Community is a moat

Hey {{first name | there}}. This past weekend I attended KCD Nigeria, and I was reminded how important community is. I want to make a case for why software might actually be the people we met along the way.

In today's not-so-technical notes:

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You see, for the longest time I have considered myself an introvert, so when I started learning how to code, there was no reason to interact with anyone. After all, I had all the help I needed from YouTube and Stack Overflow. Evidently, this was all BCC (before Claude Code).

However, in the years that followed, open source changed how I see software and the community that shapes it.

Every pull request meant someone I had never met reading my code, asking why I did it that way, and pointing me to an issue from years ago that explained a decision. Most of what I know about how software is maintained came from those threads.

Today anyone can open a terminal and ask Claude Code for the thing they used to search Stack Overflow for. Code is cheaper to produce than it has ever been.

What is hard to copy is the group of people around a project, the maintainers who answer issues, the contributors who know why a flag exists, and the users who show up at a meetup to tell you how they run it in production.

Kubernetes has alternatives with fewer lines of YAML, and the community around it is a big part of why people stay.

KCD and the conversations that ensued brought me back to simpler times, where I could have conversations with people and learn about things I had never heard about.

KCDs are run by local organizers, at least three, each from a different organization, with support from the CNCF. The speakers are usually engineers from the local community talking about what they run at work.

In a world where corporate sponsorships tend to water down conferences to a sales pitch, KCD is a unique opportunity to find those with a real interest in cloud native.

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The Data Is In: For COSS Companies, Community Is the Ultimate Moat by Matt Trifiro and Hilary Carter. Covers the State of Commercial Open Source 2025 report, which argues that the open source companies that do best are the ones that keep investing in their communities.

Announcing H2 2026 KCDs by Helena Spease. The CNCF's list of Kubernetes Community Days for the second half of 2026, plus how events were picked and the new tier system.

Meet Our Contributors - APAC (India region) from the Kubernetes blog. Contributors share how they got involved, from reading docs and Slack to joining SIG meetings and shadowing release roles.

If you have never been to a KCD or a local meetup, the CNCF KCD page lists upcoming events, so find one near you. Go to one, and talk to at least one person you don't know.

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Jubril Oyetunji
CTO, EverythingDevOps