The One Where We Geek Out on Outreachy with Eromosele Akhigbe

Apr 22, 2025

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About our guest:

Eromosele David Akhigbe is a Developer Advocate at StepSecurity, where he combines technical expertise with a passion for making technology more accessible and understandable. He’s also an active contributor to the OpenTelemetry community. A proud first-class graduate of Mechanical Engineering from Landmark University and a Decagon-trained software engineer, Eromosele is a strong advocate for open-source software and is committed to projects that democratize access to tech.

He believes deeply in Africa’s potential to shape the future of technology and innovation. Outside of work, you’ll often find him playing lead guitar or engaging with communities that share his mission to uplift the African tech ecosystem.

Find our guest on:

Find us on:

All of our social channels are on bento.me/geekingout
All of Adriana's social channels are on bento.me/adrianamvillela

Show notes:

Transcript:
ADRIANA:
Hey, fellow geeks. Welcome to Geeking Out, the podcast about all geeky aspects of software delivery DevOps, Observability, reliability, and everything in between. I'm your host, Adriana Villela. Coming to you from Toronto, Canada. And geeking out with me today, I have Eromosele Akhigbe. Welcome, Eromosele!

EROMOSELE:
Thank you Adriana for this opportunity. It's so nice to be here.

ADRIANA:
And I'm so happy to have you on.

EROMOSELE:
Thank you so much, Adriana.

ADRIANA:
Okay. So, where are you calling from today?

EROMOSELE:
Yeah, I'm calling from Lagos, Nigeria. So Nigeria, for some of you that don't know, is in Africa, is located at the western part of Africa. So yeah, that's what I'm calling from.

ADRIANA:
That's so cool. That's awesome. It's interesting. I've had, two people from Morocco on my podcast, but when I had them, they weren't in Morocco. So you are my first, like, person from Africa who's living in Africa, on the podcast. This is super exciting. Okay, so, I have so much to get into. But before we do that, we are going to start with the icebreaker questions. Are you ready? Okay. First question. Are you left handed or right handed?

EROMOSELE:
Right. Right handed.

ADRIANA:
Next question. Do you prefer iPhone or Android?

EROMOSELE:
iPhone any

ADRIANA:
Okay. Next question. Do you prefer Mac, Linux, or Windows?

EROMOSELE:
Mac. I'm currently using a Mac. No to Windows. I do not like Windows. Yeah. I'm a Mac user.

ADRIANA:
Did you. Okay, here's a question for you. Did you ever use Windows before? Because it's funny, I've talked to some people who are like, I've never even used Windows. I'm a Mac user through and through.

EROMOSELE:
No, I used to use like, Windows, when I started my tech career. And, it was the experience wasn't the best.

ADRIANA:
Yeah, I, I also for, for listeners of the podcast, they probably know... they've heard me talk about this many times, but also like I started my life with Windows, my tech life. Okay. Next question. Do you have a favorite programing language?

EROMOSELE:
Yes, I do, and it's Golang. And I also have a not so favorite programing language, although, you did not ask, which is, Java I'm not a fan of Java. I'm not I'm not a crazy fan of Java because of my experience. So my, my, my experience with Java was, the first programing language because, I, I was always, intrigued by programing since I was in secondary school. So I was intrigued, but I didn't have the, you know, the resource to learn at that time. So I was still my dad. And then one time he brought one IT guy from his company, and the guy came. And I think that after learning how to use the terminal, you know, and I learned how to change password using admin, you know, I learned about admin stuff. I was a very curious kid. So, you know, and I told the guy that I can hack your laptop, and the guy didn't believe because he was an IT professional. And I'm a young kid.

ADRIANA:
Yeah, yeah.

EROMOSELE:
And he was like, I dare you to. And I did it. And he was shocked. I told him that okay, I'm really interested in programing. I would like to learn. And I think I believe strongly that it's because of what I did. Because I embarrassed him. He decided that the best language is for me to start with was Java. He gave me I would say the worst tutorials I've ever, you know watched and I you know trying it. I thought I was just a dumb person. I couldn't just like because how willing just to type hello world public main static. It sounded so scary and crazy to me. So, you know, I just decided that maybe programing wasn't my thing. When. When I had my friends talk about JavaScript, I was like, wait. If Java is this hard, this script of Java. So I just ran away from programing, you know,

ADRIANA:
Oh, wow. So that turned you off initially?

EROMOSELE:
Yeah, yeah. For like, four years.

ADRIANA:
Can you imagine if you’d been like completely put off by it. Like how? Like how different your life would have been? How did you end up learning Go?

EROMOSELE:
Yeah. So très interesting story. Yeah, so in 2022 I was in my because in my I was in uni... I was in uni and we're having like some kind of internship. By the way, I studied mechanical engineering. So I didn't study software engineering at all because I ran away from code. I was scared of code.

