From Zero to Open Source Contributor with Diana Todea

About this episode

Diana Todea shares her journey from being a beginner to an award-winning open source contributor.

Contributing to Open Source is easier than ever - especially because contributions are needed for documentation, demos, tutorials and code. But how to get started? Where to look for "first good issues"? Is everyone welcome? What are the prerequisites? Tune in and hear from Diana Todea, Developer Experience Engineer at Victoria Metrics, on how within a year she made it from Zero to Developer and receiving the Contributor Award for OpenTelemetry 2025 at KubeCon Atlanta. Diana shares her journey, how she started, how she found the right topic and how she keeps herself motivated. Diana is also the Co-lead of the Neurodiversity CNCF Working Group and gives us insights into the Merge Forward community. And don't forget: Call for Papers for Cloud Native Days Romania and Austria are open and both Diana and Andi would be glad to see your proposals! So - what are you waiting for? Links we discussed: Diana's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/diana-todea-b2a79968/ From Zero to Developer Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPrxpEE5GpY Contributor Award: https://siliconangle.com/2025/11/13/accessibility-meets-open-source-collaboration-kubeconna/ Her latest CNCF Blog Post…

People in this episode

Hosts: PurePerformance, Andi

Guest: Diana Todea

Topics covered

• Open Source Contribution
• Developer Experience
• Community Inclusivity
• Neurodiversity
• Motivation in Tech

Keywords

• Open Source
• Contributions
• Developer
• KubeCon
• Neurodiversity
• Community
• Documentation

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Victoria Metrics, OpenTelemetry, CNCF

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