OpenTelemetry in Japanese

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I was thrilled to find out about the large OpenTelemetry community in Japan, members of which are participating in meetups and translating the official documentation in an effort to make OpenTelemetry more accessible for Japanese-speaking developers. This is the second translation effort for the project; other community members are working on OpenTelemetry in Chinese. As the Cloud Native and Open Source Virtual Summit China is coming soon I wanted to learn more about this effort. I think this conversation with Yoshi Yamaguchi 🇯🇵 (@ymotongpoo) may be interesting for a wider community.

How did you get involved in OpenTelemetry and what do you like the most about our community?

I transferred to the Google Cloud Developer Relations team as Developer Advocate for Observability-related technologies 2 years ago. Before the OpenTelemetry merger occurred, I had been involved in OpenCensus and ran several local meetups for OpenCensus. When the OpenTelemetry merger happened, I implemented the very first OpenTelemetry exporter for Google Cloud Trace, which was then used in the OpenTelemetry workshop held at Velocity Berlin in November 2019, co-presented by Liz Fong-Jones, Bogdan Drutu, and Christine Yen.

Since the beginning of the OpenTelemetry community, it has had an inclusive atmosphere and well-organized and open governance, and I felt that it was easy to communicate with people in the community. Also, as OpenTelemetry involves multiple programming languages, the community is a mix of different cultures. This is how I joined the community from its early phase, and why I feel at home there now.

You started running local meet ups. Can you share what you’ve learned about how best to organize these and what mistakes to avoid?

Before answering this question, let me share the cultural background. In Japan, language barriers often become an obstacle to try, introduce, or contribute to software products. And as a flip side of this symptom, you’ll find a lot of active localization projects for major products’ documentation. You’ll find many of them, for example, for programming languages such as Python and PHP, for frameworks such as Angular and React, and for infrastructure components such as Kubernetes and Docker, — and many more. I also have been involved in such documentation localization projects, or even book translations.

Given what I learned from those localization projects, the fact that local language documents are available gives familiarity to a lot of people in Japan and drives more involvement in the project itself. It’s not a mistake, but one thing I’d like to be careful about is the isolation of a local community from global communities. Localization itself is an awesome contribution to the community, but I hope to encourage more contributions to the upstream project so that the OpenTelemetry community can have a broader perspective.

You are one of the initiators of the docs-ja repository and are actively working on translating OpenTelemetry’s documentation. What impact do you think the translated documentation will have on Japanese developers? What else do you think we as a community can do to make OpenTelemetry more accessible?

As noted above, translation would reduce the effort required to try to introduce OpenTelemetry into existing applications and systems. I believe that as more developers understand the specifications and implementations of OpenTelemetry, we’ll see more contributions from Japanese developers.

One thing that I feel is challenging is the time zone differences, which makes it difficult to join the SIG meetings. Though it’s inevitable to hold them in US centric time because of the number of people joining the community, most SIG meetings are held in US/EMEA friendly time. It’s kind of chicken-and-egg problem, and I’m not sure how many APAC folks are interested to join the SIG meetings, but I assume having them more APAC friendly time may make some change.

Is there a Japanese social network that we should publish to? Or popular SWE news resource where OpenTelemetry presence needs to be expanded?

I don’t think we use any local social networks a lot to share news. One popular developer news source is “Hatena Bookmark”, which is a social bookmark service.

What’s your view on the specifics of a Japanese market? I believe Japan is very well globally integrated. Are there specific technologies that are used more widely and need more attention from the OpenTelemetry to be successful in Japan?

The first thing that comes to mind is Ruby. I suppose that more Ruby contributors in OpenTelemetry would provide an impact to the large Ruby community in Japan, because there are a number of Ruby committers in Japan and a lot of Ruby users as well, especially Ruby on Rails users. It would be great if some developers who use Ruby heavily in their companies could regularly join the Ruby SIG meetings and provide their point of view as users.

As we want to improve the inclusivity of our community, what can we do to make OpenTelemetry more appealing to Japanese software engineers?

The largest challenge I see is the language barrier that I mentioned above. The number of users of major software products is large and I know a lot of talented and skilled developers in Japan. However, when it comes to upstream contributions, because of the amount of communications required in English, it gets harder. Thus, we see a lot of advanced product users, but the number of contributors among them is relatively small. It would be great if OpenTelemetry could provide easier steps or guides for those developers indicating how to report issues and provide code contributions. What I found useful for this kind of activity was the contribution workshop held in GopherCon. A lot of developers attending GopherCon from Japan joined the workshop and made contributions to the upstream during the workshop, or at least learned how to make contributions.

Also, again, the time zone difference makes it hard for developers in Japan to participate in real-time discussions, such as online meetings or chat on Gitter. We can investigate how many potential contributors are in Japan, or even in APAC regions, and adjust meeting schedules depending on the result.

I think it’s time for you to write something in Japanese to invite people to your meetups and invite them to contribute. Or anything else you can tell about.

Thank you for the opportunity to give messages in Japanese.

OpenTelemetryはまだ安定版リリース前のプロダクトで、多くのベンダー企業やユーザー企業が多くの意見を交わしながら、多くの機能を取り込んでいる最中です。open-telemetry/docs-ja ではドキュメントを日本語化することでユーザー数を増やし、それによって多くのユースケースが出てくることを目的としているので、賛同していただける方はぜひご参加ください。

また今後企画しているOpenTelemetry meetupでは、現状の確認や、みなさんのユースケースの共有などを通じて、よりOpenTelemetryを利用しやすくするとともに、upstreamへの貢献もできるようにしたいと考えています。ぜひ多くの方々に参加していただければと思います！

Thank you Morgan McLean and Amelia Mango for this article review.