ADRIANA:
So yeah, dude. I like ran away from code in university too. I was like, I don't want to do this for a living. And then like in university, they fricking teach you how to code. And you're like, dammit!

EROMOSELE:
Yeah.

ADRIANA:
My degree is in industrial engineering. So I don't I don't have a computer science or computer engineering degree either. So there you go anyway. Carry on.

EROMOSELE:
So, we had an internship, and during that time I had a really good friend of mine shout out to him, by the way, his name is Isaac. And, you know, he just encouraged me that, okay. You don't want to program. Why not try DevOps, you know, and. Okay. DevOps. You know that. Okay. Sounds cool. Let me try it. Let me give it a try. And during that time I started learning DevOps. But the, the school I went to guess what decided teaching us JavaScript first. And I was like what. I'm back to programing again And I was so scared at first. But then I now realize that, wait a second, it's not that deep, you know? It's actually easy. It's not hard, you know, to code. And I'll say, like my passion for coding, you know, started, you know, dreaming again. But then I just because I went for my final year and I couldn't balance programing and final year projects, you know, things like that. So I had to put a pause. Yeah. And then December 2023, I decided to pick it up again, you know, instead of learning DevOps. And good was really nice course from... I can’t pronounce his name, but Abhishek, something like that. He's a really good guy, Udemy, then the life, my choice. My turning point was Outreachy. I don't know if you heard about Outreachy Adriana.

ADRIANA:
I have, I have, but for folks who aren't familiar with it, tell tell. Them tell our audience about Outreachy, yeah.

EROMOSELE:
Yeah, definitely. So Outreachy basically, it's like an initiative to encourage people that are in underrepresented communities, you know, to get into open source and open science. So it's not just for tech guys, also for, you know, science people. Like we have some projects about biomes, you know, microbiomes and things around that. So, I, you know, you know, show back story. When I went to apply for Outreachy, I was like, bro, nobody's ever going to pick me. But the beautiful thing about Outreachy is that is not based on experience like, you don't have to have a nice resume or like 20 years of experience or 3 years of, you know, what can experience. In fact, it's an internship and it's really, really nice. And kudos to the people that are, you know, pushing it. I applied for it, you know. I applied for it and I got it. I got into the first phase and that's how I got connected to the OpenTelemetry community. Yay!

ADRIANA:
Outreachy is not like, I know there's a lot of Outreachy people involved with the CNCF, but Outreachy is not necessarily a program of the CNCF. It's one that the CNCF is involved with. Is that correct?

EROMOSELE:
Yeah. So, so how Outreachy works is that Outreachy you know, accepts. So if you CNCF as a, as a organization can decide to sponsor an intern to work in an open source project. So that is how it works. Usually we have, OpenTelemetry you know, so you just have a little task that, you know, so on that is new, can come in and do you know, and gain experience with the community. So it's really, really nice. I think you also have, mentorship, something like that. So it's a similar kind of, you know, structure. So, that's how I got to meet Juraci and Yuri. Really awesome. There were awesome, awesome mentors. And I had to start learning Go because to contribute. Yeah. So I was I was forced to learn Go because to contribute OpenTelemetry or to OpenTelemetry is written in Go. Most parts of it, except the SDKs, is written in Go. So I have start learning Go from scratch, to learn about OpenTelemetry. But I read so many. I don't know if you can remember, but I read so many of your blogs at that time to like ramp up on OpenTelemetry. Even Henrik. Even Henrik, whose videos, were so... IsItObservable? That YouTube channel his videos were so helpful.

ADRIANA:
Henrik has great stuff.

EROMOSELE:
Yeah, really, really nice. Really, really practical, you know, and stuff. So because, those, those content was what helped me to ramp up my knowledge of OpenTelemetry. Through that knowledge, I was also able to speak in a conference, my first tech conference. You know, I was both a speaker and an attendee. Really interesting.

ADRIANA:
Oh my God. That's so cool. I love that. You know, and this is why I like these types of programs are so, so important to get people...You know, who normally wouldn't necessarily like, be in these in, in these open source communities like you rediscover you basically discovered that you liked this stuff because of of Outreachy. This is so great.

EROMOSELE:
Yeah. And then, you know, got to work with Yuri directly. Yuri was an amazing person. You know, he was very patient with me, because he understood where I was coming from, that I came from a non-tech background. I was able to finally get, you know, the project done after a while, and. Yeah, started working with Sematext. Sematext is an observability company based in the US, you know, like Datadog and, like the popular Dynatrace, you know, so it’s an observability firm. Integrating OpenTelemetry, you know, building an exporter for them. It's already it's already in process. So I think that's a very brief very, very brief. And yeah, also through the things I did in OpenTelemetry, I also got sponsored to OpenSource Summit, which I couldn't come because of my visa. But then...

