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[The way from University Student to Apache Committer]

· 5 min read
Kunshuai Zhu

New Committer Introduction#

Name: Kunshuai Zhu

University: Northeastern University

Role: Apache ShenYu Committer

Email: jooks@apache.org

Contact Open Source#

In the second semester of my sophomore year, by chance, I saw the promotion of the Open Source Software Supply Chain Lighting Program (hereinafter referred to as the Summer of Open Source) organized by the Institute of Software of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the openEuler community. Later, I slowly learned that there were so many people active in the open source community in China, which greatly promoted the development of the open source ecosystem. It was also a very coincidence that I met the VP (Xiao Yu) of Apache ShenYu, who was my mentor in the Apache ShardingSphere community during the summer of open source. After I completed the task of open source summer ahead of schedule, I saw that ShenYu had just entered the Apache incubator, and it was in full swing, so I started to contact Apache ShenYu.

Grow In The Community#

My earliest contribution to ShenYu was not code, but documentation. At that time, I found a few typo on the official website, so I decisively submitted a pr and become ShenYu's Contributor.

Later, after participating in the regular meeting of the community, I found that ShenYu, as an Apache incubator project, actually still has many places to be optimized and enriched. So, I started with integration testing and started the journey of fighting monsters and upgrading.

In fact, there are a lot of things that can be learned by doing integration testing, from Docker, CI to ShenYu's functional implementation details, microservice ecology and so on. Sometimes inappropriateness of the official website documentation is found during testing, so you need to read the source code yourself, understand the code logic, and then improve or correct the documentation; sometimes some bugs are found, so you can be familiar with ShenYu gateway in locating bugs and fixing bugs details. Later, you can gradually implement some new features yourself.

While getting familiar with the ShenYu project, the sense of awe for ShenYu is also getting higher and higher. Design patterns, asynchronous programming, functional programming, etc. in ShenYu are all very ingenious and worth learning.

Harvest In Open Source#

Looking back on the past six months since I participated in open source, I feel that I have gained a lot, which is mainly reflected in the following aspects.

  1. Improvement of technical level. Participating in open source can not only get in touch with a lot of knowledge that cannot be learned in school, but also can see the practical scene of "slaying dragon martial arts" that I have learned. As an API gateway, Apache ShenYu is the entrance to the entire microservice system. While participating in the project construction, you will naturally be exposed to various knowledge in the field of microservices.

  2. Broaden the horizons. Personally experiencing the discussion of the new feature of the project and participating in activities such as ApacheCon and the Open Source Annual Conference have enabled me to have a more systematic understanding and thinking about the microservice ecology and development trends.

  3. Help with job interviews. The addition of open source experience on my resume has really helped me in my interview for an internship, and it has also been affirmed by the interviewer.

Some Advice For Newcomers#

  1. Adapt to asynchronous communication. Different from our usual communication methods, the open source community often uses asynchronous communication methods, such as mailing lists, GitHub issues, Jira, etc. The priority of the communication methods recommended by the Apache ShenYu community is: mailing list > Github issue > WeChat group . This is because through the mailing list and github, the discussion process and results of the issue can be retained, which is open and transparent. On the other hand, throwing questions on the mailing list is often the quickest and most effective solution.

  2. Actively participate in discussions. Community trumps code, this is what the Apache Way advocates. The code obtained through full communication and discussion is more vibrant. In addition, the Apache ShenYu community will hold an online regular meeting every two weeks, which will periodically summarize the work of the community, as well as the goals and tasks after the discussion (and will also be posted to the mailing list).

  3. How to contribute? The first is after the above-mentioned discussion, and then the hands-on. For those who have not applied ShenYu in their work, writing integration tests and source code analysis articles is a very good entry point. At the same time, the Apache ShenYu community often publishes a lot of easy or difficult tasks, and we all look forward to your participation.

  4. Advice for current students who want to get involved in open source but haven't done it yet. Participate in open source boldly. Among the several open source communities I have come into contact with, students are more friendly, expectant and tolerant. In addition, some organizations will hold activities to guide student groups to participate in open source, such as Open Source Summer (mentioned above), GSoC (Google Summer of Programming), etc., which are also very good ways to participate, not only will there be generous bonuses, but also Get to know a lot of friends and tech giants.