Everyone. Thank you for joining us for this meet and greet with, with some of the lovely women working at Canonical. Uh We really would like this to be a meet and greet.So we will of course talk a little bit and tell, tell you a little bit about ourselves, but please feel free to drop your questions in the chat and ask us really anything that you're curious about and we would happily share. Um If I start with just introducing myself, my name is Mian Alexis. I'm a product manager working for Canonical and I take care of um some infrastructure products. We have um um uh virtualization platform called LEX D and also our micro cloud offering. I started my career in telecommunications and I'm not actually, well, I'm not an engineer by education. I come from social sciences. Uh But I kind of took my strengths and applied them into the technology field starting first as a program manager where I mostly use my kind of organizational and people skills. But then over time, I, I just got, I was curious and I got deeper and deeper and deeper into tech. And now I work with some very geeky things. Um So I've been in canonical for about a year and a half. Uh I really like it.

I love working with everyone. I love working with my engineering team. And again, yeah, feel free to ask any questions and I would happily uh share my experience.

Thanks, Mia, hi, everyone. My name is Via today. I have a very coarse, weird voice, a voice for that. Um I'm a senior, he's a researcher in the design team. Um My job is to see what us, those things feel and do about all of our products. And then based on that, we can change the goals, the strategy of design and make better experiences for everyone. We try to do things that are accessible and that includes different um locations, different backgrounds, et cetera. Um Before I joined Canonical a year and a half ago, I was living in Singapore where I did a phd and I work in a couple of start ups and I'm originally from Spain.

I'll go next time. Yeah. Hello. I'm Andrea. I'm originally from Romania. I work as a product manager similarly to mea, but on machine learning tooling. So I, I'm, I'm tempted to say it. It's, it's a cool thing these days. I, I started in Telco as well. I think that's by chance and I have an engineering background, but I quickly understood that I like data science and I like playing with data. So I evolved and I grew my career there. I've been economical for three years now. I'll, I'll have my anniversary in two months and I'm quite excited about that. I started here doing data science and, and doing a lot of data work and I moved, uh, or I changed roles a year ago and I'm quite excited about it. I, I figured it out once I joined that I like working here and it's a great place to actually grow your career, to discover what you like as well because there are tons of opportunities that, that you can explore and also tons of very passionate people that can, that you can easily learn from and uh improve your skills.

So I'm the last one. Thanks Andrea. Um Hi, everyone. It's great to have all of you be here, be a part of this chart. Feel free to use the chat option and engage with us ask questions. Um I'm Arshi, I'm the engineering director for our Internal Devops teams. My teams are mostly engineering team, teams that work closely with our operations team to identify and build solutions that can help manage, install um applications, enterprise applications easily uh make the opera simplify the operations a bit more for managing infrastructure at scale.

Um I have a background in technical product management and architecture before canonical and I had a very interesting journey similar to Andrea. Um I had applied for a different role when I had joined Canonical and through my conversations with leadership and now my colleagues, um I would be redirected me to a different role, which was the perfect fit for me. Um So that's like something unique about Canon's hiring process.

If the hiring manager or lead uh feels that you are not a right fit for a particular role, but a good fit for the organization, they would redirect you and they would empower you to apply for the other role. Um So, before we uh dive deeper into what canonical is, I just wanted to get a handle of whether you know anything about canonical at all. Um So maybe if you can uh go to the chat uh type in a couple of words about what you know about canonical and if you don't know anything about it, that's fine as well. Um Let's see if anyone here knows uh what canonical does.

Should I break the news and say Ubuntu vsi? Yeah.

Um OK. So Ubuntu is something I think a few of you at least would, must have heard about um canonical is the publisher of Ubuntu. But beyond ubuntu, we are, we have a much wider vision and mission. We uh we want to be the company that delivers the best experience of open source. We want to amplify the positive impact of open source, whether it is in platform, so Bantu or applications. So deploying the best data, uh data source experience or A I experience or two device. Uh so your smart, your earphones or your uh bikes, um oasis and software for that. So we are into everything. Um And as a company, we want uh to provide the best experience of open source. Um If you think about it for organizations and even individuals, it is very hard sometimes for us to um consume open source in an effective way. Like how do you figure out what software to use? Um How do you store it, maintain it? How do you make sure that it is something that's secure and that's the gap that we are trying to fill in. We want to enable our clients, our organizations and individuals uh to be able to innovate on open source. Uh and to be able to find a cost effective way of consuming open source.