ADRIANA:
So sad. I remember you telling me. Boo! Yeah, it was the Open Source Summit in, in Europe. Yeah.

EROMOSELE:
Right. Yeah, Vienna. Yeah, Vienna.

ADRIANA:
That's too bad. That's too bad. I hope I hope you, you someday get to visit Vienna because it's such a beautiful city.

EROMOSELE:
I hope so, too. And then got also got, the sponsorship to KubeCon, where I met amazing people like you finally, in person. And I met so many people that I had looked up to in the OpenTelemetry space at reading their content, you know, and it was really it was a wholesome experience. I'm still trying to recover from the... Once again, thank you so much for being such an awesome person.

ADRIANA:
Yeah. Oh my God. Like, seriously, it's, you know like such a pleasure to get to meet you and yeah, we hung out a bunch at KubeCon North America. And I love how you're just like, you know, it's so hard.For those who watch the show who've never been to a KubeCon. It is a massive conference. It is overwhelming. And if you've never been before, that means you don't really know anybody. And so for you to, like, go and and introduce yourself like, it takes like, so much like courage, I think to, like, put yourself out there like, you know, and I think it's so important to be able to do that stuff because, you know, it gives you an opportunity to connect with, with really cool people. And I'm so glad we got to connect. And then we got to hang out a little extra too at SIG Boba, which was tons of fun. It was such a blast. Yeah. I'm glad, I'm glad. We got to meet, and then I had you, interview for Humans of OTel. And then I'm like, hey, you should be on my podcast because I think you have some cool stuff to say. Okay, I'm going to, continue with the icebreaker questions. I think I know the answer to this next one, but I might be wrong. Okay. Do you prefer Dev or Ops?

EROMOSELE:
Kind of hard. Okay. I think I'll go with dev, because currently that's the part I really have a lot of experience in currently. But, we're going to definitely have another conversation about DevRel you know, DevRel, kind of.

ADRIANA:
Okay. Yeah.

EROMOSELE:
I'm looking into that space. And so definitely going to get pointers.

ADRIANA:
All right okay. Next question. Do you prefer JSON or YAML.

EROMOSELE:
YAML. YAML.

ADRIANA:
I am with you.

EROMOSELE:
Definitely YAML I don't know, maybe because of my bias, because I've, because I was exposed to a lot of YAML. You know, everyone the first time I, go to write YAML, I was like, what's the problem with the indentations?

ADRIANA:
I know, I know how like so many people are like, I prefer JSON because I hate the indentation for YAML. I understand notation for YAML will like sometimes drive you crazy. It's fine, but like it's so much,

EROMOSELE:
The like way you get used to it. You know, you just just make so much sense. Like structure. So yeah.

ADRIANA:
I also hate curly braces because of Java. There's like so many curly braces in Java.

EROMOSELE:
Really. But but you know, for fun fact, last year I decided to face my fear and actually went to software engineering school, and I learned Java.

ADRIANA:
Nice, nice.

EROMOSELE:
Just to face, like fear. But I'm not writing Java.

ADRIANA:
It's. It's been a really long time now since I've last touched Java. I think the last time I want to say 2018, but every time I touch Java, it's like I have to reteach myself how to set up the JVM on my machine because I always forget and something always goes wrong. And then there's like other JVM that got installed on my machine from some other thing that I needed. And now, like the JVM, they're fighting with each other, and then you add Eclipse on to that, and then it's fighting with the JVM that's installed on your machine, along like if it got installed with another JVM. Like, I'm just like,

EROMOSELE:
Java is too strict. It's too strict. Like, once you miss one thing, everything feels.

ADRIANA:
You know, my my thing with Java, like, my, my main issue. And I'm told that it's it's gotten better is I find it very verbose, so, like, you need to, like, code the getters and the setters. And, like everything, everything is a class. And so you want to do the most mundane thing, and you still have to create a class and it's like, but I am told that things, have gotten more concise. Also, this is on my like to learn list, but I'm told that Kotlin is like, basically, if Java were retooled, that would be its beautiful baby.

EROMOSELE:
Are you serious?

ADRIANA:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's a JVM based language. But it's, like, way more concise and cleaner than Java. So it's like Java improved, so.

EROMOSELE:
That sounds cool.

ADRIANA:
And I know a few people who tried out Kotlin and really like it, so.

EROMOSELE:
But it's like, isn’t that like, for Android or something?

ADRIANA:
Yeah, I believe so. I believe so, yeah.

EROMOSELE:
Okay.

ADRIANA:
Yeah, it is, it is used a lot in Android. So anyway, fun fact. Okay. Next question. Do you prefer spaces or tabs?

