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.

This week the spotlight shines on Ying Zhu (EdwinaZhu on GitHub), student at Carnegie Mellon University, graduating next year (if all goes well, of course). In June 2024 Ying graduated from Nanjing University a Bachelor of Science (Computer Science).

Ying joined the CloudNativePG project as a mentee through the LFX program. LFX Mentorship is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation mentorship platform that spans across the CNCF projects. More than 190 mentees have been accepted since the programs started in 2019, participating in 96 mentorship programs. Ying will be working with Gabriele Bartolini, Leonardo Cecchi, Marco Nenciarini, and Armando Ruocco. When browsing CNCF projects to contribute to, CloudNativePG’s focus on Postgres and Kubernetes immediately caught her interest since she’s already involved in those communities.

She’s currently working on implementing declarative support for managing PostgreSQL Foreign Data Wrappers (FDWs) through the Database custom resource. “First I’m focused on learning and understanding the system deeply. It’s still in progress, but I’m learning a lot and enjoying every step!”

Ying is especially interested in areas like extensibility, observability, and making it easier for users to declaratively manage PostgreSQL features. We’re looking forward to more contributions to the project in those areas by Ying!

What first got Ying in technology was playing Minecraft. “I was the leader of the Minecraft club during my undergraduate years. It was so much fun to program mods and set up multiplayer servers for others to enjoy. This led me to pursue a path in programming technology.”

After graduation, Ying would love to work as an infrastructure engineer, on scalable and reliable systems. And keep contributing to open-source tools that power modern cloud-native applications, as that’s her passion!

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