Episode 81: DevOps World 2020 Preview - Lessons on Building an Open Source Community

Brian Dawson: This is Brian Dawson with another episode of DevOps Radio, sponsored by CloudBees. This is an exciting time of the year. DevOps World is upon us, September 22 through September 24. We will be running DevOps World, in light of the times, as a virtual event. It will be DevOps World, sponsored by CloudBees. So we're getting ready for a range of really exciting interviews, as we begin to interview the DevOps World participants and learn about their stories.

With me today is Jacqueline Salinas. Jacqueline Salinas is the Director of Ecosystem and Community Development for the Continuous Delivery Foundation. Hello, Jacqueline. 

Jacqueline Salinas: Hi. Thank you so much for having me, Brian. I really appreciate it. 

Brian Dawson: Thank you. It's our honor.

To get started for our listeners, can you give them a brief overview of your role, what you do and why within the Continuous Delivery Foundation? Then also, what is your career background? How did you end up in what honestly sounds from the outside like a pretty cool job many of us would like to have? 

Jacqueline Salinas: I will say it is a really cool job. When I initially took this role on, my understanding was I was supposed to come in and help grow the ecosystem and community for the Continuous Delivery Foundation, which at first I was just like, "I have no idea how to do this." 

I like to say I grew up in Intel Corporation. That was my first job straight out of college. My background is in marketing. So I was really focused on product marketing, meaning brand development, outreach and inbound and outbound communications. So I was really probably some of those really annoying, pesky marketing people that developers most of the time are like, "Why are you here, bugging me?" 

But yeah, essentially, I like to see myself as a storyteller. What I do for the Continuous Delivery Foundation, it really varies. I've had a lot of flexibility to create this role.

Some of the ways we've tried to grow our community is by launching the Ambassador Program. I've also launched a podcast, a webinar program, because I realized that we needed to produce content to entice the developer community to start engaging with us. So that's kind of like the 10,000 view of what I do.            

Brian Dawson: And that does – I was right. It does sound cool. It's interesting. I want to bring this up and see your thoughts. I will say I started out as a developer, as an engineer, and probably have told this story in plenty of circles.

I was a bit of a cocky engineer. I felt like everything revolved around what we developed. So confession to you, Jacqueline, and everybody else here. But as I moved on in my career and I spent some time on the pre-sales and post-sales side of things, and then I've now spent time in marketing, I developed a respect for how important all of those pieces are to what we do.

But more importantly, a lot of discussions I've had – and I'm curious if you're running into this – with transformation leaders within organizations is focusing on the fact that in order to drive collaboration, get people invested, and ultimately build the community approach that an organization needs to drive DevOps, you have to market it. I'm wondering if you've found that your background – how your background in marketing becomes particularly relevant in building communities. 

Jacqueline Salinas: From my perspective, I think it has helped me quite a bit. Every time that I was faced with a challenge or with an opportunity to help the community grow, I noticed that I do dig through my skill set that I gained at Intel and at AWS. At AWS, I was a digital marketing manager, and that has actually really helped me be able to raise awareness about the foundation, raise awareness about our initiatives and the activities that we're doing. 

One big win for us was – so we're having our first flagship event, which is cdCon this October. We were able to sell out most of our sponsorships within two weeks of us opening. 

Brian Dawson: Congratulations. 

Jacqueline Salinas: But I have to give acknowledgment to the community and to all the people that continue to show up to the outreach committee meetings or people who are engaged in the TOC, people who follow us on social media, people who are paying attention. So I think that in order for us to raise awareness of the CD Foundation and what we're trying to do and achieve, I've had to really put together a lot of awareness campaigns through various channels. So I think my marketing background, that's how it's helped the CD Foundation be able to grow.

So yeah, I think that I don't disagree with you. I think developers are a very important part of our community, but it takes a village. 

Brian Dawson: Yes. I agree fully. I like that. So actually transitioning, because I think this does – we talked about your marketing experience, but you also are participating in a – or driving, really, a keynote panel at DevOps World this year, and you'll be talking about the power of the open source community.