EROMOSELE:
I like I would say spaces because apparently there's some like I think you should want to read config if you want to write a YAML file. So they're not allowed. You're not allowed to use tabs. It's like there's always this kind of weird error that happens when you use tabs. So I just I prefer spaces. Yeah.

ADRIANA:
Yeah I, I did convert to spaces because of that. But like my tab in VS code is configured so that it converts it to a space. So I still use the tab key.

EROMOSELE:
Are you serious? How do you how do you? You better teach me how to do that.

ADRIANA:
I got I got to look at that setting. I'll. I'll see if I can find it and send it to you after. But yeah, that was that was miraculous for me. I'm like, ooh, okay.

EROMOSELE:
Cool it. That will be so helpful.

ADRIANA:
I don't like, you know, space based spaces like tab key get the job done. So I guess maybe I'm a hybrid. I'm like, I use spaces, but with the tab key makes it. There you go. Okay, two more questions. Do you prefer to consume content through video or text?

EROMOSELE:
Actually, this. So when I want to first, you know, understanding content, I first go to a video. Because sometimes text can be very overwhelming. So for me so I first go to video, maybe watch 2 or 3 videos, have a general overview of what the technology or topic is about. Then I now go down to the documentation, text. And recently I was going through the OpenTelemetry docs. And I remember when I started like one year ago because like, one year ago that I started learning about OpenTelemetry almost, almost a year right now. I was so overwhelmed by the documentation. I was so it looked so scary. I didn't know where to start. I started getting a lot of things. Traces, spans, metrics. I'm like, what's going on? So I see there was YouTube. I went to Henrik, you know, and I started reading some things and some things that are making sense. Context propagations that are making sense. And I watched, talks, you know, so from OpenTelemetry talks, then getting comfortable with that. I went through your blog, you know, with some things that, you know, and it said I didn't know. Then finally I went to documentation. So I'll say video first, then text.

ADRIANA:
Oh, nice. Nice. So they complement each other. But your your go to for starters is video. That's awesome. You have to say you know like I I'm the opposite. I'm I'm text until I hit the point of desperation and I can't find anything as a blog post then it's like okay fine, I'll watch a video. And I have to say like, there was a talk that I did at KubeCon I want to see maybe last year, it was on the Target Allocator, and I was like, trying to learn some stuff, and I could not find any materials on it. And then I found a thing, a video that Henrik had done. And I'm like, okay, thank you. With, with like, I think there was like a sample repo too. And like, thank you. Henrik. I finally figured this out. Yeah. Because, like, the docs, for the Target Allocator and for the OTel Operator, where we're a little, they need a little bit of improvement. And so, like, one of the things that I did personally, like after after I learned this stuff, I'm like, I'm going to go now into the readme and the docs and like and share my knowledge.

ADRIANA:
It’s easier because it's, I think, like, I love the OTel Operator. It's like one of my favorite components of OpenTelemetry. But, it's like, it's difficult to understand. Right. And until you play with it, you don't realize how magical it is. But like, it's you got to get past the documentation. So like making making the docs accessible is important.

EROMOSELE:
Yeah. You know, and what you're saying just, shows the power of content, like content creating. Content creating is because the creation is so powerful. Like, I did my whole journey with OpenTelemetry. I decided to write two blog posts I told you to review, and I think I sent around that time to to give you a suggestion and you gave really nice suggestions then at that time. But yeah, so the power of content, through those blog posts, I know a lot of people that have texted me privately and told me that, oh, they have blocked my blog posts, you know, on how to run the OpenTelemetry Demo, helped them get started with OpenTelemetry and it really help them, you know, than, you know, getting so overwhelmed with all the info. So content creating content is so, so important, you know, just helps you to learn more and then it also helps the community, you know.

ADRIANA:
Exactly.

EROMOSELE:
Yeah.

ADRIANA:
Yeah. And I think that's like such an important point because like, you know I don't know about you like, you mentioned like it does help you, it helps the community. But, for me, it's so helpful to like, if I can recreate my steps and then write about it, because especially, like, sometimes I write blog posts very selfishly because I'm like, I need it documented somewhere. And I've actually gone back to previous blog posts. I'm like, I know I wrote about this. How the hell do you do this again? I don't remember, so it's like an archive of my knowledge stored in the interwebs. But my thought process too is like, if I'm struggling, someone else is struggling to.

EROMOSELE:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

ADRIANA:
You know, sometimes I think, like, Oh, should I write about this because someone else wrote about it, too? Well, you know what doesn't hurt? Write about it. You never know who it's going to help. You might have a slightly different take that someone else doesn't have or like you're writing with, like, more up to date. You know, you're using like a more up to date version of that tool. So now your stuff is like probably more relevant than something like a blog post from like five years ago. Sad. Sad but true, right? Because tech evolves. So yeah, I agree with you. Creating that content is so important. And don't be shy. Don't be shy about creating the content. Like just like you do. Like, you know, you saw you've seen the benefits of, what you're doing that's so amazing.

