Staff post by Ihor Dvoretskyi
As we bring 2021 to a close, we look back at an incredibly full and rewarding experience with the CNCF internship programs through Google Summer of Code (GSoC), Google Season of Docs (GSoD), LFX, and Outreachy.
The number of interns CNCF projects have hosted has grown massively over the last five years, going from a total of eight interns in 2017 to over 100 in 2021. We anticipate that this number will continue to grow as CNCF hosts an increasing number of projects.
In 2021 alone, CNCF has hosted 86 interns through LFX, 16 through GSoC, and one each through GSoD and Outreachy. One of the best ways to build an open source community is by mentoring new contributors and we have seen first-hand the benefits that this has brought to our own ecosystem.
Thanks to these internships, many developers have gained the skills and relationships necessary to not only become avid open source contributors, but also secure jobs within the community. Here are just a few of the many success stories throughout our mentorship and internship programs:
- Matei David: Matei was introduced to CNCF through his internship with Linkerd and since then has been a enthusiastic member of the CNCF community – having started as a software engineer at Bouyant.
- Goutham Veeramachaneni: A former intern who went on to become a maintainer for Prometheus and Cortex — and a GSoC mentor himself!
- Andreas Zimmerer: A graduate student in the department of computer science at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), Germany. This spring (2021), he contributed a major part of the new coprocessor framework to TiKV under the LFX Mentorship Program together with his mentors Andy Lok and Alex Chi.
Many more stories from CNCF interns can be found on the blog.
Additionally, join us on Wednesday, January 12th at 7-10:30am EST and 10-1:30pm EST for the LFX Mentorship Showcase! LFX Mentorship program to showcase the work they completed during their session term. Join on January 12 to hear from 29 graduated mentees of the Linux Kernel, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Open Mainframe Project, RISC-V, Hyperledger, and LF Networking mentorship programs as they share the specific projects they worked on during their mentorship, highlighting the contributions they made. Register for free!
The cloud native community is a diverse, welcoming, and inspiring community full of opportunities for contributors at all levels. If you are interested in joining CNCF through a mentorship or internship, have a look at the CNCF mentoring initiatives on Github and think about submitting for open programs!