Continuing in our Meet the Maintainer series, we have Hussaina Begum, Staff Engineer at VMware. Hussaina is a maintainer of Meshery CLI. In this interview, we get to know Hussaina a little better and learn about her journey as an open source project maintainer and with Layer5 community.
Hussaina, thank you for joining me today. Many people inside and outside of the Layer5 Community have seen the effects of your contributions, but may not know the backstory as to who Hussaina is and how you arrived at your maintainer role. Indulge us. How did you discover the Layer5 community? What made you stay?
I wanted to contribute to open source for a long time and finally made up my mind to get into the world of open source during Hacktoberfest 2020. Meshery was one of the projects I contributed to and it had a well defined structure and meetings for everyone - Newcomers call, Developers call, Websites (Frontend development) call, CI/CD call and Community call, etc. Also, the MeshMate program where the existing Meshery maintainers help the newest members to get started. Meshery project aligned with my networking background and my goal towards backend development using golang. Last but not the least, lighthearted jokes from Lee during the development call.
You’re a Meshery Maintainer and have been for some long time now. What does being a Meshery maintainer mean to you?
Lots of learning. Though I started out small in Meshery with a documentation PR, Meshery community had so much knowledge to share. With their support, I could start on `mesheryctl` UX improvements. I have seen many bright engineers implementing great features in Meshery. I draw inspiration from them and try to pay it forward by helping new members of the community.
Layer5 projects 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?Psst. Also, which one’s your favorite? I won’t tell.
I have contributed to mesheryctl, meshkit and meshery.io projects so far, It's hard to pick one.
What’s the coolest Meshery demo you have done/seen?
The Meshery Playground is an awesome system and a something of a hidden gem in cloud native ecosystem. I also remember the `mesheryctl perf` CLI demo I have done on the Meshery office hours from one of the Kubecon events and am proud of this. Kudos to all the contributors of `mesheryctl` command development and refactors.
What do you anticipate will be Meshery’s biggest announcement this year?
Meshery project moving to Incubating status! 🙂
What is your favorite Meshery CLI command?
mesheryctl system start
What is your hot tip for working with Meshery that others may not know?
Use Slack effectively and leverage discuss forum, talk to MeshMates and maintainers, they are all ears to the issues you face while starting out.
What are some personal goals for the next year with respect to the Meshery and the Layer5 community?
Work on the long pending `system config` CLI improvements and contribute to other Meshery projects.
Interesting. Do expand on that: What do you think Meshery could offer in addition to what it already does?
Labs designed in a way that they work with local resources.
Your most often used emoji? Your preference: movie or book? Morning person or night owl? What have you worked on in the past six months that you’re particularly proud of?
eyes emoji. My preference is a book compared to a movie. I am a Night Owl w.r.t. work, however, I use my early mornings for my fitness goals. I have not been active lately, however removing dependency on CLIs in `mesheryctl system config` would be something I would consider a good milestone item for me.
The cloud native ecosystem moves quickly. Keeping up with all the developments can be challenging. How do you stay up-to-date?
I like listening to kubernetes podcasts and I follow the internal slack channels for upstream activities at VMware. Also, attending the local KCD events helped me understand the latest developments across various k8s projects. Being a program committee member has given me good understanding of developments across a specific technology area, let it be security and identity area or the world of service meshes.
Do you have any advice for individuals hopeful to become Layer5 contributors or potentially maintainers?
Show up and attend the meetings which align with your expertise and areas you would like to learn or contribute to. Make use of the Meshmates and Meshery slack and discuss forums are pretty active and everyone is eager to help.
The Meshery project moves at an impressive pace thanks to maintainers like Hussaina. Be like Hussaina. Join the Layer5 Slack and say “hi".