I'm curious to understand in terms of your marketing background – actually, let me unwrap it a bit. In looking at the abstract, I understand much of your talk will be about how the panelists' experiences relate to the building of community. Can you tell us a bit about what the talk is about? And kind of tie that back to the background of the panelists' work.

Jacqueline Salinas: Absolutely. When I took on this role of building a community, I think I initially was a little bit overwhelmed because I didn't know exactly, how do I go out into the world and tell a powerful enough story, so that I can gain followers? So I was like, "Okay. Let's do this through the Ambassador Program."

So I kind of just put that word out there and it kind of – what surprised me about open source, because, like I said, this is my first role in open source – in my past roles, it's been with corporations, selling private products. That's the simplest way to put it.

So I just didn't realize what a tight knit community open source is, whether it's in Jenkins or Spinnaker or Tekton, any of our incubating projects. So once I started to talk about, like, "These are the things I'd like to do for the community," and I started to get to know more people, everybody really started embracing the CD Foundation and understanding the value that we bring to these communities.

Oftentimes, I think that somebody just has to help put some process and organization in place, and I think that's when people will start to follow. That's kind of what I saw with the Ambassador Program, like, "Hey, if you are contributing to a community and there's more things that you'd like to do, this is kind of my high-level plan. Do you want to join?" and I got a lot of yeses. It was as simple as getting them engaged to write a blog or to come on our podcast and talk about an area of expertise.  

So this keynote is actually inspired from my second podcast episode, "The Power of Open Source Community," where I interview Marky Jackson, who is a Jenkins, Spinnaker, and Kubernetes contributor, and he's also a CDF ambassador. This was inspired from a case study that CloudBees put out back in February about why Marky contributes to open source. So after I had read that case study, I was very inspired by Marky, and I reached out to him and invited him to be a speaker for the podcast.     

That started to morph into more talks. I started submitting this talk to other virtual events. Then DevOps World happened and they were like, "Hey, there's this opportunity for a keynote." I pitched the "The Power of Open Source Community," and I guess here we are after all that.

Brian Dawson: I'll lead into the audience about some of our conversations, to lead into the next question. We talked about the importance of diversity, and not just diversity by what I think people see as, I guess, the generic definition: gender diversity, race or ethnic diversity, diversity around orientation. We also talked about how it's important to have diversity of experience and diversity on other dimensions, which I think Marky's story, if people tune in to DevOps World and your keynote, which I absolutely recommend they should, they'll learn more about Marky's story specifically. But in my experience with the Jenkins community and other open source communities, they are composed of some of the most diverse groups of people, and also, some of the most invested and passionate groups of people. 

Can you share with me, why do you feel that this level of diversity, this diverse approach is important in the community, but also why you feel it's extremely important at this time of disruption and a demand for innovation and progress? If you could talk a bit about that, I'd love for our audience to hear. 

Jacqueline Salinas: I think it's really important for us to be an open and welcoming community because open source, something that I've identified since working with the community, is that it helps democratize education. That is extremely important if we want to be able to move forward as a society. 

I think that this gives folks who normally – I think open source communities give folks the opportunity to actually have the same starting place, on the starting line as others. I think that things like the pedigree of your education go out the window, because it's more about what is it that you want to contribute, because you want to do that versus what can you get out of it.

But, at the same time, I will say that what you put in, you get out from open source communities. So I think that's been the power of why it's so important to have diversity in open source communities, because it's giving folks – I mean I guess a fair chance to start and not have so many obstacles that hold you back. But I think that there's still a lot of work that we need to do in order to be able to be more accessible to more communities. So I think that's also why it's so important that open source communities are supported, because it's also giving folks that normally don't have that opportunity a place at the table.    

Brian Dawson: Yeah, absolutely. It's interesting because we talk about meritocracy, but oftentimes, we find before someone can get to a place where they can prove themselves based on their own merits, there's a number of other blockers that they have to get around, which sometimes kind of taints the ability to prove yourself simply on your skill set and your contribution. 

So I love the idea. I love what you're saying about not only the opportunity to embrace diversity and focus on what people can contribute versus things like their pedigree, but open source – and I'll use my daughter here as an example – is a great place for people to get around those hurdles.

