Meet Our Contributors - APAC (India region)
Good day, everyone š
Welcome to the first episode of the APAC edition of the "Meet Our Contributors" blog post series.
In this post, we'll introduce you to five amazing folks from the India region who have been actively contributing to the upstream Kubernetes projects in a variety of ways, as well as being the leaders or maintainers of numerous community initiatives.
š« Let's get started, so without further adoā¦
Arsh is currently employed with Okteto as a Developer Experience engineer. As a new contributor, he realised that 1:1 mentorship opportunities were quite beneficial in getting him started with the upstream project.
He is presently a CI Signal shadow on the Kubernetes 1.23 release team. He is also contributing to the SIG Testing and SIG Docs projects, as well as to the
To the newcomers, Arsh helps plan their early contributions sustainably. I would encourage folks to contribute in a way that's sustainable. What I mean by that
is that it's easy to be very enthusiastic early on and take up more stuff than one can
actually handle. This can often lead to burnout in later stages. It's much more sustainable
to work on things iteratively. Kunal Kushwaha is a core member of the Kubernetes marketing council. He is also a CNCF ambassador and one of the founders of the
At the end of his first year, Kunal began contributing to the
As an open-source enthusiast, he believes that diverse participation in the community is beneficial since it introduces new perspectives and opinions and respect for one's peers. He has worked on various open-source projects, and his participation in communities has considerably assisted his development as a developer. I believe if you find yourself in a place where you do not know much about the
project, that's a good thing because now you can learn while contributing and the
community is there to help you. It has helped me a lot in gaining skills, meeting
people from around the world and also helping them. You can learn on the go,
you don't have to be an expert. Make sure to also check out no code contributions
because being a beginner is a skill and you can bring new perspectives to the
organisation. Madhav Jivarajani works on the VMware Upstream Kubernetes stability team. He began contributing to the Kubernetes project in January 2021 and has since made significant contributions to several areas of work under SIG Architecture, SIG API Machinery, and SIG ContribEx (contributor experience). Among several significant contributions are his recent efforts toward the Archival of "groups" codebase under k8s-infra repository to make it mockable and testable, and improving the functionality of the . In addition to his technical efforts, Madhav oversees many projects aimed at assisting new contributors. He organises bi-weekly "KEP reading club" sessions to help newcomers understand the process of adding new features, deprecating old ones, and making other key changes to the upstream project. He has also worked on developing new contributors workshops (NCW). I initially did not know much about Kubernetes. I joined because the community was
super friendly. But what made me stay was not just the people, but the project itself.
My solution to not feeling overwhelmed in the community was to gain as much context
and knowledge into the topics that I was interested in and were being discussed. And
as a result I continued to dig deeper into Kubernetes and the design of it.
I am a systems nut & thus Kubernetes was an absolute goldmine for me. Rajas Kakodkar currently works at VMware as a Member of Technical Staff. He has been engaged in many aspects of the upstream Kubernetes project since 2019. He is now a key contributor to the Testing special interest group. He is also active in the SIG Network community. Lately, Rajas has contributed significantly to the
One of the first challenges he ran across was that he was in a different time zone than the upstream project's regular meeting hours. However, async interactions on community forums progressively corrected that problem. I enjoy contributing to Kubernetes not just because I get to work on
cutting edge tech but more importantly because I get to work with
awesome people and help in solving real world problems. Rajula Vineet Reddy, a Junior Engineer at CERN, is a member of the Marketing Council team under SIG ContribEx . He also served as a release shadow for SIG Release during the 1.22 and 1.23 Kubernetes release cycles. He started looking at the Kubernetes project as part of a university project with the help of one of his professors. Over time, he spent a significant amount of time reading the project's documentation, Slack discussions, GitHub issues, and blogs, which helped him better grasp the Kubernetes project and piqued his interest in contributing upstream. One of his key contributions was his assistance with automation in the SIG ContribEx Upstream Marketing subproject. According to Rajula, attending project meetings and shadowing various project roles are vital for learning about the community. I find the community very helpful and it's always
āyou get back as much as you contributeā.
The more involved you are, the more you will understand, get to learn and
contribute new things. The first step to ācome forward and startā is hard. But it's all gonna be
smooth after that. Just take that jump. If you have any recommendations/suggestions for who we should interview next, please let us know in #sig-contribex. We're thrilled to have other folks assisting us in reaching out to even more wonderful individuals of the community. Your suggestions would be much appreciated. We'll see you all in the next one. Everyone, till then, have a happy contributing! š