EROMOSELE:
It's just that. Yeah, it's just like nowadays it's so hard to balance the two, like working, writing. Because writing takes a lot of effort. Because you...

ADRIANA:
Oh, my God.

EROMOSELE:
You have to do your ideas. You have to think about how the audience, how to explain things well so that people don't get lost. So yeah, I think that, you know, planning to get back into once I get my groove back on.

ADRIANA:
Awesome. That's awesome. I will say like, one thing that really helps with with writing, like I remember before I got into developer advocacy, I was managing a couple of teams. And I remember when I interviewed for for that job, I made sure that, like, writing blog posts was built into my job. Because... it's a lot of like, it's a lot of work, you know, it's like contributing to open source projects like, yeah, yay, awesome if you do it on your free time. But let's face it, contributing to an open source project can be like a full time job in itself, and I don't know about you, but with my free time, I kind of want to do something completely unrelated to what I do during the day, right? So I think being in a job where you're afforded the ability to contribute to open source projects, to contribute to community knowledge, even if your role isn't, you know, like specifically a developer advocacy role. Because I think, I think those, those community contributions matter and are important.

EROMOSELE:
Yeah, really, really important.

ADRIANA:
Awesome. Okay. We're down to the final question of of the icebreaker. Okay. Okay. What is your superpower?

EROMOSELE:
Okay. You probably know this. My superpower is the ability to. Relate with people.

ADRIANA:
Yeah, I can vouch for that. I can vouch for that. Yeah, yeah. You know, seriously, like, you come across as, like, so chill and just, like, so friendly and willing to learn and, Yeah, I think, like, you're super approachable. And I think, you know, like, like I'm, I'm actually kind of an introverted person. I'm not the type of person. I am for real introverted. And so, like, conferences, like, I've been lucky that at subsequent KubeCons I've, like, met more and more people. So I have like a bunch of conference friends. Yeah. But my first KubeCon, I was like, oh my God, just let me stand in a corner and hide from everybody. Because I think sometimes it's really, it's really hard to approach people. And so when, when an extroverted person comes and starts talking to me and I get like a nice chill vibe from them, you know, it's like I, I've heard it referred to as like, when when an extroverted person adopts you. I, I feel in some ways like you adopted me at KubeCon as well, like, you know, because your, your friendliness, like you were so approachable. Like, yeah, yeah, we can, we can chill. I think extroverted people putting introverted people at ease, I think, makes us seem extroverted as a result.

EROMOSELE:
You know what? What actually helps me is, I know one thing that if I'm nervous, the other person, is nervous too. Like, we are both nervous. Yeah. So let us take the first step. So. And the worst that can happen is the person sees, I don't want to speak, and then you move on. But the best that can happen is, you know, relationships that, you know, can be bigger than, you know, what was what it was at that time. So it's I think. The upside is always the reward is better than the risk. So I always go for the reward. But don't get me wrong, when I go to KubeCon, I was first terrified. Because when I was my first time outside Nigeria. So it was it was a full experience for me, full experience, full new experience for me. But I had a Colombian friend, we shared a room together. His name is Daniel Daniel Cifuentes. Really nice guy. And I will say he helped me to, you know, ease into the whole relating with new people and then, I met you. I can't I can't meet my heroes and not speak to them. No, that's not possible. So I had to approach you.

ADRIANA:
And I think we, we kept, bumping into each other. I know, like when, when I invited you to come for SIG Boba, I was like, I was heading out with. With Marino, who was a past guest podcast, and and and. Yeah, you're like, finishing off your day. You're like, hey, how's it going? I'm like, hey, we're going to SIG Boba. Want to come with? Like, what the heck? Why not? I'm also a lot more, likely to go for these, after events if it's like, rather than saying, like, oh, let's meet at the venue. If we go together, I'm like, okay, I'll go, because otherwise I'll be like, it's the end of the day... I don't want to go there. I'm just going to go back to my hotel room and just like, watch Netflix because, yeah, otherwise I'd be hiding out. So, I'm glad. I'm glad you joined. And it was, like, lots of fun. Plus, like, bubbles tea. That's cool. Yeah. So we got we got through the icebreaker questions. Hooray! Congratulations. So, you know, like, OpenTelemetry has been an overarching, topic, of our conversation. And you said that you got into it through Outreachy. And so, was it because of of your work in OpenTelemetry that you, you ended up getting, like your Outreachy work in OpenTelemetry that you ended up getting your, your job at Sematext?

