This Summer we participated in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s mentorship platform LFX for the first time. We thought it was a great experience, which is why we’re participating again in the cohort that is starting in September.

Curious about our work with Ying? Read on!

Summer 2025: Declarative Management of Foreign Data Wrappers

Ying Zhu (EdwinaZhu on GitHub), a student at Carnegie Mellon University, was immediately drawn to CloudNativePG when she was looking for CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation) projects to contribute to, since she’s already involved in the PostgreSQL and Kubernetes communities.

Ying worked on implementing “Declarative Management of PostgreSQL Foreign Data Wrappers”. The project aimed to extend the CloudNativePG operator to support declarative configuration of foreign data wrappers through its Database custom resource.

On mentoring

Four CloudNativePG maintainers, Gabriele Bartolini, Leonardo Cecchi, Marco Nenciarini, and Armando Ruocco, supported Ying in her journey.

Gabriele shares how Ying worked hard, studied diligently, sought feedback, and grew visibly throughout the program. “Her curiosity, passion, and initiative stood out, and I hope that the psychologically safe environment we tried to create played a key role in her progress.” Gabriele is confident Ying will continue to make valuable contributions to the project and the wider community.

Reflecting on the collaboration, Leonardo said:

“She is not only a skilled engineer who writes beautiful code, but she also brought many new, innovative ideas—and even sparked a few in us. Working with new people is always an enriching experience for everyone!”

Leonardo knows the value of mentorship from both perspectives. Professionally, he has helped colleagues transition into new roles. Personally, he experienced the impact of early guidance when his father taught him programming as a child and continued to support him throughout his career.

Looking back, there’s one piece of advice Leonardo wishes he had received early on—well, two, actually. First: the true purpose of software is to help people. Second: always weigh the value of the code you write—how much it helps—against the effort it takes for you and your team, both now and in the long-term maintenance of that code. A topic of much discussion in the CloudNativePG Slack.

What’s next?

Ying has done an outstanding job with her initial mentorship commitment, and the patch she has provided is almost ready to be merged—after the release of version 1.27.0 the pull request will be incorporated into v1.28.

We’re so happy to work with Ying that we’ve decided to extend the mentorship project (which ends on Aug 29) to its next phase, focusing on foreign servers with issue [Feature]: Declarative support for foreign servers #8063, which will presumably enter 1.28 too.

More to come!