Expanding User Support with Office Hours

Today's post is by

Today's developer has an almost overwhelming amount of resources available for learning. Kubernetes development teams use

One of the challenges of large projects is keeping user resources relevant and useful. While documentation can be useful, great learning also happens in Q&A sessions at conferences, or by learning with someone whose explanation matches your learning style. Consider that learning Kung Fu from Morpheus would be a lot more fun than reading a book about Kung Fu!

We as Kubernetes developers want to create an interactive experience: where Kubernetes users can get their questions answered by experts in real time, or at least referred to the best known documentation or code example.

Having discussed a few broad ideas, we eventually decided to make

To give you an idea of what Kubernetes office hours are like, here's Josh Berkus answering a question on running databases on Kubernetes. Despite the popularity of this topic, it's still difficult for a new user to get a constructive answer. Here's an excellent response from Josh:

It's often easier to field this kind of question in office hours than it is to ask a developer to write a full-length blog post. [Editor's note: That's legit!] Because we don't have infinite developers with infinite time, this kind of focused communication creates high-bandwidth help while limiting developer commitments to 1 hour per month. This allows a rotating set of experts to share the load without overwhelming any one person.

We hold office hours the third Wednesday of every month on the

Special thanks to Amazon, Bitnami, Giant Swarm, Heptio, Liquidweb, Northwestern Mutual, Packet.net, Pivotal, Red Hat, Weaveworks, and VMWare for donating engineering time to office hours.

And thanks to Alan Pope, Joe Beda, and Charles Butler for technical support in making our livestream better.