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.

Today we meet Jonathan Battiato, an engineer on the Cloud Native team at EDB. He was working on 2ndQuadrant’s Cloud Native team when the CloudNativePG project (then under a different name) was first conceived. His first contribution to the project must have been reported a bug, Jonathan says he’s “good at breaking things”. Most of his contributions since then have been in improving the user experience.

Even though the CloudNativePG Operator is a stable, easy-to-use, and a production-ready product, there are many aspects of the project that still require improvements and/or rewriting. Most of them are already on the roadmap. Jonathan is keen to improve the user experience for the docs. “The documentation is… a lot. Sometimes I worry one could get lost in it.” Jonathan had hoped to work on some hands-on-labs style tutorials to be published on the website, but simply hasn’t had the time to dedicate to it.

Jonathan is as a long-time member of the local Linux User Group (in Prato). While he’s been more of a lurker than an active member of any other community, he’s changing this with his involvement in the Data on Kubernetes community. Giving talks, and writing a knowledge base about benchmarking storage solutions in Kubernetes, is what earned him his DoK Ambassador status.

Jonathan got into technology because of tv shows like Ghostbusters, MacGyver, and A-Team. “I’ve always been interested in science and technology. When my best friend introduced me to Linux through the Debian project, my fate was decided. Since then, I worked as a Linux SysAdmin, a PostgreSQL Admin, and a Kubernetes Admin.” It takes a special kind of nerd to answer the question “what are you most notorious for?” with: my PostgreSQL benchmarks…

When he (finally) grows up, Jonathan wants to be an astronaut, looking for new civilizations like in Star Trek. “Earthlings are disappointing.” Present company not withstanding, I hope.

You can find Jonathan in the CloudNativePG channels on the CNCF Slack workspace, or on Mastodon, or LinkedIn.