Um A lot of organizations now are becoming remote after COVID or have a hybrid side of a work culture uh for canonical though uh we were found in uh 2004 and now we have 1000 employees in over over 70 countries. So ever since we were founded, we were a remote first company. So over 80% of our workforce is remote and though that presents like some interesting challenges on um how do you manage, working in A P A and America simultaneously or how do you manage uh a workforce that is not working in the same time zone? We have found some effective processes around how to do that. So, one of the things that we do is if we hire someone, we try to put them in a time zone specific team. So if you're hired in A P A most probably you will have a team that is working in similar time zones as you um Thailand, Philippines, India, Japan. Um So you'll have uh teammates who have a significant overlap with you. Um Or if you uh the other thing that we do is we try and uh prioritize travel over commute.

So if you are, uh we try and meet at least once every six months for a week and we work together as a team, we identify what our focus areas for next six months and we work together as a team um and have fun together in the last year itself. We've been to Frankfurt Copenhagen Prague and we're planning on going to Rega. So it's a very dynamic and a very diverse sort of a culture. Um And I let mea go a bit further. Uh um Actually, Andrea, uh I let Andrea go a bit further into uh open source and its impact on women.

Thank you, Rashi. And uh it's, it's great that you actually captured it that we, it's not that we are very multi multicultural environment, but we also explore new cultures by meeting our colleagues around the world. But when we think of open source, I, I first met open source when I was a student, I started using ubuntu. Um back then, but then over time, the more that I grew, I figured it out that actually I can use other tooling. And I, I already mentioned that I'm a product manager for a IML. And the great part of it is that often we get questions on, hey, but how can I get started? How can I actually use it? Well, it's simple. You, you go on our website or on our one of our websites, you go on ww.com and you think of what are your needs and you can easily deploy or install, let's say any product you want. What does it mean? Well, it means that anyone can try it out. And as you, as we already said, anyone can actually um innovate using our products and there, there's no barriers, it, it really goes back to. Well, we can all do it and it's just our responsibility to, to try it out. I'm, I'm curious, Leona, I see you uh you agree with me. Would you like to, to help me?

Yeah, I mean, I, you know, you mentioned that you used ubuntu before and I can share maybe my story of how I came to study, to use ubuntu because as I said, I come from social sciences. So I never really was, you know, too deep into technology. And then I was somewhere in the middle of my, my university studies and my computer was getting extremely slow. It was running one of the older Windows versions and it was just, you know, it just wasn't working properly. It would take forever to boot. It was, be like, becoming super slow. I couldn't do my, my assignment but I had, I was a poor student and I had no money to actually buy a new computer. And then I had a friend that, that was a software engineer that recommended. Oh, why don't you try installing ubuntu? And I was like, what is that? And it's like, it's a Linux operating system but, you know, isn't that, you know, not user friendly and weird and so on. I was like, no, no, no, it's fine. And then we actually installed ubuntu on my laptop and it gave it a new life, like it would turn on in like 10 seconds, you know, I could do everything that I needed to do. And that's when I first realized that, hey, you know, there are all these people that are creating software that is accessible to everyone that is useful that is user friendly and you, I mean, you maybe just don't know about it because it's not necessarily visible to you, but it's out there and there's this whole community of people that care about it and then, you know, contribute to it and, you know, spend their free time actually, like, not, not just, you know, during working hours but actual free time to make it better.

And I think that's pretty cool.

I'll add one more thing here because you mentioned about, hey, you might know or about it or it might not be user friendly. And it's interesting because I think in, in canonical, first of all, you have a lot of materials to use it. But also we started spending more time educating people and helping them get started on, on a IML. I can easily recall that in February, I was at Bacon Namibia just playing around with Q flow and showcasing how it can be used. And it's a similar thing that I'll be doing in a couple of months at the, at another open source event where we have an entire uh two hours just talking about ML tooling and how to use it and it's open so anyone can try it out, which is quite nice, right?