Jacqueline Salinas: To just get exposure, to be to have a safe place that they can come and learn without judgment, without whatever other societal pressures we often feel.

Brian Dawson: Amen. I agree fully. So I would ask what are some of the tactics that you've used to build not only community, right, you've shared some of the tactics, but the diverse communities that help drive the pulse of open source? 

Jacqueline Salinas: It's a pretty small initiative right now, just because sometimes I'm juggling too many things at the same time, but one of the things that obviously we recognize is the lack of female representation. So we started a LinkedIn group called (She)DF – so “she” in parentheses and Delivery Foundation. 

This is basically just a group for women and allies to just have a conversation with each other, because I think it's just as simple as that. Sometimes it's just like – I realize that once I start talking about things, it sort of starts to get momentum. So that's why we're like, "Let's just put this group together and see how it grows."

So when we first started, there was no one. We probably had – right now, that's something that I'm trying to work on. Our Ambassador group needs more female representation, but not just female representation, other ethnic minorities and also other gender folks as well.

Jacqueline Salinas: Gender diversity as well is something that we're like, "Okay, this is heavily male dominated," but it's also the nature of the beast. That's just how our industry is right now. But I think just starting to talk about it and pointing out that there is – we have a gap here, so let's just start figuring out how do we engage people. How do we engage them to know about us and to also identify us as a safe place for them to come and engage? 

I think for myself, as a female who is not technical, but works in tech, I will say that I've had the worst impostor syndrome with this role, because as a LatinX, as a female, I don't have anybody to identify with. So for a long time, I didn't really allow myself to dream, to aspire to be something more than just a manager, for example. The reason why is because there was no examples, and if you don't have that, if you don't have people who you identify with, whether it's culturally, whether it's gender-wise, I think that makes an impact in why females also don't have leadership roles or why there aren't more females going into these technical fields. 

So that's also why, for me, that's something that I'm extremely passionate about is figuring out: how do we do that within the CDF. How do we do that with our community? 

But it's a challenge, too. It's been a challenge for me to find these individuals, to have a conversation with them and be like, "Hey, learn about the CD Foundation. Join us." 

So that's one initiative we've launched, and it's also part of our nine strategic goals as a foundation, to make sure that we are a place where people understand that diversity is something that we value. So that's some of the ways that we've been doing it. Like I said, we're starting small, but we hope to kind of snowball into something bigger. But yeah, it's unfortunate to just say, "Yeah, it's kind of the nature of the beast right now." 

Brian Dawson: Yeah. Look, everything has to start with intent and genuine intent, similar to how you described when you started (She)DF. It was crickets, but once you made this space and you had the intent to drive it, people came. I think that's pretty powerful.

I do believe that many of us, irrespective of race, background, ethnicity, gender, orientation, oftentimes bring into this space our own baggage. We see really, really smart people and we question if we belong here, and that questioning of if we belong here stops us from fully engaging.

I think to the point a lot of the work that you're doing is important, not only around diversity, but just community in general is I think we're better, stronger as companies, as individuals, when everybody that is participating can shake the impostor syndrome, come in and bring their full and best self. So I love (She)DF, that initiative, and I know less of the diversity-focused initiatives you covered in terms of building an Ambassador program, some of the awareness campaigns in outbound marketing. 

I'd like to contrast that against the fact that in the past, as you said, you sort of grew up at Intel and AWS. Now, you're in what I would assume is a very different space.

Jacqueline Salinas: Night and day.

Brian Dawson: Night and day. So I'm gonna set you up so you can go – I want to know one – I want to dig into that night and day, what's so different, but I want to add to it. In hindsight, because a lot of our listeners work within companies, enterprises like Intel and AWS, a lot of our participants at DevOps World are, not only how are they night and day different, but what could Intel, AWS, and companies of the like learn from what you guys are doing with CDF and in open source communities? 

Jacqueline Salinas: Absolutely. The difference is that when you work at a big corporation, you're usually given a scope of what you're supposed to do. I think that the biggest difference for me with the CDF is that I've had so much flexibility to actually be creative in how I mold my role. I get the flexibility to choose what I get to work on, within guidance of course from the governing board and the nine strategic goals that they've set. 

