As a platform engineer, I've spent years operating Kubernetes clusters and running projects like External Secrets Operator, and ArgoCD in production. Contributing to OSS was something I had never thought of, until the AI era made me reconsider.

In this talk, I'll walk through my very first OSS contribution: how it started, how I troubleshot the issue, how I landed the PR and got it merged and the lessons along the way. Especially what it means to contribute when AI is now available to everyone.
AI helped me understand an unfamiliar codebase, filled my Go knowledge gap, and accelerated code generation. But it doesn't mean we can blindly trust it, even when it tells you unit tests pass at 100% coverage.

Lastly, I'll share what I gained through out the journey, a sense of belonging to a global community, a firsthand look at how world-class projects are maintained, their CI/CD workflows and documentation practices, direct collaboration with maintainers, and a new skill in Go.