I mean, another example I can give and this is something I've experienced for the first time this February. Um my team joined a conference called foam, which is free and open source developer conference. Uh It's happening in Brussels every, every spring and it's a conference that is basically built up by the community. So it's completely free. It doesn't even have registration, which means that anyone can go like it doesn't matter how many people anyone can just show up, they can see the program, they, you can join one of the developer rooms, they can hear about, you know, new things that are happening or they can experiment with them.

And it was the first time that, you know, I mean, I've been to many conferences but you typically, you know, you, you register, you have some sponsors, you see a program and those kind of things. And this was just purely driven by, you know, people wanting to share the stuff that they're doing. Which, which again, it's, it's, it's a part of what makes me excited to work for canonical as well because usually open source is something that, you know, you contribute to in your spare time. I mean, a lot of companies do have open source programs and now we see that happening more and more. Um but it's still something that people usually do in their free time. Whereas I think in canonical, we really have this unique chance to work with open source as our job, you know, work with open source and actually get paid to work with open source, which I think is, is something that doesn't happen easily um in, in other companies.

And I am I, I'll go, I'll circulate the back to because you mentioned contributions. And one of the questions that I, I got a lot in the past as well, how can I actually contribute? And since we have all our repositories open, you go on github slash canonical, it's quite easy. Uh you can always contribute there. And I know LXD projects, for example, that Neona is looking after it even has labels with easy for people who are just getting started.

Exactly. You can filter the issues by easy and then those that are labeled easy, you know, kind of user friendly and you can actually, you know, try to solve them, which is, yeah, it's, it's a good way to get started.

But also if you look on our dogs, for example, you can always, you, most of our products have an area which contribute or uh buttons to hey, make, make these dogs better. And these are two of the options. Another interesting thing is for example, in flow again, I talk about it because that's what I know the best and we run better sessions we have before any release, we have a better session or a better period where people can contribute, provide feedback. And we have a couple of users who I think they are our power users and they go on this course once we go with the announcement out and, and they tell us about so many bugs, problems workarounds that they figured it out that it's really uh it's a real contribution. And the engineering team is these days is really looking forward for that period of the year when, when they get feedback and contributions back from, from our users because they know the best what their pain points are. I would say

someone, someone is asking for a particular examples of projects it could contribute to. Can you search some from your A I work? Yes.

Yeah. And I can, I can also, I will find a link for, for the project that I am a part of and a product manager for we have a, a page describing how you can actually contribute. And then, I mean, as I mentioned already, if you go to our github page, you can um you can sort the issues by easy and then you know,

get started that way as well,

right? And I shared a couple of links in the chat as well for good places for you to start looking uh for projects or things that we are working at. You can uh start with our blog, you can go to github like uh Biona mentioned and we'll also uh share certain links of projects that we are interested in and are working on.

And I think one more important thing to mention is that, you know, of course, when we talk about open source, we talk about software most most likely and we talk about contributions in terms of actual code. But it's important to mention that you can be a part of the open source community even if you're not a software developer or an engineer. Because there is a lot that goes on that, you know, requires organizational skills, communication skills, even documentation, you know, just having someone to go through the documentation and say, hey, this doesn't make sense, you know, like can we maybe adjust this so that it's easier for people to understand or when we have these kind of meetups and community events, it's always, you know, it's always helpful to have someone join in that can kind of help, bring people together, help organize, help communicate, help plan.

So it doesn't, you don't need to be a software engineer, you can use your soft skills as well and just be a part of the community and you know, facilitate this

collaboration. Yeah, definitely the design team, we have some cool design of this. We also look for potential users to talk to them and let them try our products and see what's working, what's not. So there's a lot beyond just coding.

But maybe vsi I can ask you a question like given that you are an engineering director and you actually lead teams. What is it like to be a leader in canonical? And how do you, you know how, how, how do you lead effectively in a multicultural company?

Right? So canonical is very unique in that aspect that uh most of our, our workforce is very global. We are a very dynamic and agile organization and it's a very flat organization. Um So things that are effective for my part of the August written communication, a synchronous communication.

