Meet Our Contributors - APAC (China region)

Authors & Interviewers: Avinesh Tripathi, Debabrata Panigrahi, Jayesh Srivastava, Priyanka Saggu, Purneswar Prasad, Vedant Kakde

Hello, everyone 👋

Welcome back to the third edition of the "Meet Our Contributors" blog post series for APAC.

This post features four outstanding contributors from China, who have played diverse leadership and community roles in the upstream Kubernetes project.

So, without further ado, let's get straight to the article.

Andy Zhang

Andy Zhang currently works for Microsoft China at the Shanghai site. His main focus is on Kubernetes storage drivers. Andy started contributing to Kubernetes about 5 years ago.

He states that as he is working in Azure Kubernetes Service team and spends most of his time contributing to the Kubernetes community project. Now he is the main contributor of quite a lot Kubernetes subprojects such as Kubernetes cloud provider code.

His open source contributions are mainly self-motivated. In the last two years he has mentored a few students contributing to Kubernetes through the LFX Mentorship program, some of whom got jobs due to their expertise and contributions on Kubernetes projects.

Andy is an active member of the China Kubernetes community. He adds that the Kubernetes community has a good guide about how to become members, code reviewers, approvers and finally when he found out that some open source projects are in the very early stage, he actively contributed to those projects and became the project maintainer.

Shiming Zhang

Shiming Zhang is a Software Engineer working on Kubernetes for DaoCloud in Shanghai, China.

He has mostly been involved with SIG Node as a reviewer. His major contributions have mainly been bug fixes and feature improvements in an ongoing KEP, all revolving around SIG Node.

Some of his major PRs are fixing watchForLockfileContention memory leak, fixing startupProbe behaviour, adding Field status.hostIPs for Pod.

Paco Xu

Paco Xu works at DaoCloud, a Shanghai-based cloud-native firm. He works with the infra and the open source team, focusing on enterprise cloud native platforms based on Kubernetes.

He started with Kubernetes in early 2017 and his first contribution was in March 2018. He started with a bug that he found, but his solution was not that graceful, hence wasn't accepted. He then started with some good first issues, which helped him to a great extent. In addition to this, from 2016 to 2017, he made some minor contributions to Docker.

Currently, Paco is a reviewer for kubeadm (a SIG Cluster Lifecycle product), and for SIG Node.

Paco says that you should contribute to open source projects you use. For him, an open source project is like a book to learn, getting inspired through discussions with the project maintainers.

In my opinion, the best way for me is learning how owners work on the project.

Jintao Zhang

Jintao Zhang is presently employed at API7, where he focuses on ingress and service mesh.

In 2017, he encountered an issue which led to a community discussion and his contributions to Kubernetes started. Before contributing to Kubernetes, Jintao was a long-time contributor to Docker-related open source projects.

Currently Jintao is a maintainer for the ingress-nginx project.

He suggests keeping track of job opportunities at open source companies so that you can find one that allows you to contribute full time. For new contributors Jintao says that if anyone wants to make a significant contribution to an open source project, then they should choose the project based on their interests and should generously invest time.

If you have any recommendations/suggestions for who we should interview next, please let us know in the #sig-contribex channel channel on the Kubernetes Slack. Your suggestions would be much appreciated. We're thrilled to have additional folks assisting us in reaching out to even more wonderful individuals of the community.

We'll see you all in the next one. Everyone, till then, have a happy contributing! 👋

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