited too right because it's the samefeeling recaptured in a narrative so Ilike to wrap a story around it so ifit's someone you work with all the timeor maybe it's a friend just notice hownatural you are when you talk to them you use simple words you leverage yourbody language you use intention you usesilence but I think when people areuncomfortable whether it's on a bigstage people that don't know they tendto overdo it right they use complexwords too many pictures too many slidesand then it can feel unnatural foreveryone that's involved and so I wouldsay this is that everyone knows how todo public speaking because that's whatyou do in general and then gettingcomfortable speaking in larger audience in front of people you don't know that'ssomething that just takes time and lookif you want to do it you'll probablyfigure it out because probably it'sbecause of the anxious so we are morefocused on what people could think aboutus rather than us communicating to whatwe learned what we want to communicatethis can be as you said on on differentlevels so yes I totally agree with thatand this is a great tip if you want toget started with Public public speakingso do less maybe just try to be focusedon the message that you want to communicate so Kelsey let me say thatyou were doing the devrel so developerrelations even before becoming adeveloper advocate so I asked this Ithink to about 200 people so I'll trywith you also because I never had likeone single definition so what is thereal for you and what the real that doesmean for you from your point of view andyour your huge experience in this role if I were to talk about marketingdepartment they may say devrel is a wayto hire people who can relate todevelopers and so in that case it couldbe let's make a video on YouTube in away that a developer would like so let'sgo and look at how videos are consumedby developers and let's just copy thatso in the copying patience Deborah willbe that right but I think if you thinkabout just that combination of the wordslike developer relations how do yourelate to a person who's a developer and some people would say it takes one toknow one and so people who have done thejob before can understand the nuance andwhat they're saying and I think in theworld of devrel the live demo is soimportant if you've never used the toolthen you are basically evangelizingright you're just saying use it becauseI believe in it why do you believe in itbecause I'm being paid to believe in itright that could be a valid reason sosince I'm being paid well to believe init I need you to believe in it too so wecan keep the whole thing going and thatis a raw form of evangelism and then advocacy is very different in my opinionadvocacy is going to be more around wehave this thing that we've built I havea thing that I've built it's not usableby my target set of users and thesecould also be paying customerswhy can't they use it who's going toAdvocate on their behalf what bugsshould be prioritized to be fixed and soat the end of the day there are a largegroup of consumers whether they're usersare paying customers that happen to bedevelopers those developers are now making independent decisions on thetools and products that they want to buyso traditional marketing is noteffective to that group of people youcan't just show them an ad and expectthem to go and take an action they needto see something way more authenticright when when Nike wants to sell shoesthen they have to show those shoes beingworn by professional athletes right if Isee my favorite athlete wearing acertain set of shoes I say hey thoseshoes must be good because it's the best professional is wearing them to do theirjob they're going to work for me eventhough I'm just playing at the local gymand I think developers are the same wayI need to see it in action and I need tounderstand that you understand what I'mtrying to do and if that's the case thenyou have a way to effectivelycommunicate the unfortunate part aboutdevrel though people have used it tocreate another HR box right you join acompany and they say you are in devreland then you may focus on the activitiesright I think a lot of people will say oh devrel means creating videos givingconference talks getting likes andretweets those are activities they maynot result in any impact and I think alot of people in devrel struggle withthe difference between impact andactivities impact is where you growadoption maybe increased revenue and soI think the biggest challenge of that HRtitle is that honestly the set oftechniques for communicatingauthentically with developers should beshared by everyone in the organization that is building something and theyshould approach product development withempathy for that actual end user sothat's the way I think about devro Ithink at a high level it's a philosophyto communicate with authenticity to adeveloper community and in terms of arole you need to think about thedifferences between activities andimpact thank you Kelsey we are having alot of questions so if that's okay foryou I will start with some of thembecause they are piling up so which is the best DX developer experience you'veseen so far and why is it the best uhthe best developer experience you neversee because it's the best it's hidden ifit's in my way then it cannot be thebest if I have to think about it this iswhy people like key bindingsI can choose a combination of keys andcommit to muscle memory and it fadesaway I don't even think about it it's ahidden feature there is no UI there is no pop-up that's one of the bestdeveloper experiences in the world andthis is when developers that have everused something like emacs or vim andwhen they go to a different IDE what isthe first thing they try to do they tryto get their key bindings back becausethey turn their workflow into a set ofkey presses to speed things up thinkabout autocomplete in the IDE I'm typingI hit period on a function and I hit taband it auto completes the rest of thework that's a very powerful developer experience because it's so transparentit's completely out of the way so to methe best developer experience is the oneyou can't seematter of fact okay let's go with uhthis one about the commercial opensource software which are told aboutthis and I see a lot of companies jointhe cncf landscape my personal opinionhere is that if depending on the type ofsoftware you're building a lot of peoplewon't use that software unless it's opensource right when it comes to like Computing platforms programminglanguages maybe it's a specializedprogramming language maybe some peoplewould pay to to use it but in generalthere's so much competition in the opensource space there's so much innovationin open source space for manyorganizations you're almost