Neil Smith
Neil has his Computer Science degree from University of Toronto and over 30 years' experience in IT and Software. Senior Manager for the Container Tools team at Red Hat he is passionate about the use of containers. Neil is currently working on moving Podman, Buildah, and Scopio through the CNCF project lifecycle.
Red Hat
Podman Evangelist
Session
At DevConf.CZ 2025 this workshop packed the room and helped generate 25 pull requests, with multiple first-time contributors submitting their first open-source PR. We're back with a twist: bring your AI tool of choice.
Podman is a CNCF Sandbox project heading to incubation and it needs contributors. This workshop gives you two paths to your first (or next) contribution:
Path A — Traditional. Find an issue, write a fix, submit a PR the classic way with Podman experts guiding you.
Path B — AI-assisted. Use Cursor, Claude, or your preferred AI tool to help write a fix. We'll teach you to contribute AI-generated code well — review what the AI produces, verify it solves the problem, and submit a PR maintainers will want to merge.
Both paths end the same way: a real pull request on the Podman repo, tested and ready for review.
Pre-req
Basic programming knowledge
A GitHub account
Familiarity with Git is a plus
Podman on your laptop
For Path B: your preferred AI coding tool and the above