So I have teams that will follow the sun. So we have teams in a America's EEAAP a all the time zones. And the way that we coordinate between the teams is trying to make sure we are coordinating a lot through written communication. We have a meeting, we make sure we have a set meeting agenda before it and we capture meeting notes for other people to follow if they weren't able to attend, we try to record meetings which are important. So uh things like demos, product demos or retrospectives, which people can then view later and, and get information from, we share our updates and discourse um at times for other teams in the company to view those. So we have a very strong written culture in the company that helps with uh the aspect of uh of collaborating with each other. Um I think the prints really help as well. Um Getting to meet everyone, getting to have that human connect with everyone. I think that helps. Um And also just in general, I think we are uh a team of very bright engineers who are very passionate about what we are doing. So it's a actually not that hard managing such such works. So um it's actually a blessing to be learning from all of them and people are the greatest uh asset of our company is what is what I've always believed in.

We have a workforce of really bright engineers who have both the heart and head, which is very difficult to find. And I think it's easier when you have such such nice and smart colleagues.

I do see another question it came to the Q and A uh regarding how to get started uh in engaging with open source community. Are there any suggestions? I'm not sure if anyone in this panel has experience in contributing to open source or maybe how you got started?

I mean, for example, one thing that we do for, for the like the project that I work with, I mean, we, we try to do everything publicly. So, you know, we share kind of what is our road map, what are we planning to do? What are we developing? We kind of try to keep everyone informed. And for example, we've had people just coming in our forum which is usually where we get to kind of most of the interaction with the team. Um I mean, you can just kind of post a question but like we had people come up to us with suggestions like, hey, do you know, like I would like to, I think this is like a super useful thing and I would like to maybe help uh create like uh an education for people that are interested in learning this.

So, I mean, I think, you know, it's, it's hard because there is so many different open source projects that they, but I think if you find something that is interesting for you, you know, like maybe uh a tool that makes making websites easier or, you know, an automation thing that, you know, makes configuration a breeze or a IML and, and those kind of things.

So just try to kind of browse through search, read up and then if you find a project that you like, that seems interesting, you can always kind of reach out to the maintainers that are typically listed there and say, hey, you know, is there anything I can help I could help with?

Like, I'm curious about this, how can I get involved? And then I mean, it will be a different answer with different communities, but for sure everyone would just appreciate that, you know, someone wants to help out because we are working on this collectively.

I will want to add uh one more thing here. If you think of um canonical specifically, we do have on matter most some of the channels publicly where you can just engage directly with some of us and you see what, what the teams are working on and you can also direct the the developers, how, how could I help or? Hey, II I bumped into this problem. Um I, I found the solution and it's charm hub is one of the examples that I I can recall from the top of my um mind. It's, it's gone matter most it's publicly, you see they're all our contributions because I think at the end of the day, we are kind of also contributors to, to the projects that we are working on.

I mean, yeah, I, I don't contribute in code but I contribute in spirit and in, you know, a lot of other things as well. I

think you said sorry to jump in. I think you said something very interesting. And it's a discussion that we had in the upstream crypto community on, hey, can I only contribute by writing code? And the short answer is no, you can contribute by, by writing docs by showcasing how to use the product. And that's actually a contribution as well. It's not just the code itself that should be uh is considered a contribution, but knowing how to use a product, it's something very, very valuable as well and showcasing it. But I mean, I think

even things like, you know, if there's a topic, you're curious about trying to organize a meet up, you know, like interacting with, you know, someone like trying to invite, I don't know, a product manager and engineering lead and trying to organize a meet up for other people even that is contributing because you're creating a platform for people to kind of, you know, learn, learn about something.

So just kind of I I would just advise, try browse through different projects and try to find some that you find here that, that you, you find interesting and then try to get involved and typically by talking with people that are already in the project, you will find ways that you can, you know, pitch in and give your contribution.

Nothing else.

Um Sorry. Uh I was just going to say if nothing else, you can always just provide feedback, that could be a way of contributing as well. So if you have used the product and if you wanted to uh open source software and, and if you want to provide feedback for that, that could be a way to contribute as well. Go ahead, Lydia.

Yeah. How's this gonna ask whether any of you would like to share about the role of women in open source?

