Introducing the Grafana k6 Champions Program
Marie Cruz is a developer advocate for Grafana k6.
Over the past couple of months, the Grafana k6 Developer Relations team has been working on a way to acknowledge our performance testing experts who have been contributing to our community.
We’re thrilled to announce that we are launching the k6 Champions Program!
What is the k6 Champions Program?
k6 launched in 2016, and we’re really proud that it has become known as a performance testing tool that provides the best developer experience. It’s been amazing to see our active community filled with contributors spreading their knowledge about k6 and performance testing in general.
As our community grows, we recognize the need for a program to support our contributors better and give them resources and additional mentorship from the k6 team. The k6 Champions Program aims to recognize performance testing experts within our community from across the globe and amplify their contributions.
A k6 Champion can be a developer, a tester who loves using modern testing tools, or a site reliability engineer. To identify our first set of Champions, our DevRel team reached out to various people who were already advocates for k6 and assessed if each of them met our criteria. We were specifically looking for people who are passionate about mentoring and sharing their wealth of knowledge with the community, whether it’s about performance testing practices, using k6 on different scenarios, speaking at different events, writing tutorials, or simply answering questions from the community.
Information on how to apply is below, but first . . .
Meet the inaugural k6 Champions
We are starting off this program with five amazing contributors. Here’s a quick introduction. You’ll be able to learn more about them on the k6 blog.
Carlos Gauto
Carlos is an IT professional from Argentina with more than 16 years of experience doing web, API, and mobile test automation. He stood out to us because he shares his expertise and knowledge about k6 via his YouTube and Twitch channels.
John Hill
John works at NASA’s Ames Research Center as a test engineer. He has always been passionate about open source solutions and k6 is no exception. John was chosen as a Champion because he has presented topics about web performance at conferences and has also created a performance toolkit Github project allowing developers to reliably monitor a web application.
Jose Luis Latorre Millas
Jose Luis is an Azure certified engineer and a former Microsoft MVP. He enjoys sharing his knowledge with developer communities. When Microsoft deprecated Azure load testing, Jose Luis found k6 to be the modern alternative, and he led its adoption in Swish Life. Since then, he has given seven talks in Europe to Microsoft user groups and conferences about the value of performance testing and how to use k6 and Azure. Jose Luis has also participated in the k6 Office Hours, which makes him an excellent fit for our k6 Champions Program.
José Wenceslao Castillo
José is a performance engineer at Globant. He maintains one of the Grafana dashboards to visualize k6 OSS results with InfluxDB. José participates in testing in Chile and other communities in Latin America. He evangelizes about k6 in talks and workshops.
Krzystof Widera
Krzystof currently works as a performance engineer and he is one of the most active contributors in our k6 Community Slack channel. He’s been helping the community with any performance testing and k6-related questions, making him an excellent Champion already.
Are you our next k6 Champion?
The k6 Champions Program is now accepting applications! If you are passionate about sharing your knowledge with the community and want to be recognized further as an expert in your field, we encourage you to apply.
Throughout the program, you will get support from the k6 team and be exposed to opportunities that can strengthen your personal brand. You’ll be with passionate and like-minded people, and we’ll work with you to create content that you enjoy.
In our application review process, we mainly look at how you have advocated for k6, whether that’s in the form of blog posts, meetups, workshops, community forums, or open source contributions.
If you are selected as a k6 Champion, we ask that you to contribute four activities — in any shape or form — per year.
They can include:
- Guest blog posts/video content in k6 platforms
- Your own content related to k6 posted on your platform of choice
- Speaking at meetups/conferences about k6-related topics
- Hosting workshops
- Being a guest at k6 Office Hours
Apart from the activities mentioned above, we are open to other suggestions as well. Let us know what you’re thinking and we’ll work together on your idea!
In return for their advocacy, our k6 Champions also get awesome perks such as:
- Free access to k6 cloud for educational purposes
- Exclusive k6 champion swag
- Free tickets to Grafana Labs conferences
- An information packet to help with giving presentations or workshops
- And much more!
If you want to join our five new Champions and be part of the k6 Champions Program, please get in touch by sending us an email at avocados@k6.io or apply directly via this application form. We welcome applications from across the globe, and would love to hear from contributors from different demographics and underrepresented communities.
