Mario García – My Unexpected Journey to Become a GitLab Hero

Hey, welcome to the Everyone Can Contribute track at our 2020 GitLab Ccommit event. My name is Beth Vanderkolk and I'm the senior manager of the Community Advocacy Program at GitLab, a part of the greater community relations team. I'm proud to introduce one of our GitLab heroes, Mario Garcia.

Mario story is at the heart of Everyone Can Contribute. His journey has been unexpected and inspiring, even though he was involved in other open source communities and had plenty of experience speaking at conferences, he championed imposter syndrome and gave his first tech talk in English at last year's Commit. Mario's journey continues this year, and we're excited to hear about his experience, his insight and what's next for him.

Hi, everyone. I'm so happy to be here and join GitLab community again to share the story of my great, my unexpected journey to become a GitLab hero. I'm Mario Garcia I'm a Mozilla Rep and GitLab Hero from Mexico.

If you want to stay in contact after this talk, you can find me on Twitter, on GitLab. Or you can go to my website to find more contact details. What I'm going to talk about during this talk is: when I started using GitLab, why I joined the GitLab Heroes program, the work that I've been doing here in Latin America, and what are the future goals.

Well, if I have to say when I started using GitLab, that was two years ago, but I created my account in 2016. I was attending a civic innovation lab in Rosario, Argentina in October of 2018. This was a hackathon like experience and I was there to join with multidisciplinary team for working on one of the nine projects that were built during the week and that were looking for a solution of a social problem through technology.

I joined Mercado Justo Team for working on a platform that supported and promoted fair trade with the local producers. There were four developers in the team, so we decided to use GitLab for the developer process, and we based this platform on the fork of OpenCart. Which is our e-commerce platform with developed with PHP.

com. Before that, I didn't have any experience GitLab and Continuous Integration. I was looking for a CI/CD tool that supported Rust and Python that were the languages that I was using for some projects that I was working on.

And I also needed that it's for the Heroku and later realized I also had to learn about Docker. So I chose Travis CI for GitHub, this was before GitHub actions before that GitHub actions was released to the public or before the data was ready for access. I also tried GitLab CI and after rating, searching on Google, testing, as I always do when I'm learning a new technology, I take some notes and publish a few articles about it on DEV.

These articles were in English, so I wrote about Travis CI how to use it with cross projects. I also wrote about GitLab CI and how to build a web app developed with rust for to Heroku using GitLab CI. This was in April last year, and later that year, I joined the GitLab Hero's program.

I also have to mention about Gitlab Commit because both events happened at the same time. I sent a proposal for GitLab Commit and later that month I also applied to join the GitLab Heros program. And one month later I was accepted to speak at GitLab Commit and joined the GitLab Heros program.

I was permitted to present my first talk in English. I wrote many proposals. I don't remember how many of them, but those events said no.

So I was on Twitter one day and I saw a tweet about GitLab Commit and I thought this could be the last opportunity I had. So I work on a proposal and sent it on the last day that the CFP was open. Later that month I found out about the GitLab Heros program and I went to the page, something that caught my attention was the idea that everyone can contribute.

And that is related with the work that I already had been doing with Open Source Project. And the idea that if you're an active community member, you can get recognized as a GiLab hero if you organize meetups or an event, if you write technical blogposts or contribute to the open source project of GitLab. I was already writing about GitLab and I thought it was an opportunity for clarity about DevOps and GitLab and the tools that it provides, and opportunity for meeting other community members and learn from them and share the things that I could learn with the community here in Latin America.

It's been a whole year. I joined the GitLab Heroes program last August and one of the first of the events that I attended as a GitLab Hero was GitLab Commit. I remember that I spent a few hours to work on the proposal and one day I was coming home and received an email that said GitLab Commit in London talk proposal accepted.

I couldn't believe that it actually was happening and that this could be an opportunity for presenting my first talk in English. So I have to give credit for GitLab Commit, and I started working on my presentation, practicing for the event, preparing everything for traveling, and it was amazing to see my profile picture on the page with the other speakers and see the speaker card on social media. After a few weeks, I was ready for the event and the adventure started.

I travel from my city to Mexico City, then Bogota, Colombia, and after 20 hours traveling, I finally arrived in London two days before the event. So I had some time to work around the city. Took some photos, visited the London Eye, and I also got the lost one when I was going back to the hotel and, you know, they were amazing days in London.

