Encouraging OSS Contributions - Patrick Stephens

For our first event of 2026, we are delighted to welcome Patrick Stephens. Patrick is a core maintainer for Fluent, a CNCF graduated project, as well as organiser of the Cloud Native + Kubernetes Manchester.

Encouraging OSS Contribution

Encouraging anyone who wants to contribute to OSS with some concrete examples and suggestions as to how to do that.

Highlighting how contribution is typically handled by the Fluent organisation to give people an insight into what happens with their issues, pull requests and other types of contribution. Real world examples of specific contributions of not just code changes, but CICD and docs too. It should show you how best to document an issue or provide a pull request plus also a call to action for areas we need help with. It will also present a little of how I got into the OSS maintainer role starting from an atypical Defence background through initial community engagement into the maintainer role.

Speaker bio: Patrick Stephens

Over 20 years experience in software engineering, mostly in the defence domain at Thales. The last few years of this were focused on transformation first to containers then Kubernetes.

After Thales I worked on the cloud native team at Couchbase, working on their Golang-based Kubernetes operator. This included producing a custom Fluent Bit deployment for observability needs.

Calyptia (founded by the Fluent maintainers) then approached me to come work with them building out observability products before we were successfully acquired by Chronosphere. I then led the migration of all our infrastructure and SOC2 compliance before Chronosphere was again successfully acquired by Palo Alto. During this period I also became a core maintainer of the CNCF graduated Fluent project, primarily working on Fluent Bit.

I am now running an OSS consultancy for observability called Telemetry Forge leveraging our knowledge as well as working with customers in the defence domain again.

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Huge thanks to Morgan Stanley for hosting us!

Schedule:
5.30pm - Doors open, food and drink courtesy of Morgan Stanley
6.00pm - Talks
7.45pm - Wrap Up

Please note that you must RSVP via Meetup.com at least 24 hours prior in order to attend this event!

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