EROMOSELE:
Oh, yeah. The.. I had worked on the Collector, you know, before, and because of the conference I had to go for, I had to learn so much about the Collector, you know, so just to say conference inspired learning or something like that, you know, so because of the. I didn't want to fall, so I had to go. I learned so much about Collector. Yeah. Yeah. So I was able to, you know, show so much at that time that it is possible to auto instrument an application without adding code. Yeah. And that was really, you know, mindblowing. So they employed me because of that, because I had that skill and I could... Yeah. I could I had, I had not done this before, but and also probably have is that I have the ability to learn fast, you know, if it's structured, I can learn very fast and I can, grab things easily. So I had not built an exporter before, but. Yeah, I looked through a lot of code or the exporter code was able to find patterns and similarities, and I was like, yeah, I can build an exporter for Sematext and OpenTelemetry and they were like, okay, come onboard and let's do that. So yeah. So that's.

ADRIANA:
Yeah! That's amazing. And you know, it's that is a great superpower. And I think this is the superpower that really, differentiates you know, the awesome people from the not so awesome people in tech because like, look, let's face it, you can't be on top of every new technology that's out there ever, right. And so you kind of you pick a technology that, you know, resonates with you and, and then you learn it like, you know, the, the stuff that I did when I finished university, so different from what I do now. And like, you know, and I learned OpenTelemetry on the fly for a job as well. When I was managing, I was managing a team, an observability practices team, and I was trying to get the company to use OpenTelemetry. And I'm like, I don't know that much about observability. I don't know that much about OpenTelemetry. Let me learn about it. So I learned about it on the fly, too, right. Because you got to do that. You got to learn. You got to learn fast. You become you become the expert, as quickly as you can. Learn... Sometimes it means like not learning, maybe not necessarily fully in depth at first. Right? But it's like learning enough. And then you can start asking questions and being curious and be like, oh, how does this work?

How does that work? And I think what you said also about, you know, like you never wrote an exporter, but you look through the code and you look for patterns and I think like that's what we have to do as a software engineers is we look for the patterns. It's like learning a new language, right? Like you learned, you learn Java, you learn JavaScript, you learn Go. There are different languages, different syntax. They have different paradigms, but also they have some similarities. And so you learn from your experience, draw on your experience with like one language to sort of like get through learning the other language, which is cool.

EROMOSELE:
Yeah. It's so nice.

ADRIANA:
Yeah. So, what's, you know, as, as someone who's, been been involved in OpenTelemetry for the, for the last little while. You know, you mentioned, like, the different resources, for, for OpenTelemetry that you've, that you've relied on. What about, how would you say, like, your experience with the OpenTelemetry community has been because that's that's always, like something that's that I love about OpenTelemetry is the community. So what are what are your thoughts around that?

EROMOSELE:
Yeah. I would say my experience with the community was and has been still great. I can I can mention his name. Dimitri. He was so helpful during my, during my internship because most times, the issues that I have to, solve, he will be do like, he will be the one reviewing those in the past. And then he was always like, giving me tips and pointers. Okay, try it. Yeah, try try this. Go like this. You know, and he really helped me, you know, in getting my first PR merged. I remember I remember when it first got merged, I was like, whaaat? I feel like I'm...

ADRIANA:
It’s like a party, right?

EROMOSELE:
I was like, wow. I contributed to open source. And it was just really an exhilarating feeling, you know, knowing that. Yeah, someone like me that had like a month ago, I had no knowledge of Go. No knowledge of OpenTelemetry. And then two weeks, three weeks after I made my first contribution. So like I always I always advise people, even in my community, you know, I advise people that don't be scared because the what stops a lot of people from contributing to open source is to feel like, oh, I have to be like a senior engineer. I have to know everything. I have to have to be so good. Twenty years’ experience. Nobody will care about what I have to do. Well, it is not really true. Because the people in the community, first of all, are willing to help. Well, I can’t speak about all communities, but OpenTelemetry, for example. If you're honest, you told them that. Oh, this is what I know. This is what I can do. What can I start from? You know, this thing called good first issues? You know, they have good first. Yeah. So, not so technical, but you can just, you know, start your journey from there. And I believe that once you get the first PR merged you know, this, this drive to do more, you know, I think that yeah, I think on my first PR merged, I, I doubled down, you know, I doubled down on my learnings.

EROMOSELE:
I doubled down on my Go. And I was able to get five other PRs merged.

