Episode 174: Maintainer Month with Bob Killen & Navendu Pottekkat

Guests Bob Killen | Navendu Pottekkat Panelist Richard Littauer Show Notes Hello and welcome to Sustain! The podcast where we talk about sustaining open source for the long haul. This is a special podcast and one of several in this series for GitHub’s Maintainer Month. We’re interviewing maintainers to ask them about what their experience is of maintainership and open source. Today, we’re very excited to have two guests joining us. Our first guest is Bob Killen, who’s a Program Manager at Google, serves the Kubernetes project as a Steering Committee member and chair of the Contributor Experience Special Interest Group. Bob talks about the mentoring cohort approach the Kubernetes community has, the importance of titles, and the value of a defined contributor ladder to recognize and motivate contributors. Our next guest is Navendu Pottekkat, who’s a Maintainer of Apache APISIX, the Cloud Native API Gateway. Navendu tells us about his experience in contributing to building, scaling, and maintaining open source projects, his involvement in mentorship programs, and the importance of people focusing on balancing the code with the community aspect. Download this episode now to hear much more! Bob: [00:02:00] Bob’s role at Google encourages him to contribute and to be active in the Kubernetes community and being part of the OSPO, where he’s focused on maintaining the overall health of the project and keeping track of various services. [00:03:02] He’s been in the open source space since mid-2000s and was already working on Kubernetes before joining Google. [00:04:16] We hear about the Contributor Experience Special Interest Group, what Bob does there, and the mentoring cohort approach the Kubernetes community has to help grow people into maintainer roles. [00:07:56] Since Kubernetes avoids private Slack channels, Bob explains how he asks questions in an open place. [00:08:45] Bob finds it challenging to maintain his role in special interest groups while working full-time, as there is always an endless backlog of issue