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.

Gabriele Quaresima (gabriele-wolfox on GitHub) is a Staff Software Engineer at EDB, where he builds products on top of CloudNativePG. When he joined the company, he immediately started to work with the CloudNativePG team. The open source operator and the closed source ones running on top of it represent his learning path and entry point to Kubernetes and the PostgreSQL world.

Gabriele now feels at home in the PostgreSQL and the Kubernetes communities. “I attended several PGDays and KCD / CND (Kubernetes Community Days / Cloud Native Days) events as a speaker and attendee both, and I really enjoyed it!”

His first contribution to CloudNativePG was feat: customize labels and annotations for the service account #1105, regarding customization of labels and annotations for the service account. But reviewing PRs opened by others has been the main way Gabriele has contributed to the project - at the same time it has been the thing that contributed most to his own development as well.

Given a magic wand, the one thing Gabriele would like to improve is the project adopting tools like modernize and new linters to improve the codebase.

How he got interested in technology is a familiar story. “I started playing with my Commodore 64 at 5 years old. I spent at least 1 to 2 hours in front of a monitor from an early age on.” Gabriele then started using Linux at University, and discovered the world of open source. His dream however was to become a writer and win the Nobel Prize, so exactly how he got into software engineering is fuzzy.

“I have always loved doing nerdy stuff, like playing board games, attending World Championship of sudoku and logic puzzles, but I guess playing saxophones and flutes is currently the hobby I am wrapped up in.”

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