kind offorced to start and I think with opensource being your starting point itgives you a chance to really thinkthrough your go to market strategy buildthat viable product and then attract abunch of community developers that arewilling to exercise your product and be willing to adopt it before you find theperfect price the perfect entry pointmaybe even before it's completelyfinished so when it comes to like thethe cncf landscape there's many reasonsto do it some companies they want to seethat you have a really good governancemodel they want to know that if you goout of business remember not everystartup is going to make it and so whathappens if your startup goes away wellif I'm a large institution I expect thistechnology to work for decades and so weneed to know that it's going to be around longer than the maintainers willbe around and so I think cncf and otherfoundations they provide a landing placefor governance things like IP can youuse the trademark and also there's anopportunity for people to be very clearabout their governance model and howthey choose a collaborate long term soto me commercial open source should bevery little difference than normal opensource but we just got to have acommunity agreeance on what things do Ihave to pay for and will you stop me from competing with you on the open sideyeah I agree with that so there isnothing wrong when trying to to get someof course it doesn't make sense and asyou said also it should always be clearabout our intentions if you make thingsa career since the beginning you're goodto go we have also many questions aboutthe the varel side so now let's uh let'sget some of them if that's okay for youso you you were talking about yourexperience in meetups but now I would like to ask you like I was being likeyou're on York's first experience onyour first experiences in the worldbecause I think that many people herethey want to get started in some ways sofrom your point of view what is the bestway to start and about your especiallyfirst experiencesI didn't do devrel until 13 years in theindustry I've done tech support systemadministration I worked inside of thedata centers and so you take thiscombination of 13 years and you joinGoogle cloud and remember when I joined Google Cloud I was a contributor tokubernetes so when I joined Google I Iwas joining Google for flexibility andone of the most flexible roles at Googleat that time was developer relations Ihad never done it before and so for me Ilooked at that and says okay I do notwant to be put in a box at that timeseven years ago all I knew about Deborahwas people who focus on creatingactivities that's not what I do I likeRevenue I like business I like understanding how to make a product sogood that people want to pay for it Ialso know that you actually had to buildthe actual product and you have toprioritize what to build it starts withthe work figure out what the work is howdo you actually figure out what the workis go look at what the profit and lossstatement isthe thing you work on does it make anymoney do customers like it if it's notmeeting those monetary goals why yourjob is to go find out how do you find out you go spend time with actualcustomers you sit with them youwhiteboard with them you listen deeplyand then you take all the noise and youtranslate it into priority the thingthat helped me most though is having the13 years of Prior experiencebecause now I don't just talk about theproduct I can talk about the reality ofadopting that product over time so nowwhat do I think after not being in thedevil anymore so I got a devil two years agoI thinkmost people should understand what thisdiscipline in is and leverage it ifyou're PM you got to learn how tocommunicate and write really clear userJourneys about how your product will beused how it's currently being used andhow to improve it and set prioritiesaround that if you're an engineer thereason why I started the empatheticengineering program at Google because Iwanted Engineers to know what it's liketo use their product from a customer perspective so they can approach theirwork with empathy how will peopleactually authenticate to your product isit compatible what the market is doingand so I think now to like go back andrevisit that experience I think everyonecan learn something from it but I thinkit's all about what you bring to thetable remember I keep going back to itImpact versus activities because they'renot always the same thingthank you all thank you so much uhKelsey I think that basically what you are communicating is that you should bepatient and I like this approach whichis bottom up so you build up from thebasics you start from as you said like astart from building and then I think inthat case you can really understand andput in communication the company thecustomers the users I think and manypeople think I'd like being the realityit's easy like you just stay a bit oftime on Twitter then you'll make acouple of my streams and then you youare done you can call your day so in Philadelphia you know already know thatis not that but like I would like to askyou directly which are some commonchallenges that you faced in the worldand how you overcome them if you manageto overcome them of course there are alot of people who are in the techindustry that have zero communicationskills and so for them they believe thatcommunication skills are not required tobe successful now I'm fortunate for thatperson they don't understand how much oftheir career has been limited by not being able to communicate so they haveno frame of reference and so imaginewhen people who watch people do thesethings like all you do is tweet wellbecause they believe that writing atweet is easy right because they cantweet too right my shoes are red andthen they get a million likes on Twitterand like see I can do it so what's thedifference between me and you right andso that is one way to frame this kind ofdiscussion one of the challenges I had and it was amazing because peoplethought I was just someone who was justtalking at a conference based on a deckor demo that someone else built for meand so I'm speaking at a conference andI'm talking about kubernetes and thelow-level details on how it'simplemented and someone just asked thisquestion assuming that I couldn't answerit and they were like what happens ifthe consistency model of kubernetes wereto get messed up wouldn't the wholesystem break I was like like well that'snot how NCD works we talked a little bitabout cap theorem and I showed them that CD leans towards consistency and this issome computer scientist and he wasdebating the cap there I was like listenyou only have certain rules cap theoremis good enough to explain the situationif we can't have consistency