Floor Drees

May 21, 2025 • 2 minutes

Contributor Spotlight:

Building and maintaining and 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.

Today it’s my great pleasure to introduce Francesco Canovai, my colleage at EDB. Francesco is a Senior Software Development Engineer, living in Prato, Italy. No point asking when he first found out about CloudNativePG: he was in the room when/where the project started! The first commit with his name on it is the initial suite of end-to-end tests.

One dream he has for the project is to rework the tests so they are driven by a single unified configuration file, instead of the Frankenstein approach in current use entailing GH actions, Makefiles, shell scripts,… If only there were unlimited hours in the day!

Francesco got into technology in the first place playing videogames (of the rpg and grand strategy genre). At 15 he was sure he wanted to study computer science, and in his early twenties he really wanted to teach maths. It’s never too late to switch, Francesco, I don’t think the world is saturated for math teachers!

Today what he’s really interested in, is the human side of tech and open source: “It amazes me to see where things go when multiple people work in the same general direction, even if each one’s end goal is different”.

If you wanted to get in touch with Francesco, you can find him in the CloudNativePG channels on the CNCF Slack workspace, or on Bluesky, Mastodon, or LinkedIn.