I think that's been the biggest difference. I'm not just working on one product and building its brand. I'm working on building the brand of the foundation, but I also have to take into consideration the brands of each of the incubating projects and graduated projects. I look at them as products as well, so I have to continue making sure that they are growing.

So for me, I think the reason why I – it was a personal goal of mine anyway to work for a nonprofit foundation at some point in my life. I think that when I graduated in 2013, I was just like, "I'm gonna take whatever job I get." So I got my foot in the door with Intel, but I also have really unique experiences at Intel, where I actually worked for a research and development group for a depth sensor, which was not really – it's not Intel's bread and butter. So it allowed me to gain a ton of skill sets that normally a person at the age of 24, 25 in a marketing role would not have. 

So from a young age, I've been getting quite a bit of responsibility, and just kind of also been encouraged to run with it. So I think that's also been a similarity here where I've been given a ton of responsibility, but also, they've been like, "Go and figure it out in your own way," whereas in bigger corporations, they already have a process in place of how they want you to do things. But that for me has been the most exciting part, identifying problems, figuring out how to put a process in place, and then making sure that that problem doesn't happen again. 

So, like I said, I've taken a lot of – I look back at the skills I gained at Intel and at AWS, and I use one of those skills one way or another for the CD Foundation.

Brian Dawson: Would you – and potentially leading your answer – what I hear is that to the extent that they can do it, corporations would also benefit from giving people some latitude to move across boundaries, not work in fixed roles, being given some ownership and allowed to run. That would drive positive outcomes. Is that –?

Jacqueline Salinas: I think so. I would agree with that. I mean I think it also depends on the individual. I know that there are some individuals that are like – they are great performers, but they don't want to be given that responsibility to have to be creative in the way that they address a problem.

I thrive in that. That's the area where I like to live in and work in, which is why I kind of took a leap of faith with the podcast. I had no idea if it was going to be successful. Kind of the same thing we're finding out with the webinar program. It's slowly building up an audience. But these are two really simple tactics that across the board I think several companies address or implement or execute on, but I think not everybody wants to do the work.   

Brian Dawson: Yeah, I think that's fair. People have different modes of operation.

Jacqueline Salinas: Yeah.

Brian Dawson: I'm sitting here thinking that I could see some of our listeners going, "Isn't this a DevOps podcast? Why are you guys talking about this?" Well, one, it's fun. It's cool. But I actually hold why this conversation with you is so important and some of the discussions that we're having, this all maps to what it takes to be able to build successful teams, successful cross-functional teams, which is what it takes to drive a successful open source project, and what it takes to drive a successful commercial project, in my opinion.

I think we can learn from you, your learnings in CDF about how to do this better within all of our organizations. So just in case anybody was wondering or, Jacqueline, you're wondering, "Why is this guy taking me there," there's some rhyme and reason.  

Jacqueline Salinas: Absolutely. I agree with that. I think it's important for the industry to understand why there's value to the CD Foundation. There's a lot of value to incubating a project with the CD Foundations, because sometimes you start something and it just kind of snowballs, and you need somebody to come in and help put the process and infrastructure in place, so that it can continue to grow in scale at that speed.

So I think that's something that I also would like the industry to walk away with, knowing why the CD Foundation is valuable. Sometimes you start a project and you're just like, "Oh my god." It's like a fire in a kitchen, where it's just out of control and you need somebody to come in and help. I see myself as that as well. How do we address some of these really fundamental issues like – 

Brian Dawson: Culture, teamwork.

Jacqueline Salinas: Yeah, culture, team, process. I've had to do a lot of testing in my processes, from just as simple as how do I collect folks who are interested in being speakers. Or if you have a blog out there, how do you let the CD Foundation know, so that we can publish it through our channels? Sometimes I find it to be really simple things, but when you start that plan and you execute that plan, it ends up helping the community quite a bit.       

Brian Dawson: Right. Actually, that sets me up well. You have some entrepreneurial experience. I guess you have entrepreneurial experience, so to say, in what you've spun up sort of green-field with the CDF, but also out of CDF, right.    