I mean, I can talk briefly about it and I think I mentioned it a bit and I think it's kind of, there is no really reliable statistic but um some statistics shows that only about 10% of open source contributions are made by women. And I think a part of it is also what I previously mentioned. It's kind of a thing you do in your free time, you know, like it's not, it's, it's hard for you to be included in your career development. So it's, I think in some ways it's, you know, geared towards people that don't necessarily have too many responsibilities outside of work and that don't mind spending their free time, you know, just being stuck in, in, in their computer screen. But I think we really need more women in open source just because I mean, it's just the general diversity of thinking we are building something that should be freely open to anyone and that should help anyone innovate. That means that we need different people in different mindsets working, working on these kind of things and not just, you know, the same, the same geeky people that, you know, have time to actually stand on this in their feet.

You know, I'll have to challenge this because uh on eighth of March this year and it was by chance, we had a release party with the team and we end up being two ladies talking about open source tool in machine learning. Yes, we were live on youtube and someone notices it and we're like, oh, we didn't even notice for us. It was normal. It was the normality that we have ladies that work on, on to on open source tooling. They, they are software developers. Uh And it's nice to see how they the team in general has different skills. Some are more organized naturally, some others are more creative naturally and it became natural. So it depends on the team. That's my challenge. It

it depends on it and I think it depends also on kind of the the layer like I work with infrastructure and unfortunately, we don't have too many ladies in infrastructure and if anyone has even the tiniest interest, I would gladly help, you know, just kind of teach you everything you need to know.

But you know, it's not so scary. I know. It sounds scary. It's like that down in the basement with a lot of cables and a lot of boxes. But it's actually a lot of fun.

Right. I think the, the operations, we have the same problem as infrastructure as well. It might, it might feel difficult but it isn't as, as, as difficult and the problems if you're challenging, I think they are relevant to all the genders and they are very diverse problems that are applicable to anyone and everyone. So we want that a diversity of thought. Um and people who are building it as

well. And if there's something that I'll say, so, I started my career in a quite an old school company. I would say I, I was the only woman back then and I was extremely young. I was extremely scared and I think it, it kind of followed my career. So when I drink, you know, because I was very surprised to figure it out that there is an entire community of women that support each other that we, we go and have dinners whenever we meet during Springs. And then we do connect in different manners such that it's, it's easy not to ever feel them because you're not the only one out there who might have a challenge at some point. So if I have a bad day as a product manager, I have mea who's in my team. And I'm like, well, mea, how do you feel today? And it's something very important that and quite unique, I would say for Canal as well. Uh We are almost

out of time. So maybe, or you can take the, the last few minutes just to kind of share with people how, how can they find out more about us and, and also potentially see some of the open roles

we have? All right. Um So I think there was a question about hiring here as well. Um So for everyone who's interested in uh applying for a role, uh you can go to Cardio at canonical.com or we also have a virtual booth uh here. So you can visit a virtual booth. It, it is under expo and if you go to gold sponsors, you'll see a canonical logo. And if you go into it, you will see a virtual booth and you'll find someone you can interact with further as well. And there is, there is a link for our careers page there as well. You can apply using that. Um in terms of our hiring processes. Uh We um considering how we are trying to do the I do what's not been done before. We have a very unconventional hiring process. Um We have, uh I like I mentioned, written culture is very important for us having good writing skills is important to us. So we have a written in you, we have psychometric assessments after that, then we have technical evaluations and a panel of interviews. Um So it is uh the process itself is, has been created uh keeping the candidate in mind as well during the process, uh you would get enough opportunities to know about canonical and whether canonical is a fit for you or not as well.

Um So it, it's an interesting process to be a part of uh a lot of people give us feedback that they learn about themselves in the process. So I would encourage everyone to apply um and do feel free to reach out to any of us um over linkedin or uh during this conference uh through the virtual booth. And we would be able to answer more queries and uh uh redirect you to the right places for hiring as well.

And maybe a final thing to add. I think both Andrea me and why she initially applied for different roles when we wanted to join canonical. And then throughout the recruitment process, it was identified that we might be a better fit for something else. So we do really try to take care of our candidates and try to really make sure that we match them with the, with the best possible um role for them.

OK. So I think we don't have much time left. So I'll, I like to thank all of you for attending. Um And thanks for your time today and do reach out to us with any further questions.

Thank you everyone. It has been a pleasure. Thank

you so much. Bye bye bye.