Cloud Native PDX: No C, No Opaque AI - Watch Your First Fluent Bit Contribution Happen Live

I'm headed to the Pacific Northwest in September, and while I'm out there I'm spending an evening with the local Cloud Native PDX crowd on 16 September.

This one isn't a conference track. It's a meetup in the Fireside Room at a brewery, and that's exactly why I said yes. Some of the best conversations I've had about open source contribution happened at meetups like this one, with a pint in hand and nobody's slide deck getting in the way.

The organizers were kind enough to build the whole night around observability, so I'm sharing the stage with Reese Lee from New Relic. Two talks, one theme, zero vendor pitches.

Read on for more details.

I've been writing about Fluent Bit for a couple of years now. The Mastering Fluent Bit series covers the configuration, the parsers, the pipelines, all the things you need to run it.

What none of that covers is the part that's behind the scenes in an open source project.

Contributing to a CNCF graduated project feels like something other people do. There's an assumption baked in for Fluent Bit that you need to know C, that you need to have been around the project for years, that the maintainers will spot you as an outsider the moment you open a pull request. 

It's just plain wrong.

So instead of explain it. I'm going to do it, on stage, in real time. Live fork, live branch, live commit, live PR against a real issue. If we break it, you'll watch it break and we will fix it. That's the point.

Cloud Native PDX September: Observability Night

Cloud Native PDX is turning September into an all-observability evening, with Fluent Bit and OpenTelemetry on the menu.

No C, No Opaque AI: Watch Your First Fluent Bit Contribution Happen Live (Eric D. Schabell, SUSE) Contributing to a CNCF graduated project feels out of reach until someone shows you exactly how it happens. In this session, that someone is on stage doing it in real time, spotting a gap between what the Fluent Bit codebase actually does and what the docs say, opening a branch on a live fork, running the project's prose linter, writing a properly signed commit, and pushing a pull request that closes a real tracked issue. Every step, no shortcuts, no slides pretending to be a terminal. You will leave knowing the two-repo mental model that makes Fluent Bit doc contributions work, the git habits that signal credibility to maintainers, and the AI guardrails that keep your name attached to work you actually stand behind. Your first PR does not require deep C knowledge. It requires knowing where to look, how to show your work, and when to keep your hands on the wheel.

Devs, Transform (Your Data) and Roll Out!: Learning and Leveraging OTTL (Reese Lee, New Relic) The OpenTelemetry Collector is OTel's power tool for ingesting and processing your app and infrastructure data, but there's even more you can do with your data before it reaches your backend! Learn how to start leveraging OTTL, or OpenTelemetry Transformation Language, to manage your data volume and quality. We'll explore the syntax basics and its underlying architecture within the Collector, where its strength really comes into play, when to use it (or not!), and more.

Date: Wed, 16 September 2026

Time: 18:00-20:00 PDT

Location: SteepleJack Brewing, Fireside Room, 2400 NE Broadway, Portland

Registration: https://www.meetup.com/cloud-native-pdx/events/315866615/

A word on the AI guardrails bit

That phrase in the abstract isn't decoration.

There's a real temptation right now to let a model write your first contribution for you. Point it at an issue, take what comes out, push it. Maintainers can tell, and more importantly, you learn nothing. Your name goes on work you can't defend in review.

I'll show you where I use the tooling and, more usefully, where I manage it with guardrails. Keeping your hands on the wheel isn't nostalgia. It's how you build a track record that means something.

Come say hello

You don't need a laptop. You don't need to know C. You need to be curious about how an open source project actually accepts work from strangers, because that's the whole trick.

Thanks to the Cloud Native PDX organizers for making room on the calendar. The Fireside Room, a good local place to hang out, and a pull request that lands while you watch. I'll take that over a keynote hall any day.