This session opens a conversation about what nobody told us when we were trying to break into cloud native. Starting from my own experience as a first-gen Hispanic American in open source, I'll share a few things I had to figure out the hard way, which include depth over breadth, relationships as a skill, self-advocacy, letting your work speak, and then hand the room the mic. The goal is to surface the unwritten rules people from underrepresented backgrounds are still navigating alone, share what's actually worked, and build the kind of peer network that most of us didn't have access to coming up.