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.

Jaime Silvela (jsilvela on GitHub), is an experienced software developer and system builder, and a component owner for the CloudNativePG project. If you’ve ever visited cloudnative-pg.io (spoiler: you have now), you’ve seen his work. Jaime is currently on a sabbatical of sorts, after working at EDB from 2021 to 2025, first as a Senior developer, then as a Principal.

When he started at EDB, the operator (then called CNP) had not yet been made open source. “I was so lucky to land in the team building CloudNativePG.” His first real contribution was adding the report command for the kubectl plugin. Other significant ones were declarative roles and tablespaces, documentation, and creating Ciclops.

“CloudNativePG already does most of what I need; it’s what I’ll use in any project where I have a choice.” It’s not the project that needs to change, says Jaime. What he most wants applies to Kubernetes, and only by refraction to CNPG: “I would like to see more consolidation and refinement in the K8s ecosystem. There is too much complexity right now, and at the same time, I see this careless attitude of just deploy this manifest on your K8s cluster that reminds me of … NPM.”

Like many in his generation, from a young age Jaime was attracted to computers, which still felt arcane and unexplored. “I have fond memories of my family’s Commodore VIC-20. But it was not until reading Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs in my early twenties that I thought of writing code for a living.” That book also motivated him to move to the US for graduate school.

To the question what he wants to be when he grows up, Jaime answers: “I just turned 50, and you don’t find so many developers of that age. But I intend to keep writing code; I have more contributions to make!” Even if these days there’s a lot of hype around generative AI / LLM tools, Jaime is betting and hoping that when the dust settles, there will still be a big need for human software developers. “Do not obey in advance!” We know who to go to battle with when the singularity comes.

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