inkubernetes then the system stops now hedidn't believe me so I said all rightlet me show you if you turn that CD offwhat will happenit won't accept any changes you're goingto get an error because it's leaningtowards consistency so we sacrifice availability because there's a networkpartition there you go this is in simpleterms now I'm going to show you whathappens when we bring it back but don'thave a quorum but in that case I foundthat throughout the years before peopleunderstood my background I had toexplain to them that I'm a contributorto kubernetes I have Commit access Iwrote the book you're reading look atthe bottom I'm the author that's my nameand so people will get confused thatthey didn't understand that just becauseyou're speaking on the stage that you don't know how to actually write code soI think those are the challenges but youknow it's always been fun but I thinkthere's a lot of bias where people willsometimes try to shame people who arevery popular on YouTube or Twitter andclaim that they are not real engineersand I think that is just literally uhpretty sad to see because it just isn'ttrue all the timeokay nice so let's give with a couple ofmore questions the metric like aren'tthey currently working are they currently in doing something so how canwe measure how much weight we arelifting in the umbrella which are thethe best kpi or way to measure out whatwe are doingthere's a probably a good answersomewheremy opinion is that in business whetheryou like it or not let's talk aboutbusinessbusinesses tend to exist to generatemoney from the things that they chooseto buildthat's also pretty straightforward andif you choose to join a company on that mission you expect payment in order topay you the thing that they're buildingmust be something that people want topay for now in the open source Communityit's a little different what's themetric well if it's an open sourceproject your metric is that you may justwant to share with the world and I'vecreated projects before where I just sayI'm going to put it on GitHub and that'sit there will be no maintenance I'm notlooking at it and I'm not fixing anybugs and I expect no payment from you either you don't like it you can Fork itand you can do whatever you want with itnow let's say I wanted to have mypopular open source project and I wantthe number of GitHub stars to grow sothen you may wake up every morning andyou look at your number of GitHub Starsright and you say I want more stars sowhat would you do to get more stars youwould probably tweet about your GitHubproject right you would say hey checkout my GitHub project and then you wouldsay something like and if you like itplease give it a starthere has to be a call to action and so then you wake up the next morningand you have more GitHub Stars thanbefore and so you know something isworking so you're going to keep doingthose activities why are you doing thoseactivities because they're having theimpact that you set out to measure whichis GitHub stars now in this case youstill have no money so now let's applyit to business so instead of GitHubStars the business wants moneyso now think about the activities you need to do in order to get money nowso as a person doing devrel your managercould say we want more people to readthis blog post people are still going tobe mad at you because if I'm thebusiness and I find out that all you'redoing is writing blog posts and you tellme hey look at this chart the number ofpeople reading our blog post has gone upand if I'm the business and I have topay you I say that we're not making anymoney we care about money you care aboutblog post views we have a disconnect so when people ask me what's the bestmetricslet's not fool ourselvesif you work at a company that must makemoney to survive and to pay you by thewaythere's really only one metricare your activities having an impact onthe moneyif the answer is yes then to me and mypersonal experience devro gets wayeasier so if you say I went to aconference and I got three new customers that are each paying us a hundredmillion dollarsI promise you Noah's gonna ask you aboutany other metrics so if you write a blogpost are people even reading it that'sgood to know I'm not saying it'sunnecessary it's good to know but boyI'd rather have Revenue over blog viewsI like this idea of like trying to workreally hand in hand with your team soI'll see maybe we have one one the verylast one it was about to open sourcelike what do you think is it might be the future of Open Source how is the theuse of Open Source evolved what do yousee Can it can be future and they saythat the future is easy to predict ifyou're working on itand when it comes to Software I thinkopen source has demonstrated whathappens when you have a large collectionof people come togetherand have alignment on what they want thefuture to be and so you can just createany project that you want there is no company that has to give you permissionyou don't even have to have an aim tomake money you can do whatever you wantand you can attract people tocollaborate with you from anywhere inthe world what happens when people whowant to solve Health Care people whowant to make education better who wantto automate legal defense people whowant to tackle Finance so when you bringthose different people together and thenthey get to try to solve that newproblem with code then I think whatyou're going to find out is that software can be applied to other domainsand so I think the future is going to bemore collaboration from people who arejust not developers or software peopleyou can have software people combinedwith domain experts to come together andthen open source the solution I thinkthat is 100 the future so the futurewill be defined by peoplepeople coming together to solve aproblem that can happily or and somewhatbe solved by leveraging software as partof the solution nice amazing so basically good it will be focused moreon the open rather than the source sothe open part will be probably the mostrelevant part so because before we closedo we want to say like which otherplants do you make plans for 2023 myplans at the keep doing what I've beendoing I've been fairly successful and Inever stopped learning and look if youhave one big takeaway when we talk aboutopen source and devrel activities andimpact are not always the same thing and just try to figure out how to alignyourself strategically to get thesethings to move closer and if you focuson the impact then I think the rightactivities reveal themselvesthank you so much sir and uh yeah bestof luck for everything remember tofollow him of course and yes thank youso muchbye-bye bye bye everyone, Open Source & DevRel | Kelsey Hightower, Francesco Ciulla, 01h5mgpv0e6e06n1c1pgvdnc75.