Recap: Curiefense Community Meeting #1

Open source isn’t open source without community. And so we were very excited to host our very first community meeting where we can bring everyone together in a virtual space to discuss anything and everything to do with Curiefense.

This post is a quick recap of what happening in the meeting so that if you missed it, you can catch up on what was discussed.

Meeting the Team

We started by introducing the core team so everyone could put some faces to names and get a sense as to who is driving this internally. There was a very special welcome to Aaryan Porwal, who has recently joined as a summer intern and has already made his first commit. Hopefully, that will be the first of many! Welcome to the team Aaryan.

Awesome Contributions

Building a community from scratch is hard, so we wanted to highlight some of the awesome contributors who have made a significant impact over the past month:

• Sergio Mendez (sergioarmgpl) is an SRE and a professor at USAC in Guatemala. Sergio has been incredibly helpful by always being on Slack to answer questions regarding cloud native or open source. He has also been great in introducing us to great people in the community. If you want to learn more about Sergio, be sure to check out episode 4 of our podcast where we sat down to chat with him. It’s the second most popular episode in the catalog so you know it’s worth checking out.
• Pedro Sá (pncps99) is a computer science student from Portugal. He was having trouble with Istio via Helm installation and thanks to his detailed bug report, we’ve been able to make big improvements to the product and to the documentation. He could have shrugged his shoulders and walked away but he didn’t – he took the time to bring it to our attention and work with us to get it resolved. For that, we are very grateful.
• Juan Pablo (JuanPabloGarciaMonzon) is a student at USAC in Guatemala and actually happens to be in one of Sergio’s classes. He is contributing Curiefense-Rancher which will help get us into the Rancher marketplace. Having a community member take initiative to help Curiefense grow is awesome and we are immensely grateful for the hard work. This is what community is all about.

A big thank you to our three featured contributors for this month. We look forward to celebrating more good work in the months to come.

Content Creation

We all know that content creation is a big part of modern-day community building and we’ve been doing a lot of good work in that space that we wanted to share:

• Our blog has lots of great content that helps to tell the Curiefense story and bring new users into the fray. We are busy redesigning the whole interface to make it easier to read and share articles – so we’re looking forward to finishing that revamp.
• We have recently published three new walkthrough videos on our YouTube channel that cover tag rules and rate limits. We are going to be promoting these through social media and our various documentation shortly which should prove to be very helpful for community members.
• Our monthly newsletter (Ra-Po Monthly) continues to march ahead, sharing news, updates, and interesting content with our community. You can subscribe to the newsletter here and you can select what types of updates you want so that we don’t spam you unnecessarily with things you don’t want.
• Our Committing to Cloud Native podcast has been a great success in terms of learning from others in the Cloud Native space. Our guests include members of other CNCF projects, maintainers of products at scale, and community members contributing to awesome projects. You can subscribe here if you’re interested.

1.4.0 Updates

We are moving ever closer to our 1.4.0 update and we couldn’t be more excited for it. There are 33 enhancements, with 30 being UI-related – as we revamp the entire interface to make the product easier to use and adopt. There are also 6 bug fixes and Nginx support in the update.

We will be available in the AWS, GCP, and Rancher marketplaces quite soon, but the ETA is still to be determined.

We’re expecting the 1.4.0 update to be released around the 9^th of July 2021, so keep your eyes out for that.

Q&A

We then opened things up to the floor and took some questions. Here are two great questions that were asked:

• What else is coming up in video format?
  • The next one in the queue is part 2 of the rate limits video. After that, we’ll probably create an overview of the whole platform in one video to show all the features and functionality. Then, we’ll tackle things module by module, digging deeper into the detail as we go along.
• What are you most excited about when you think about Curiefense?
  • There are so many things that we’re excited about with this project, but here are some of the main ones: * We’re excited that we have managed to create a viable MVP that some enterprises are using in production. * We’re excited about the traction we’ve got in the CNCF community. And we’re excited about the community we’re building around the product – which will be the foundation of our success.
    * We’re excited that we’re enabling full-featured open-source products - making it available for anyone to use it for free without any obligations or strings attached. * We’re excited about what we’re planning to build on top of the Curiefense API in terms of Enterprise services.

That brought an end to our first community meeting.

We hope you’ll join us for the next one!

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