And I really enjoyed the time at GitLab Commit I learned a. lot from the other speakers and made new friends. And it was amazing to present my first talk in English there in a city that I really wanted to visit since I started traveling for speaking at conferences.

This was my first talk in English, which I have previous experience attending the other events in Latin America, and it was also amazing that I received many positive comments. And I also had the opportunity to visit Mozzila London, this was the second Mozilla space where I had the opportunity to visit, the first one was Mozilla Toronto in 2013. And besides speaking at GitLab Commit, I've also learned a lot about some technologies like Git I learn some new commands that I wasn't using.

com page and later cloning for for your local dev environment. I've also learned a lot about GitLab CI at different places and different kinds of scenarios and how to use it with Rust and Python, how to use GitLab CI for publishing websites like my website, that is hosted on GitLab pages. I started to get familiar with Docker and basic commands and how to use a custom Docker image, and Containerize an app, I learned a lot about Heroku.

I already knew what Heroku was, but I learned how to publish an app with Heroku in different cases and scenarios. Now, if you're probably thinking that I've been doing all of these activities on my own, but the truth is that I have a lot of support from GitLab and especially from some GitLab team members like Emily Chin, who supported me last year and this year for preparing for my my presentation by reviewing the content of my presentation, giving feedback and suggestions on how to improve it. I've also had support from John Coghlan, who manages the GitLab Heroes program, and from , Ray Paik, who with John manages The Everyone Can Contribute track for GitLab Commit this year.

So you don't have to be an expert but willing to learn if you want to join the program, you will have the support of the GitLab members and other community members that we can help with code or anything related to stuff. If you want to organize a meet up or if you want to speak at a conferences or host a workshop, you can have the support of the community. And talking about communities, Ive been collaborating with some communities here in Latin America.

And if you attended my talk last year or watched the recording, you probably remember that one of my slides have a statement that I recently changed, that that says if you create documentation, Don't forget about your native language, especially if you live in a non english speaking country. I truly believe in this statement. I started learning english 17 years ago.

I'm from Mexico, so my native language is Spanish and most of the content available related to software development and technology related topics are in English, but not so many people have the opportunity to learn this language. I know that there are efforts for developing tools and documentation like the work and the community is doing here in Mexico for localizing Firefox from English to Spanish. Or The work that the Python community is doing for localizing documentation of Python from English to Spanish.

so we as content creators or speakers need to focus on creating more content in our native languages. So that is the way that we can support other people that don't have the same opportunity to learn the language or getting access to all of this content. Some of the communities that I've been collaborating with are Código Facilito, which is a creative a platform where you can get access to classes about software development in Spanish for free or premium package.

Rust Mex the most active community of Rust here in Latin America. Some the Mozilla communities here in the the region like Mozilla Peru or Mozilla Chile. I also have attended I've also attended some events organized by the Latin American Free Software Info Community, which is one of the largest events in Latin America for promoting Free software.

And last year, I collaborated with Major League Hacking for hosting: Learn Git With GitLab and Gitcrackin. A workshop that I hosted that last year in December. I've also attended some events organized by some local universities like Polytechnique.

which is actually in my city or the University of the South, in the capital city of the state where I live. I've been writing as that I've been doing for so many years as a way to improve my grammar and vocabulary. I've been writing on Dev and on PuntoTech both in Spanish and English about GitLab, Open source, and software development.

I've also been using GitLab for hosting a few projects. One of them is a work in progress for localizing the official rust book from English to Spanish. I'm planning to finish this project by the end of the year.

But if I have to say what I want, I would like to do in the future or what projects I would like to work on. These are some of them. I want to become a DevOps expert.

I know that's a long and long way to go, but it's something that I really want to do. And one year ago, I was invited to write a book about rust. But the outline, I sent wasn't accepted.

So I really would like to write a book about GitLab in Spanish for documenting the things that I've been learning and the things that I could learn in the future. I want to focus on creating more content in both English and Spanish, especially blog post and videos. And if after hearing this talk you want to join the GitLab Heros program, I will be more than happy to support and help you as I want to become a mentor for New GitLab heros here in Latin America.

And My story with the program, it's been like this, I don't have anything else to add, so. I would like to say thank you for joining me.