Hey folks! So a few days back I got an amazing opportunity of one on one 30-minute mentoring session with Kunal Kushwaha in which we discussed and I learned about how to go further in career, DevRel, Remote Jobs, building & scaling communities and much more.

I got this opportunity through Eddie Jaoude's Twitter 100k special giveaway. A big thanks to Eddie for this opportunity.

Who is Kunal Kushwaha?

For the people who don't know about Kunal Kushwaha and wondering who Kunal is and what does he do. Here is a small introduction of him.

Mentoring Session

I will be sharing my experience of the session in the form of questions and their answers i.e. question which I asked Kunal and the guidance he gave about that particular question in his answer and our discussion.

And as I am from Civil engineering background and currently doing job in non tech field. I always had interest in tech and IT, And for the last 5 months I have been studying to get into DevOps. I have studied from your DevOps Boot camp and other sources as well. In the last 5 months I have learned Linux - ubuntu, Git & GitHub, Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible, YAML, Bash/Shell scripting and I am currently learning Jenkins. So my first question was

Q 1. How should I go further in my career to get a remote job?

As I wanted to go in DevOps but these answers are valid for any tech field, He suggested me to

• Get knowledge of development and development cycle also and then move to DevOps.
• Get involved in Open source and contribute to Open Source.
• Learn in public and share your learning in public.
• Attend events and conferences and try to attend events as a speaker.
• Join twitter spaces at first and then start hosting them and speak in twitter spaces.
• Get involved with communities and network with people.
• Help others and try to network with people who are professionals and already working in the same field.

Q 2. How should I learn further and which people should I follow?

Whatever you are learning, try to apply it somewhere in personal projects or contribute to Open Source project to get hands-on experience of the tool/technology you are learning.

Don't get stuck in tutorial or Boot Camp videos loop. Try to get hands-on experience and knowledge as much as you can.

People I should follow to go further and get a better understanding that he suggested are :

• TechWorldWithNana : A YouTube channel providing Bootcamp and courses related to DevOps.
• MichaelCade/90DaysOfDevOps : This GitHub repository contains resources about everything you need you need to learn about DevOps in 90 days time frame structure way.

He suggested to follow these two people not just because they are providing good courses and Bootcamp to learn from but they are also sharing their experiences and problems they are facing nd how they are getting over those problems through their videos.

Q 3. How to write good CFP's for events and conferences as a first time speaker for maximum acceptance chances?

• Attend other's talks at events and study them.
• Go through talks available on YouTube of big conferences like KubeCon and CloudNativeCon. Study them and learn how they wrote their talks and how they presented it.
• Apply as much as you can. Apply to all the events you can find.
• There is no 100% sure way to get selected, so just keep applying.
• Try to have resources to back your credibility as a speaker such as blogs and your twitter.
• Make your blogs and twitter feed structured and try to provide value to other people.
• this will increase your credibility and increase your chances of getting selected as a speaker and as whole also it will improve your profile.

Q 4. When we attend any event/conference, how to approach any speaker for building a good connection and networking?

• Just approach through twitter or LinkedIn. The whole community is really helpful so most of the speakers will reply and will be happy to help you.
• Don't reach out through DM's directly.
• Share their what you like about their talk publicly first and share your experience.
• Try to have conversations publicly. Ask your question in public that will be much better, it will help other as well.

Q 5. I also want build a community from scratch. How can i do that and what are the things to keep in mind?

• Just think of a name.
• Make a Discord/Slack server.
• And start building it.
• Try to pick a niche around which you want your community to be focused.
• Try to provide more value and make the community more inclusive.
• Watch Kunal's talk on Scaling Communities to be more Inclusive to understand it much better in detail before starting the community.

Conclusion

So these were the questions I asked in my mentoring session with Kunal. The time was only 30 minutes, hence I could only these 5 questions not more but the session was very informative and I learned a lot from this session. I got a direct to go ahead and got clarity on how I should go ahead and what things I need to follow.

Hope you'll find this blog helpful. I will see you in the next one.

Take Care. Keep smiling. :)