JR Valdes
J.R. Valdes is a software engineer at Red Hat on the Windows Containers team, where he contributes to the Windows Machine Config Operator (WMCO) for Openshift. He is also a Kubernetes upstream contributor who helped promote the NodeLogQuery feature (KEP-2258) to General Availability in Kubernetes 1.36. He is active in SIG Windows and focused on making hybrid Linux/Windows Kubernetes clusters a production reality.
Software engineer
Red Hat
Session
What happens when a Linux company hires you to work with the Windows Operating System?
At Red Hat, I contribute to an OLM operator written in Go that configures Windows Server
instances into OpenShift worker nodes. I debug Windows issues from a Fedora laptop,
and contribute to a Kubernetes SIG literally called "sig-windows". When I tell people at conferences what I do, the first reaction is always the same: "Wait, Windows at Red Hat?"
This talk is the honest story behind that reaction. I'll share a career lesson hiding in a weird job description, a different perspective on where to find meaningful open source work, concrete strategies for contributing to large upstream projects, and maybe the courage to navigate a role that doesn't fit the obvious narrative but creates a unique opportunity for impact.