Jacqueline Salinas: Yeah.

Brian Dawson: Okay. So I'm curious. Are there any parallels to your experience with the Continuous Delivery Foundation, open source communities, and your experience in your entrepreneurial pursuits?

Jacqueline Salinas: One of the things that I believe is parallel is having the ability to tell a really good story, even if sometimes it's half-baked. I think having the confidence in just telling the story that you believe is important. 

Tracy and I worked on this project. We launched it. It's called Happy Teff, which is a high-protein teff energy bar.

Brian Dawson: I'm gonna interrupt real quick because I want to call out Tracy. So people know, this is Tracy Ragan.

Jacqueline Salinas: Yes, CEO of DeployHub.

Brian Dawson: Yeah, CEO of DeployHub. So I just wanted to make sure we got a plug. Sorry to interrupt.

Jacqueline Salinas: No, you're good. Yeah. So Tracy Ragan, CEO of Deploy Hub, as well as she's also a CDF governing board member, we came across this accelerator program through the University of New Mexico. It basically was like an intensive five-month program, where they prep you to launch this product.

So I think it's telling a good story. I really learned how to pitch a product, so that we could go and get funding. I think that experience really helped me also, like learning how to pitch the CDF, drawing out those snippets of value of why the CDF is important to the industry, and why it's important, for example, for industry members to support nonprofit foundations such as, for example, the Linux Foundation or CNCF or the CDF.

We are trying to ensure that there are resources out there that the community can take advantage of, so that eventually they can go and work for these industry members, so that then you can have a diverse workforce that was able to – you know, if they didn't have the opportunity to go through a four-year traditional college or get a Masters degree, but they were able to get certifications through these foundations, I think that's really valuable. I think that's one of the reasons why I feel like if you're an industry member you should be supporting a nonprofit foundation, depending and varying on your industry. 

Brian Dawson: Right. Yeah, there's a lot there. So I'll repeat for impact that, speaking to the diversity conversation and diversity and the power of communities, if we want to bring some of that power into our commercial companies and our commercial organizations, one of the ways to do it is to engage with nonprofits around your sector. You can address multiple things with one motion. So I appreciate that and there will be some discussions around how to grow STEM, how to grow the software industry, tangible methods at DevOps World, including within your talk. 

The other thing you hit there that I think is really important is the power of storytelling. I don't know if you found this. I do open comment, but again, more and more I'm talking to people and people are understanding that as engineers, developers, practitioners, in order to be successful in developing the way that's best to develop delivery in the features we feel are important to develop, adopting the practices and, at times, the tools, as CDF practices in tools helps support.     

You have to be able to meet people where they're at. You have to be able to tell a story to your peers on the other team. You have to be able to tell a story to your leaders. So I feel like just like you are unlocking resources which you and the team at the Continuous Delivery Foundation are doing, we as practitioners need to be able to unlock resources to power doing what we feel is right.    

Jacqueline Salinas: Absolutely.

Brian Dawson: And this is open, so you can absolutely say, "Brian, you're dead wrong. I don't know what you're talking about." 

Jacqueline Salinas: No. I really agree with that. The power of storytelling, I think as humans we need that. We need to be able to communicate clearly, so that everybody understands us. I think that's something that developers struggle with is their communication skills sometimes.

Brian Dawson: You said it. I didn't. 

[Laughter]

Jacqueline Salinas: I know. This is why developers hate marketing people, because we're like, "We can tell a story," but it's important, right. Here's why outreach and marketing is so important, and why I think that it's just – this has been such a cool role for me.

I'm not technical. I'm always talking about how I'm not technical because I never want to misguide anybody. But at the same time, I get really excited about technology. I've worked with such cool projects over the years, especially at Intel, that I understand the value, and sometimes being able to communicate that to the rest of the world in simple terms for them to understand is only gonna help you guys.

Brian Dawson: Yes.

Jacqueline Salinas: Right?

Brian Dawson: Correct, right. Like you said, it unlocks it to do what you want.

