LFX fall program 2021: A successful season with 37 graduated interns!

Post by Ihor Dvoretskyi

CNCF has had great experiences hosting interns through the LFX program since 2019, helping hundreds of developers get started in open source technology. This year was no exception, with 37 interns across 16 Graduated, Incubating, and Sandbox projects hosted by CNCF. 

We have shared some highlights from the graduating class below along with thoughts from the interns about their experiences! 

Cloud Native Buildpacks 

Update Builder implementation to 0.1 Builder Spec

Mentee: Jimil Desai

Mentor: Javier Romero

Working with the Buildpacks team for the course of over 3 months was indeed a great learning experience. It involved a lot of critical thinking and reading the buildpacks documentation. Writing software specification was something of a challenge for me because it was the first time working on a project which involved writing specifications rather than code. It was intimidating at first but with the guidance of Javier, my mentor and the entire buildpacks community I was able to write the required specification (which was up to mark of the community requirements). I considered this mentorship a success because I was able to learn something new and important i.e. writing specs (which is also an important part of developing software as writing code). 

Chaos Mesh

Monitoring Metrics about Chaos Mesh

Mentee: Chunxu Zhang

Mentor: Zhiqiang Zhou

I had a wonderful experience in these short 12 weeks. I gained a deeper understanding of Kubernetes, CRD, and observability, but also realized that I was still lacking a lot of knowledge on how to improve code structure, Linux basics, and the knowledge of container technology. Thanks to the CNCF LFX Mentorship project for providing a great platform for all of us.

Cloud Native Buildpacks

Web Redesign of Feature Comparison

Mentee: Harshita Kanal (Blog post)

Mentor: Javier Romero

“The entire journey from receiving the selection mail to finally graduating was amazing.

I had interactions with my mentor where we discussed the expectations, and incoming tasks.

It was an absolute pleasure to be around in a community of amazing developers, willing to help each other and always welcoming, learned a lot from my mentor and the community. I look forward to making even more contributions to the project.”

Thanos

Add metrics to track the progress for compaction and downsampling

Mentee: Aditi Ahuja

Mentor: Ben Ye

My mentorship was my first foray into the world of observability. The best part about the mentorship was being simultaneously challenged and guided. The bar was raised, from completing my project to taking on some stretch goals, from merely implementing working features, to doing so in an optimal manner and in accordance with the Thanos’ coding guidelines(which are very opinionated!). But in all of this, I was guided patiently and taught to overcome the shortcomings in my work, with a lot of encouragement thrown in for good measure. The guidance came not just from my mentor, but also other Thanos team members. The initial month of the mentorship provided a smooth ramping up to equip myself with some of the concepts and skills I would need for the project. Overall, the mentorship was well-structured and provided me with a concrete launch pad to start contributing to Thanos. 

OpenEBS

Enhance OpenEBS CLI with a sub-command to upgrade Jiva Volumes

Mentee: Abhishek Kumar

Mentor: Kiran Mova

“The experience was wholesome and very exciting considering the support from the mentors and team mates within the openEBS. Have been the part of several brain-storms and have learnt the best way to write code with immense amount of exposure with the Cloud-native tools, Kubernetes, CLI-Development and golang. The experience is best by far.”

Kubernetes

Improvements to Cluster API provider for GCP (CAPG)

Mentee: Sayantani Saha

Mentor: Davanum Srinivas and Carlos Panato

“I had an amazing experience being part of LFX mentorship. I have learnt so much throughout the mentorship, and also the networking was too good. Added to that I was appreciated by others from the K8s-SIGS community and so many of them. Volunteered for me to be a member of SIGS org. I feel grateful to be a part of this amazing community and want to continue with my contributions like this in the future. And a special thanks to my mentors, who has pushed me to always do better.”

