Continuing in our Meet the Maintainer series, we have Sangram Rath. Sangram is a maintainer of Meshery CI. In this interview, we get to know Sangram a little better and learn about his journey as an open source project maintainer in the Layer5 community.
Mia: Sangram, thank you for taking the time to join me today. While many people, both within and beyond the Layer5 community, have witnessed the impact of your contributions, they may not know the story behind who you are and how you became a maintainer. Could you share your journey with us? How did you discover the Layer5 community, and what inspired you to stay?
Sangram: "My work requires me to design solutions for cloud and cloud-native platforms like Kubernetes, OpenShift, AWS, Azure, and Google. And to design, visualize and deploy them, I am always exploring different tools, mostly open-source, which is when I stumbled upon Meshery, the community, and Layer5, the company behind it. Kanvas (then MeshMap), the collaborative designing and visualization extension of Mesery, is what I was mostly interested about. I soon found out that Meshery was extensive, young and provided a lot of opportunities to contribute with minimal red taping. And so it has been over 2 years with the community so far."
Mia: You're a Meshery CI maintainer. What does being a Meshery CI maintainer mean to you?
Sangram: "Being a maintainer is generally about empowering contributors to be successful and in a project like Meshery which has many sub-projects and numerous extensions, it involves balancing security and stability with agility. This is achieved through automation and observability of various steps using CI pipelines. Apart from contributing to CI, I also contribute to docs and security."
Mia: Have you worked with any other open source project? How does Layer5 compare?
Sangram: "While I did start contributing to OpenStack many years back, I couldn’t spend much time then due to work and other commitments. Meshery (and Layer5) in many ways is the first open source project I got to meaningfully contribute."
Mia: Layer5 has a number of active, open source projects. You’ve been consistently contributing to a few of them. Which one(s) are you currently focusing on?
Sangram: "Meshery continues to be the primary project I work on along with Layer5 Cloud."
Mia: What’s the coolest Meshery CI demo you have done/seen?
Sangram: "Deploying the complete discourse stack using Meshery Kanvas has to be one of my favorites since I worked on creating it. The design deploys all components of the stack including persistent storage."
Mia: What is your favorite feature or aspect of the CI/CD pipeline in this project, and why?
Sangram: "The use of GitHub actions for our workflows is my favourite mostly because of its simplicity and tight integration with our VCS, GitHub. GitHub actions provide all of the CI/CD capabilities Meshery needs at the moment like unified identity, pipeline security, native event-driven approach, the availability of community actions that can be simply references and zero infrastructure overhead for runners. The result is a faster feedback loop for the developers."
Mia: What is your hot tip for working with Meshery that others may not know?
Sangram: "Don’t rush to pick an issue and contribute, especially if you are new to open-source contributions and the frameworks/technologies/tools/languages Meshery uses. Explore Meshery, Kanvas and other related extensions to understand how it works. Through this process read the docs, attend weekly meetings and get involved with the community. This helps you find your foot and get clarity on contributions."
Mia: Where do you see opportunities for contributors to actively engage and contribute to the CI pipeline within the Meshery and Layer5 community?
Sangram: "CI pipelines are in many ways the first reviewer contributors encounter and there’s always opportunities to make this experience better. As of this time, there are opportunities to contribute to the BATS (Bash Automated Testing System) tests we use for mesheryctl (CLI) edge cases, improve reusability of GitHub actions, consolidate and/or decouple GitHub actions, improve readability of the CI workflows, and implement deeper security measures into the CI pipelines in line with DevSecOps practices."
Mia: What’s the emoji you use most often? Do you prefer movies or books? Would you consider yourself a morning person or a night owl? Over the past year, what’s a project or accomplishment you’re particularly proud of?
Sangram: "I am not a big fan of emojis but I definitely end up using quite a bit in my interactions with the community on slack. Check mark, +1, thumbs up, and thank you are some common ones. Books first and then movies. "
Mia: Do you have any advice for individuals hopeful to become Meshery CI contributors or potentially maintainers?
Sangram: Focus on making high-quality contributions that add value to the project, whether they are big or small. Take time to understand the ecosystem, stay consistent, and contribute in ways that help both the project and the people working in it.
Mia: In other words, whether your contribution is big or small, it sounds like aiming for high-quality contributions that add value to the projects is key.
Sangram: "Yes, but it is mutually beneficial as well. Contributions also provide value to contributors in many ways. They are a public proof of their skills, provide access to great mentorship, present networking opportunities, scholarships and sometimes even result in career growth through jobs. Projects like Meshery offer paid internships through LFX and GSoC which adds a lot of value to students and early-career professionals."
The Meshery project moves at an impressive pace thanks to maintainers like Sangram. Be like Sangram. Join the Layer5 Slack and say "hi".