Jacqueline Salinas: It unlocks it. So that's also why it's important to be able to tell a good story, and to be able to highlight the value of what the CD Foundation is trying to do. For example, best practices, being able to document it, being able to notify everybody in the community, for example, that we've published a set of best practices. Our goal is to help people, so that they are following the right guidelines, so that they can be successful.

But it takes a village. It takes people from a variety of skill sets and backgrounds to be able to push this forward in a way that people understand it. 

Brian Dawson: Excellent. This takes me to a question that I love to ask guests, and that is about DevOoops, D-E-V-O-O-O-O-P-S. I think there may be an extra O in there. But as we've called out, you add a lot of value to technology. You love technology. You have not practiced as a developer.

What I'm interested in is, still, within the work that you have done, have you or a team faced a moment where you made a big mistake or you encountered a significant challenge, possibly failed and learned from it?

Jacqueline Salinas: Yeah. There's so many small failures that I've had, but I think to attest how not of a technical person I am, when I first was working with the brand, RealSense, at Intel, we were trying to put together a program. Intel used to host the Intel Developer Forum, and we had a track dedicated to RealSense and how do you develop using this piece of hardware, the different types of languages that you could code in. 

So I didn't know many of the computer languages back then, so I was white-boarding and two of my colleagues were giving me topics that we wanted to pitch for this track. So one of them was coding with C#. I had never heard of C# before, and I also have poor hearing. So I heard Sea Shark, like sea as in the ocean and shark as in the – you know, Jaws.     

That for me was pretty embarrassing because I wrote Sea Shark and they just started to laugh. At that moment, it didn't click to me. So they were like, "That's not what we meant. It's C as the letter C and then hashtag."

Brian Dawson: That's funny. I'm sure that didn't help when you were already nervous about it.

Jacqueline Salinas: Yeah. I did it because I was always the youngest and the only female in this, because I worked with a ton of engineers and our marketing team was tiny. It was me and two other people, and they were also men. So when you're being made fun of, that was kind of not so great.

But also, you have to laugh at it at some point as well, and I think that really encouraged me to get more invested in learning about what I'm doing and understanding. For example, what is software? What is software development? What does the DevOps pipeline look like? Yeah, so I always like to poke fun at myself for not being a technical person in a technical world. But that was kind of my oops moment.

Brian Dawson: That's awesome. That's great to hear. I think that's actually a great example; plus, it's a good laugh, so I appreciate you sharing that.

I'd also like to ask you do you have a must-read, must-consume resource for our listeners? That can be a book, a particular podcast. It can't be yours – well, it can, but you've got to have something else. A particular podcast, blog, something that people should read or consume to help better them, better enable them to _____.

Jacqueline Salinas: I don't know if this will enable folks to succeed, but for me, it has been a really helpful book. It's by the author Paulo Coelho. He wrote The Alchemist. That's actually one of my favorite books, The Alchemist. The reason why I love this book, it's a very simple read. I think you could probably get through it in a day. 

But the reason why I love it is because it encourages you to dream, and that is something that I struggled with my entire life is allowing myself to dream, allowing myself to be something bigger than I am. I think that this has a lot to do with growing up with a single mother, who was an immigrant in the United States, and really living paycheck to paycheck a lot of the time, where education wasn't as accessible. This is also why community is so important to me.

My personal community is pretty small, but if it hadn't been for the women that have helped me along the way, I would not be here. I would not be the Director of Ecosystem and Community for the Continuous Delivery Foundation. 

Why I struggle to dream, I think it's also because of the lack of representation of LatinX people in any sort of leadership role, and also in various industries. A lot of times, I grew up – and this was also because just culturally this is how some ethnic families are. They want you  to be a lawyer or they want you to be a doctor. 

Brian Dawson: But no time for dreaming, no time for creativity.

Jacqueline Salinas: Yeah, no time for dreaming. So that's also why I think having this role and having this stage is important to me, to highlight community, because we need to diversify. We need to make STEM more accessible to a variety of communities.

Going back, again, it was the same thing with – when you tune in to listen to our keynote and you learn Marky's story, and you learn also Tracy's story, and you learn my story, you realize we come from very diverse backgrounds. When we talk about diversity, it's not just talking about race, but it's also talking about various socioeconomic environments and different – yeah, just different lifestyles of how we were raised and how we ended up in this world. But I would not have ended up in the tech world if it wasn't for Tracy, who is a mentor of mine, Tracy Ragan. 