Kubernetes Policy WG

KubeArmor support for Policy Report CRD

Mentee: Haardik Dharma (Blog post)

Mentor: Jim Bugwadia, Mritunjay Sharma

“LFX Mentorship was definitely a game-changer for my career. It made me fall in love with Go and Kubernetes. I worked with the Working Group – Policy and my project was to build an external adapter for KubeArmor which will receive outputs from KubeArmor and convert it to policy reports based on the Policy Report CRD. The learning and knowledge I gained over these 3 months has helped me immensely in my career, so much so that I have even started receiving job offers from companies that hire Go Developers. You can view my project work here.” 

Kyverno

Extend Kyverno test command to cover generate policies & improve test coverage

Mentee: Shubham Palriwala (blog post)

Mentor: Jim Bugwadia

“The experience to contribute to and be a part of the Kyverno community has been a great stepping stone for me. With the help of Jim, Shuting, and the entire community, I learned a lot from scratch about k8s, Kyverno, its use-case, how the world of devsecops is. To be exposed to the kubernetes sig security team during meetings, this has opened the gates for my career ahead. All of this would’ve been very difficult if it weren’t for the LFX Mentorship program to help us get started into this awesome space. The end of this program is a start for my further contributions to the cloud-native community.”

Kyverno

Scalability testing for Kyverno

Mentee: Siddharth Lal

Mentor: Shuting Zhao

“I am very thankful to my mentor Shuting Zhao, her constant help was one of the significant reasons we could complete the project. She is technically solid, and I learned many new things working alongside her! Along with this, I would also like to thank Linux Foundation & CNCF for this opportunity, it helped me to get exposure to large codebases and modern industry techniques used in software development.”

LitmusChaos

Develop/Enhance E2E test-cases for ChaosCenter

Mentee: Dhananjay Purohit (Blog post)

Mentor: Vedant Shrotria, Raj Babu Das, Soumya Ghosh Dastidar, Udit Gaurav

“Those 3 months were packed with a lot of learning, fun, challenges, and coding. I have learned a lot of things in my journey and explored many technologies that I have never faced before. I would highly recommend this program to anyone who is looking forward to stepping into the open source world and want to learn by contributing to such impactful projects.”

LitmusChaos

Develop E2E dashboard with CI/CD pipeline details and enhance litmus e2e website

Mentee: Aman Dwivedi (Blog post)

Mentor: Soumya Ghosh Dastidar

“All in all my entire LFX mentorship journey has been no less than an adventurous ride, full of excitement. I can’t thank enough my mentors for providing me the much-needed guidance and support throughout my journey. We used to have regular weekly meetings which helped me to ensure that the project is on track and there are no blockers. My heartfelt gratitude to the LitmusChaos and CNCF community who made me push my limits and deliver the project following the industry-level best practices.”

Tremor

AWS (S3) connectors

Mentee: Daksh Chauhan (Blog post)

Mentor: Matthias Wahl

“I had very positive experience from this mentorship. I learned about the OSI and feel deeply inspired by the open-source community. I got to program in my favorite language i.e. rust. I love the joyful and accommodating the Tremor community is. I had these productive 3 months which had a solid impact on my development skills and also evolved me into a joyous person. I would wish to be a mentor for a project in the future.”

Vitess

Add complete parsing support for MySQL constructs

Mentee: Ritwiz Sinha, Incoming Software Engineer at Bloomberg 

Mentor: Manan Gupta

I worked on Vitess, an open source database clustering solution for MySQL. My work involved improving the parser support in Vitess so as to support new constructs which are present in MySQL 5.7 and 8.0. I also worked on scraping tests already present in MySQL and port them to Vitess so that we could get an idea about what all do we support. Over the course of 3 months I updated the select statements, value expressions, collations and character sets in the Vitess parser.

WasmEdge

Support Wasm-Signature proposal

Mentee: Xingzi Yu

Mentor: Hung-Ying Tai, Michael Yuan and Shen-Ta Hsieh

“My experience of being a mentee in an open-source program for the first time is far better than I have expected. I’ve learned much from my mentor, Hung-Ying Tai, including various coding techniques and some basic principle for cooperating in an open-source program. WasmEdge is a nice project and people here are nice too. I hope to exploring more in Wasm and WasmEdge.”

Below is an overview of all 37 interns and their projects, which are outlined on GitHub and the LFX Platform.