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CONTRIBUTING: Jürgen Etzlstorfer on Keptn

Leading up to (and during) the month of October, we want to help you discover open source projects to work on, and put your Hacktoberfest contributions to excellent use. Meet Jürgen Etzlstorfer, contributor of the Keptn project.
Check out this page regularly for more interviews with contributors & maintainers

What can you tell us about your project?
Keptn is a control plane for continuous delivery and automated operations - in one sentence. So that means you can connect different tools to Keptn and the Keptn control plane can orchestrate these tools for you for continuous delivery and also for automated operations. So for one example you might want to connect your deployment tools in your testing tools connect to Keptn and Keptn can then take care of deploying testing evaluating the test quality and promoting or rolling back the artifact that you want to deploy to your production environment.
You can also connect automation tools like Ansible to trigger automated remediation action in case that something goes wrong in your production environment or in some other environments.
You can automatically trigger some counteractions and Keptn will even evaluate if those counteractions gave you the right results. Basically if it remediated the issues, and can then inform you by sending out cloud-events to any tool that you connect.

What contributions are you welcoming?
A lot of different contributions are welcome to the project. The project itself is written most of its parts in Go. The backend services and the CLI is written in Go. We have our front end written in Angular. So these are the most two prominent programming languages that we are using in the project. Those contributions are very welcome to add some new features to the source code or to do bug fixing. We also have a lot of documentation for an open source project - which is always a good standard to have a lot of documentation. We're looking for folks that are interested in improving our documentation or proofreading the documentation. And we also have tutorials that are basically a good start or an introduction how to get started with Keptn. And here we're also looking for more tutorials for different platforms or for writing a tutorial for different features of Keptn. And if you want to extend Keptn, since it's event based, you can always contribute by writing your own integration from your favorite service to the Keptn control plane.

What skills do people need to contribute?
I would say the best skill set you can bring is either being a Go or Angular developer, if you're really interested in helping out with the source code, with bug fixing, with working on new issues. If you're also interested in working on the documentation or tutorials then of course our main language is English. If you're a native speaker or if you feel yourself familiar with the English language then your contributions are very welcome. That's the basic skill set. If you want to contribute your own extension to Keptn then you can choose whatever programming language you want and you just have to consume cloud-events and send out cloud-events. Having some experience with Kubernetes is for sure a plus but it's not necessary.

How do I get started?
The best way to get started is to give Keptn a try. Go to keptn.sh, download the CLI and install it in your Kubernetes cluster or on a small Kubernetes distribution like K3s or go to tutorials.kepn.sh and find the tutorial that best fits your use case. Give Keptn a try and then take a look at our good first issues. They are all tagged in our GitHub repository.
Once you've done the perfect start is already done and we are happy to welcome your contributions.

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Join, October 2nd, for CONTRIBUTING.md - a virtual Hacktoberfest meetup, free and open for anyone who wants to join. Learn what Open Source projects are looking for contributions, which communities are looking for new members, and who is looking for advice from someone with your exact skill set. Check this page regularly for more interviews with contributors & maintainers which we'll release until the event.

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