ADRIANA:
Wow. That's awesome. So it had inspired you. It kind of gave you that kind of boost, right. Confidence boost. And inspiration to to contribute more. That's great. And I so agree with you. Like getting your first PR merged is like I don't know if you've never experienced that. I hope like folks out there, I hope you get to experience it because there's nothing like it. And, you know, like I think you you made a really important point to like, you know, don't be shy about like, what you think is worthy of contribution because it is open source and people always need help. Yeah. And especially if you find something where there's a gap. So, you, you've noticed something like there's thing in the documentation or like you noticed a bug or whatever, or as you said, you you look through the issues, list for a particular repo and see if there's something where you're like, I think I can do that.

EROMOSELE:
Another thing like I would like to speak about is, you know, like people like us, like when I, when I came for, like, one of the reasons that made me like, apply for KubeCon and all was that I hadn't really seen a lot of Nigerians living in Nigeria, like I saw Nigerians that were not living in Nigeria, like America, Canada. But Nigerians living in Nigeria. I didn’t really see so, so much representation, you know.

ADRIANA:
Yeah.

EROMOSELE:
From our community and, and in our community, like the the tech space is really booming. Kubernetes... I had a conversation with Jake. Jake is a CNCF Ambassador. I'm sure you know, you know, basically talking around topics around how to build and improve a community here in, you know, Nigeria and Africa at large because there's so much there's so much that's currently happening here. But, the access to, you know, the like, you know, this, you know, everybody sees what's going on in the US. You know, it's very easy to see what's going on in the US. What's going on. Yeah. But then, you know, places like Africa, like things are actually going on, but no one is really seeing what's happening. If no one knows what you're doing, then, you know, no one can call you for it. So I just one of the things that inspired me to actually apply for that sponsorship, you know, to go to attend KubeCon, you know, see how these things work and how can we bring, you know, this kind of thing. So, our own local community, like, I spoke to Jake about, you know, something, starting something like a KubeCon Africa.

ADRIANA:
How cool would that be? It's cool... I know there have been some KCDs in Africa.

EROMOSELE:
Ghana and Nigeria. Yeah.

ADRIANA:
That's so cool. That's cool.

EROMOSELE:
But there's so much, so much things can be done, you know, in the whole, you know, building the community space. And, you know, hopefully I'll get tips from people like you that are so good at this. At building community.

ADRIANA:
Hey, we learn from each other. I love that so much. And yeah, I mean, I think it's really important. And this a conversation that I've had with a few people too, like even even stuff about like, language barriers. Right. That there's so much, so much stuff like so much open source contribution is done in English. And if you know English, great. If English is not your strong language, that it's like you're shutting your doors to like a bunch of brilliant people who work, which is not their first language. And why should it be? I mean, you know, you're born in a different country. It's a different first language. So I think it's really cool that there is, so much of an effort now that you see in the CNCF around, like international like internationalization of documentation, like OpenTelemetry, I think, the docs are now available in a number of languages, which is really cool. Even in Portuguese, I found out. And it's, it's easy to forget like if you're, if you, if you speak English relatively well, you just sort of like. Yeah. Of course. Like, what what about other people, you know. So I think representation matters. Making people aware of, of other communities and other places that are not North America, not necessarily Western Europe, like tech exists in all parts of the world. And I think, it's really important to to bring that to the forefront. So I love what you're doing. I love that you're, you know, the hustle is on and you're just, like, excited to learn and you're putting yourself out there. I think it's fantastic. And you're so young too. I love it, yeah. Well, we're coming up on time. But before we finish off, I wanted to ask if you have any parting words of wisdom.

EROMOSELE:
Well, to the. Well, I'm talking to newbies now. Not to the experienced guys, but to the newbies out there, don't be scared to take that step, that first step, because that first step is what can change your life entirely. If I was scared to take. I was scared to take the Outreachy step. But I just told myself, “What's the worst that can happen?” They won't pick me, I won't, you know? I'll. I'll still be fine, you know? But what's the best I can happen? The best that can happen is that my life can, you know, change forever. So. So everyone out there, that's still scared to take that first step? You want to start a company? You have an idea. You know, don't be scared to take that first step. Take that first step, and things will meet you on the way. And two, three years down the line, you'll be happy you did.

ADRIANA:
Aw, that's so great. I love that so much. And before we wrap up, there is one more thing that I want to mention. Because you've, you know, you got your start through Outreachy. Can you tell folks, how does that they can apply to Outreachy if they're interested and maybe just talk a little bit about the selection process?

EROMOSELE:
Okay. Okay. Cool. So Outreachy has like two... I’ll say two cohorts. So there's one that's currently happening in a few days starting in a few days. And then we have another one in August. So you have two every year. So to apply to Outreachy you have to write five essays. Yeah. So there's no like there's no exams or anything. You just have to write five essays And in those essays you have to basically talk about how you are, you know, underrepresented in the location that you live in, how you have been underrepresented in the tech industry and the location that you live in, you know, basically share your story. You know, share how probably, you know, for women, you know, the whole issue around, subjugation, you know, from the society that we live in. For someone like me... So, in our state, we are classified... People classify us as people that practice voodoo, you know, like witchcraft.

