# Amit DSouza Region: Australia Author: Brad McCoy I grew up in India and am now living in Australia where I work at Odyssey Cloud providing Kubernetes professional services for a media client. I maintain the Kubernetes setup for my client while finding new ways to automate our day to day operations, improve performance and ensure we have a DR strategy. When I first got introduced to the open source community I felt it very welcoming, and wanted to contribute straight away. I started off with a project called Ortelius with the CD Foundation and now I am involved in contributing to Kubernetes, and starting to contribute to Argo aswel. Open source contribution extended my network with people in the tech community from different regions. It enabled me to connect with people I would not normally have the opportunity to interact with. Coding and DevOps is my passion so I find it easy to make time for it. I enjoy solving different problems which I might not otherwise come across at work. It involves alot of time but it is worth it. Tips I would give to people starting off would be to establish other's confidence in your abilities by completing the tickets you put your hand up for. Whether they are documentation, increasing awareness in the tech community regarding a particular product or adding a feature into the product. We can improve representation by having more SIG & WG meetups during APAC friendly timings. I find it quite difficult to attend meetings and generally try to catch up on the video the next day as I am very busy.