Red Hat: On a mission to diversify the open source community

Jannaeé Sick
Sep 1, 2018 · 6 min read

In the fall of 2017, I sat on the living room floor staring at a screen filled with tech jobs. My heart sank as I compared my old resumé to the job descriptions. Regretfully, I had not written code in 2 years, and my resumé hadn’t been modified for almost 6 years.

I had spent the past two years attempting to launch my own jewelry company while managing a difficult pregnancy. But, a few months before my son’s 2nd birthday I decided it was time to reenter the workforce.

I have a career spanning 9 years and experiences gained from employment at companies like Walt Disney World, BAE Systems, Zappos and EverBank. I have worked as an Illustrator, Graphic Designer and Web developer. But, the tech market is extremely competitive in Raleigh so I dusted off the old keyboard and signed up for a slew of online courses.

Within 7 months, I had finished a coding boot-camp, earned a $1500 scholarship from Google, and was accepted into Udacity’s advanced course for Mobile Web Application design. When I started applying for jobs it was clear that the impact of a career break still outweighed the new skills and experiences that I added onto my resume.

One recruiter recommended that I knock about “$10,000” from my salary expectation because of the break. In another interview, I was told I was seen as “a risk” to their Fortune 500 company. I was starting to doubt my own abilities until I heard about DevConf.US.

Open source is software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified.

A friend who had been working at Red Hat told me about a scholarship being offered. A Diversity and Inclusion scholarship that would assist with travel and boarding accommodations to DevConf.US. I had never heard of such a thing. Red Hat is the world’s leading provider of open source solutions and based in Raleigh. They were holding their first free community-oriented conference in the U.S.

Presentations covered topics like machine learning and artificial intelligence, containers and orchestration, serverless computing, middleware technologies, user experience, and testing, debugging, tracing in software.

I had never considered becoming involved with open source development because I believed that was a hobby for elite programmers. After reading what topics would be covered I thought, what could I offer software giants like Red Hat? Better yet, why would they be interested in me? I thought this would be an unlikely fit, but I applied for the Diversity Scholarship anyways.

Shortly after application’s deadline passed I was contacted by Marina Zhurakhinskaya via an email titled “Congratulations” — and discovered I had been granted one of 11 scholarships.

When I arrived in Boston, I was nervous, but thrilled that someone from a large tech company saw the potential in me. Additionally, Red Hat was willing to invest in my education. I could not wait to meet this woman who made it happen.

Marina is an alumnus of MIT with a background in Computer Information Science. When I met her I could tell this program was her passion. As for the 11 recipients we came from all walks of life. We were mothers, recent college graduates, young professionals and veterans.

I have been to many conferences before and typically end up suffering from “imposter syndrome”. But I never felt that way at this conference largely due to the fact that we were immediately paired with an employee in tech wh was to be our “Coach” for the weekend. This was an extremely unique concept that allow you to fit into the community of developers and immediately feel that you belong.

Although, the audience was primarily male there was a larger than normal mix of women, minorities and LGBT attendees sprinkled within the community. My coach, Petra Sargent is a technical writer with over 17 years experience in proprietary software development. Interesting enough, she had too had taken an extended career break to start a family.

Petra Sargent, Red Hat technical writer, speaker and coach.

Wow! She took a break and landed a job with Red Hat! I couldn’t wait to find out how the secrets to her success. She gave me many pointers and guidance including making sure that I applied for the Outreachy program. She told me to contribute to open source. She informed me on the many ways to contribute to open source and that many projects are highly interested in seeing developers contribute to their open source.

I discovered that open source projects need more than just code refactoring, but documentation and visual styling, testing and so on. All along I thought the only thing developers where doing with open source was creating more open source code. The lights came on and I realized, I can do this, and I want to do this!

That night I went home and searched for open source projects needing help and came across two interesting places. The first was firsttimersonly.com, where as you can imagine is a place for those who have never contributed to open source before.

But, it turns out I made my first contribution 4 years ago! You can see if you’ve contributed too if you visit firstpr.me.

I forgot about little change from jsConf2014.

Another resource I found was codetriage.com, which is a collection of filterable repositories requiring code assistance.

Yes that first bucket says they have 708 issues! What a terrific way to get into code and learn something, right?

Later, our diversity team ended up meeting two Red Hat employees Erik and Michael (very fun and energetic presenters) who demonstrated their project the Oasis on Learn.Study. An open source Minecraft server designed to engage youth in the 8–13 demographic. The goal is to encourage youth to code in a way where they can create objects and interact with them on Minecraft through Scratch programming.

Oasis.Learn.Study open source community

I haven’t participated yet, but I have some great ideas of how to help with this open source project. If you are interested in participating please do. These were two really fun and awesome guys! They are looking basically any and all help to support the project.


I was exposed to many a wide range of Red Hat open source products. I’m going to admit, some of the presentations were waaay over my head, but the good thing is I know it’s out there, and available for use.

Being a part of Red Hat’s diversity and inclusion program proved to be invaluable to my career growth. I had never attended a conference where I walked away knowing exactly how to achieve my career goals.

My takeaways apply for Outreachy, search for more diversity and inclusion events, contribute to open source and most importantly keep in touch with the friends that you make.

As I flew out of town, I felt as though a huge weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I no longer felt defeated, but empowered because now I had options and allies.

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