I also wouldn't have gone to college if it wasn't for somebody who I like to refer to as my godmother. My mom used to clean her house. And I think it was around 11 or 12 that, for whatever reason, she decided that she was going to help me achieve my dreams of getting a college education. 

Brian Dawson: And through those multiple steps of people helping you, like The Alchemist, which you brought up, arriving at a place where you could dream, you have now arrived at a place where you're helping hundreds, if not up to tens of thousands of people deliver software better. 

Jacqueline Salinas: I hope so. I hope so, and I hope that my story also inspires folks who never thought they could be a software engineer go for it. 

Brian Dawson: Awesome.

Jacqueline Salinas: I think also just dream bigger than you – if you have a dream, make it three times bigger. That's kind of what I took away from The Alchemist. It talks about – one of my favorite quotes, it says, "The universe conspires with you." If you want something really bad, the universe conspires with you to help you achieve it.

I think that's been extremely true, and I think this is why community is so important to me. This is why it's important for me to work for a nonprofit foundation that gives back to a community, that is also making strides towards creating an environment that is safe for anybody to contribute and to join and to participate.

Brian Dawson: Yeah. So putting on a marketing hat, if we want to successfully scale DevOps and scale innovation, we need to be able to scale diversity and scale an ability to dream.

Jacqueline Salinas: Absolutely, yeah. It's as simple as allowing somebody to dream, and just also making sure that – I hope one day somebody comes up to me and says, "Hey, I listened to this podcast," or, "I saw your talk, and because of you, I went for it. I went for that job that I thought I didn't have the skill set for."

Honestly, that's how I felt when I applied for this role. I was just like, "Oh my god, a director, a title. Do I have the skill set to achieve it?" I don't know. I think I'm still pretty insecure about that, but I think that I have moments, for example, with cdCon selling out in two weeks sponsorships where I'm like, "Okay." The tiny, little pieces of contribution that everybody has made is snowballing into something really big and important.

Brian Dawson: Yeah. That's powerful. Let me just say understanding your background, having spoken with you for almost two hours now, not that you need to hear it from me, but I'm pretty confident that you've got it and you're gonna continue to be wildly successful.

I want to thank you for your time, Jacqueline. I look forward to your keynote at DevOps World. The only downside of this for me is that we're not gonna be able to see each other in person, and have a conversation and talk about this.

Jacqueline Salinas: I know.

Brian Dawson: I do hope that we get a chance to communicate around the event and after the event, that I actually not only encourage people to attend, but if you heard something interesting, compelling, inspiring, or just have questions around what Jacqueline said, please reach out to Jacqueline. Jacqueline, is Twitter a good place for –?

Jacqueline Salinas: Twitter, LinkedIn. I think also if you go to the CD Foundation and even email any of our – I'll get the e-mails. Trust me.

Brian Dawson: Okay. So thank you. Before we wrap, any final words?

Jacqueline Salinas: Just thank you so much for having the CD Foundation. I want to also thank CloudBees because they've been such a great partner of the CDF. Without your contributions, without your help and recognition, honestly, the CD Foundation wouldn't be where it is today. 

So I really want to just say thank you to also our community members, who contribute and show up week after week, whether it's a SIG or a TOC or an outreach meeting. Your contributions are so valuable to us. So yeah, thank you. Thank you for being community members and thank you for believing in our community.

Brian Dawson: I would also like to underscore your thank you as a person who has benefited from and been in awe of the power of the Jenkins community and communities like it. I'm gonna jump on your coattails, Jacqueline, and say I thank you community members and community contributors as well.

Awesome. That was Jacqueline Salinas. We appreciate you taking the time and sharing so much with us so openly. Jacqueline, best of luck at DevOps World. I look forward to seeing you there, and to all of our listeners, I look forward to seeing you there as well – air quotes, seeing you.

Jacqueline Salinas: Thank you so much, Brian. I appreciate your time. 

Brian Dawson: Thank you.