Building and maintaining an open source project takes a village. In a mini-series on this blog we would like to highlight the work of our maintainers, component owners, and members of the larger community.

Floor Drees (floord on GitHub) is a Principal Program Manager at EDB. She joined the company earlier this year, but has been active in the PostgreSQL community for several years. Day to day she works with, and in the open source community.

“I must have first heard of CloudNativePG when I was still working at an EDB competitor, when they did a research of the different Kubernetes operators available.” Since, she’s met several of the project’s maintainers at events - certainly at KubeCon Europe this April there was a high concentration of them in host city London! These days, Floor gets to work with the project’s maintainers directly.

My contributions to the project are mostly in communication and community. I talk to end-users and write about their use case, I find events for us to speak at, and I interview people for this series!

One question we like to ask is: if you had all the time/skills/money in the world, what would you most like to change about CloudNativePG? Floor’s answer is this: “I’d like to onboard more contributors to the project and make sure they feel enabled to take on more impactful roles. And also just for everyone to get a chance to meet the other members. I’m trying with the idea of organizing a contributor summit around PGDay Napoli in September, since so many of our maintainers are based in Italy anyway.

What first got Floor into technology was her blog. To bend the WordPress beast to her will, she had to learn just enough PHP to copy and paste code snippets onto her ftp server. She got really into open source when she started learning Rails and Ruby. “I found a mistake in a Rails Girls guide, and when I found a solution a colleague suggested I could fix the guide so that the next person wouldn’t get stuck like I did. I could help people that easily? I was hooked!”

Floor has been active in the Rails (Girls) community, in DevOps, as a DevOpsDays Amsterdam organizer and DevOpsDays Core member and Co-chair, and in various open source communities. Most recently, and perhaps notably, in PostgreSQL. Floor is a PostgreSQL Code of Conduct Committee member, Diversity Committee member, and PGDay Lowlands organizer. Floor isn’t new to the Kubernetes ecosystem either. In 2019 she helped organize the first Kubernetes Community Days, in Amsterdam.

Thinking about what she wants to be or do when she grows up, Floor answers: “either I’ll run a retreat for tech people in Norway, with lots of animals, or I’ll head up an Open Source Program Office somewhere interesting.” Or perhaps both?

If you wanted to get in touch with Floor, you can find her in the CloudNativePG channels on the CNCF Slack workspace, or on Bluesky, Mastodon, or LinkedIn. You can follow the CloudNativePG project on Bluesky and Mastodon too!