Hello all, my name is Saiyam Pathak and I am currently working as a Director of technical evangelism at Civo. I work primarily on Kubernetes and its surrounding projects from the CNCF landscape. I like to keep learning new stuff, interact with the community and teach people my learning via my YouTube videos. In this post, I will explain how Kubesimplify originated, where we are now, where we are headed and how you can be a part of it.

Rise of Kubesimplify

I have always wanted to simplify the cloud native learning curve for everyone and that is why I keep on trying out new initiatives including:

• CNCFMinutes - Short videos that aim to tell about a CNCF project -> This is loved by the community and I will keep on doing this!
• Live streams with maintainers - People love this and I have not done much on 2022 but will resume this in a different manner
• Walkthrough videos - This I will continue to tell about the features of a product in a hands-on manner

Now all this is good but I wanted to be more close to the community and help them out so first I started a student ambassador program just like that - It was just called the student ambassador program which will get mentorship from me, learning opportunities, job opportunities, etc. I had a couple of students helping me out on this and selecting the first set of student ambassadors after this and my first meeting with students ambassador I halted this program as I got a crazy response and hundreds of applications across the globe! Now after thinking for a few days I thought let's name our community and give it a purpose and define what we want to achieve, this is where KUBESIMPLIFY was born! The name came out from within the group after multiple iterations and the same for the logo. Once the community was created I purchased the domain and wanted to create a website for it and decided to use Hashnode for the time being.

Below was our initial logo which is now changed but since we are going through the origin story so you should know the first logo of Kubesimplify(that was the same time we joined Twitter)

Where we are now

After starting I realized that this community is much bigger than I thought so now it's not only limited to students, it is actually a community for everyone including professionals of all skill levels. That is why we also have contributors from the industry as well.

Our First blog was published on 23rd March 2022 and we have been growing exponentially since then!

Let's look at our stats so far (as of 5th June 2022)

Total blogs published - 54 Total one time sponsors - 8 Total views - 73k+ Total Twitter followers - 2.1k+

The maximum request that I get is for the mini-projects, where people learn a particular thing in cloud native but don't know how they apply skills and showcase them. So Kubesimplify is not only limited to blog contributions but if you join the discord you get to interact with the community where other people are learning, experts who are there to help you out, and mini-projects where you can work on to implement your learnings, guidance, and mentorship.

As of now, there is no student ambassador program as that program was ended and we have a new program starting globally for everyone and not only for students, it will be called Kubesimplify ambassadors(details will be announced soon on Twitter).

Mini projects

Let me tell you a bit more about our mini projects: So at Kubesimplify I have created a list of projects that I will be telling on how to proceed with and the goal of that project, then it is all voluntary effort that people are putting in to create the project and learning to implement their knowledge. We first started with the Tweets project: It aimed to create a PR from a GitHub issue and then on the merge it will send out a Tweet on Twitter. Here people learned about Twitter API's, GitHub Issue templates and how to use GitHub actions.

The next ongoing project is the Kubesimplify website: People from the Kubesimplify community are working on this project to create a website and learn multiple things over there. It is also structured learning with project management, PR reviews, teamwork, and collaboration. So apart from the tech skills, it helps with overall learning.

New project starting - A Golang CLI -> Join Kubesimplify discord to know more about this project(I am yet to lay out the structure for this but the idea in my head is clear)

Like this, we will be starting new projects and as the community grows I will be putting parallel projects so that many people can contribute to different places. I am hoping to solve the practical knowledge problem with these mini projects and a new initiative - mini tasks that I will be starting soon!

Where we are headed at Kubesimplify

The end goal is to make it a global brand from where people learn cloud-native technology easily and are able to implement their learning with projects. They can contribute to different initiatives and make it the best place to learn cloud native and get all news about cloud native from its social media and newsletter platforms. This is going to be huge in the coming years and you have already seen the growth and commitment, so be part of this initiative and join Kubesimplify today -> Start your learnings and contributions which hopefully will land you in getting good jobs in cloud native!

Thank you for reading. Follow Kubesimplify on Hashnode, Twitter and Linkedin. Join our Discord server to learn with us.