#040 – Beyond Mere Penguins: Crafting Engaging Developer Communities with Jono Bacon (Stateshift)

Itiel Shwartz: Hello everyone and welcome to another episodes of the Kubernetes for humans podcast. I’m Itiel Shwartz and today we are here at KubeCon London and I have Jono with me.

Jono Bacon: Yeah. Hey Jono, pleasure to meet you.

Itiel Shwartz: Good to see you.

Jono Bacon: Yeah. How’s things?

Itiel Shwartz: I’m good. How are you? How is KubeCon so far?

Jono Bacon: It’s been awesome. I love this event and the fact that it’s in London is great because I’m British so this is nice time to come back, see all my friends, have a few pints. This has been fantastic. But no, it’s been fant I think this is the biggest KubeCon.

Itiel Shwartz: Yeah, that’s what I heard. Yeah, that that’s the rumors at least.

Jono Bacon: Yeah. No, but um had some great conversations. The expo hall has been great. been in a ton of meetings, but so far so good.

Itiel Shwartz: So what do you do when

Jono Bacon: So uh for my whole career, basically help companies build developer and user engagement. um you know most of the people we work with they kind of show up and they say okay we’ve got this open-source project or we got this technology like how do we get people using it and then how do we get people helping each other right so we think about communities in a traditional sense a lot of people think of communities as just like a Discord or a Slack or a forum we don’t really see it that way we think of it as like how do you weave together social media video and you know events and online events and whatever else so you have this like really consistent experience so you know it’s kind of like the heart and soul of what makes open-source so special right

Itiel Shwartz: Yeah, but with a load of different companies. I have to ask like how did you start doing that? Like it doesn’t sound like it’s like everybody dream, right? Like it’s not that common. So how did it start?

Jono Bacon: When I was six years old, I had a dream of like building the community like hanging out in a convention center in London. No, I mean for me it was um when I was 18, my brother Simon um came to stay for a couple of weeks with I was living with my parents and he introduced me to Linux in like 1998 or something like that. and I never really heard of Linux. It was in the earlier days. And I used to work in a bookshop and I bought a book and the first chapter of the book talked about how people all over the world build this this software together. And I thought that’s really freaking interesting. Like how does that work? And the for me like the mixture of psychology and the tech, I just think it’s fascinating. So it sounds like a massive cliche, but literally when I was 18, I was like, I want to figure out how to master that, how to do that. and you know every little nuance of how to get people building stuff together.

Itiel Shwartz: So that that sounds like cool. I figure it out like okay you like Linux, you like the community. Yeah. And then what like just there there needs to be another like jump, right?

Jono Bacon: I mean when I first got into it the first thing I thought was like I want to meet more people who are into into Linux.

Itiel Shwartz: Right.

Itiel Shwartz: Okay.

Jono Bacon: and I was living in central England. I didn’t really know anyone. So the first thing I did like I said I work part time in a bookshop. I would like iron like penguin transfers on white t-shirts. So I was hoping somebody would notice it and then want to have a conversation.

Itiel Shwartz: Then I started it worked.

Jono Bacon: It worked. People come in like, “Hey, that’s Linux.” And then, you know, I I went to a couple of Linux user groups and then I started a UK Linux community called uh Linux UK.

Itiel Shwartz: I imaginative title.

Jono Bacon: Yeah. Yeah. Good thing. First version of the website was created in Microsoft FrontPage, which I kept that a secret. and then literally like from there to uh I became a journalist and then used to write about write about all these different places. went to work at a place that I wrote about then I went to Canonical and built the Ubuntu community and you know there that you know whole bunch of things after that

Itiel Shwartz: and what do you do now like

Jono Bacon: so I run this company called State Shift and we’re a coaching company so you know we work with big companies like Okta IBM Comcast Visa and then lots of earlier stage companies ton of companies uh who are in the CNCF world

Itiel Shwartz: give some names like and what do you mean coach like what do you do like you

Jono Bacon: so you know we work with companies like Umbraco uh Okteto dagger um Dragonfly. nice companies. Yeah. And what we do is, uh you know, when we kick off an engagement, we basically get a sense of like what do people want to get to? Like how are what’s the goals of the company? It’s always either grow sales. Yeah. Build adoption, build your brand. It’s usually a mixture of those. And then what we do is we literally have hands-on coaching on Zoom, uh, where we kind of guide them towards how to kind of navigate towards those goals. And then we provide like super hands-on feedback on what they’re doing. like we’re like we’re reviewing booths and how to like what the call to action is at a booth and how to do online media and content social.

Itiel Shwartz: Give me like an example of a company that is doing that extremely well. Like it can be a client, it can be not a client.

Jono Bacon: Like I think a company that’s done this really well is GitLab. Okay.

Jono Bacon: to me like GitLab are a really interesting use case because a few reasons. One is they were kind of the lagging company, right? Like they were they were kind of going up against GitHub. What they did is one is they defaulted to openness. Yeah.

Jono Bacon: And they built a great business around it, which is hard. But two, I think the key to this is you’ve got to buck the trend. You got to do something differently. So, you know, an example I often give here is 2015 2016, GitLab had like a massive production outage. The worst outage I think I saw like ever. Yeah. Yeah.

Jono Bacon: And they they they spun up a Google Doc. They had a live YouTube stream and they debugged it together with their community. I’d never seen anything quite like that. I think if you look at what they did with their handbook and all these different examples, they’re I think they’re a phenomenal example of that. Dagger actually, I think are another company that’s doing an amazing job here. They were one of our first customers and Miranda Carter who’s there. She had never really had much experience building online developer communities for engage. She’s done a little bit of it, but not a lot. And she just like leaned right into it and they built like these Daggernauts and ambassador programs and all kinds of stuff and they’re they’re they’re crushing it. So yeah. And there’s so many what I love about coming to KubeCon is there’s so many people doing so many interesting things here, you know?

Itiel Shwartz: So, okay. Okay, that’s cool. Anything that you want to like closing note like saying to our like listeners or viewers?

Jono Bacon: Yeah, I think the most important thing in my mind is um I’ll go back to what I said earlier on is bucking the trend. You know, a lot of people come up to me and they say like, “How do I stand out on social media or with events? How do I come to KubeCon and stand out?” Yeah.

Jono Bacon: And to me, you got to you got to look at what people are doing already, do something different, whe whether it, you know, for example, I was chatting to someone yesterday uh about their booth, right? And they were like, “Oh, we’re not getting a lot of traction.” But if you looked at their booth, there was nothing original. There was nothing interesting about it. It didn’t evoke any kind of curiosity. And to me, that’s the most critical thing. Like what you put on the booth, the conversation you have with people, the incentives of people to go there. Don’t just scan these. They’re garbage in in many cases. like actually have conversations with people, qualify people at the booth and and um you know and that’s how you stand out.

Itiel Shwartz: So Okay, super cool. Awesome. Pleasure having you.

Jono Bacon: Thank you. Cheers. Thank you.

[Music] Kubernetes for Humans.

This is an AI generated transcript of the conversation