So, like, most times, most of, the wins that I, you know, had done when I was coming up, people just say, he's from that state. He's probably doing something on shady underneath, you know, so there's really it's really terrible. And the funny thing about under these things is that you may not even know you're going through these things. Like, you may not even be aware because it might be so normal to you, but for some people, it's just it's normal to, be talked down on, you know, talked down. Yeah. So you have to actually sit down and think because, man, there's so many things that you don't know that you are currently facing that are not normal, that are very, very abnormal. If you can write, write those stories in, you know, in five essays, the only... Adriana, maybe you can add the, the link to the application at all.

ADRIANA:
Oh yeah. Absolutely. I'll, I'll include that in the show notes for sure.

EROMOSELE:
Yeah. Awesome. So, write you write your story and then if you get selected, oh, you got you go through the first phase. So the, the second phase of the second phase, you have, you have to pick an open source project. And I picked OpenTelemetry. I'm so happy I did, but yeah.

ADRIANA:
Did you randomly pick it or was it something about it where you're like, this is something that interests me because of something you read?

EROMOSELE:
Yeah, yeah. You know, so I was, I would say I was late. I was late and I was also very interested in, you know, then I was learning DevOps. So like DevOps of seemed very familiar. So I'm like, okay, let's go for OpenTelemetry. And it seemed like the most familiar thing for me at that time. Yeah. But there are many other projects. Yes. Wikimedia. There's OCaml really, really other awesome open source communities. So then you have to pick the project and then you have to contribute to the project and be very you have to stand out because most times we compete with a lot of people that I was competing with like 59 other people. Don't. Yeah. Don't don't be scared. Because at first I was scared because the people I was competing with were like, senior engineers, like, have been doing this for long.

And I was like, oh my gosh, how will I get this done? But, you know, the mentors are not biased. They see effort. So they see that you put in so much effort because someone that has been writing Go for the past ten years, you know, the effort I'll put in is like the same effort you put in and they grade effort more than experience, because what they want to do is they want to empower people. So once you get in welcome to Outreachy. So that's how...

ADRIANA:
That's great. That's great. So I love that because you know it's really and I think this is what tech should be all about. It's not necessarily what skills do you have now. It's like what is your potential. And I think that's what it is like. I think we need to be able to invest in people based on their potential, because otherwise you like miss out on awesome people, right? So that's that's great. Is the internship is it a paid or unpaid internship?

EROMOSELE:
Well, it's paid - $7,000.

ADRIANA:
Right on! That's amazing. I ask because like there's some internships where people are like working a lot and then they it's like an unpaid internship. That's great. Awesome, awesome. Very cool. Feels like very worthwhile. And and just to, clarify. So you said you need to have done a contribution in the open source project that you selected. So, so you need so like, when you applied for Outreachy, you had already done like an OTel contribution at that point?

EROMOSELE:
No. I hadn't. I had no...

ADRIANA:
Oh, okay. Oh, it's just like as part of the part of the internship, like, once you get selected, you.

EROMOSELE:
Yeah, yeah.

ADRIANA:
You have to, you have to fulfill that as a, as a requirement of the program. Cool, cool. And then and then, as part of Outreachy then are you like, because, like, if I recall, like, Juraci, he was at Grafana before. Yuri was at, at RedHat Both awesome guys, by the way. I can totally vouch. Juraci was actually on the podcast before, and, but so are you working then under the umbrella of OpenTelemetry or under the umbrella of, like, whatever company that, like the your kind of Outreachy mentor is is working at?

EROMOSELE:
I'm working on an umbrella of OpenTelemetry.

ADRIANA:
Okay. Okay.

EROMOSELE:
So they they're like my mentors.

ADRIANA:
That's awesome. Well. Thank you. Thank you so much for for explaining how the Outreachy program works. I think this is, a really, really cool opportunity, especially for for folks who are looking to get into open source and get some, some cool work experience. And, yeah, it sounds it sounds like a great program. Juraci always talks about Outreachy, and now I understand why he's so passionate about it. So this is this is truly, truly amazing. And, you know, that's a perfect way to to wrap up our episode. So thank you so much, Eromosele for geeking out with me today. Y'all, don't forget to subscribe and be sure to check out the show notes for additional resources and to connect with us and our guests on social media. Until next time...

EROMOSELE:
Peace out and geek out!

ADRIANA:
Geeking Out is hosted and produced by me, Adriana Villela. I also compose and perform the theme music on my trusty clarinet. Geeking out is also produced by my daughter Hannah Maxwell, who incidentally design all of the cool graphics. Be sure to follow us on all the socials by going to bento.me/geekingout.