Tale of getting selected for LFX mentorship
Hii, After an almost 1-year break, I’m writing my third blog the last one I wrote was on “How to make your first pull request on GitHub” and I still remember I was the time when I started learning about open-source and was so excited about it and wanted to share my experience with everyone.
After reading the title you might have got the gist of what this blog is going to be about, I’m going to share how I was rejected twice for the LFX mentorship and got selected in the third attempt.
It all started way back in the month of May 2021, when I was randomly watching youtube videos on coding like most of the naive students do. I stumble upon one of the videos which were related to opensource and yeah it was from Kunal Kushwaha after that I was the hook to that channel and watched most of the videos related to open-source and It was the first time I came to know about LFX mentorship and GSOC(Google summer of code).
LFX mentorship program happens 3 times a year. You can go through the timeline for more details. I was applying for the Summer Term and it was just 2 days before the deadline I came to know about this program.LFX mentorship has many projects and most of them are from CNCF, Open MainFrame, or Linux kernel. I was targeting for CNCF project as I was kind of aware of Kubernetes and Docker (though I think at that time I was just knowing about these terms and was not knowing what exactly it is). After going through some of the CNCF projects I saw that most of the projects were in Go programming. At first, I thought I should not apply as I was not knowing any of the required skills but after having a conversation with Bart Farrell I applied.
After 15 days results were out and It was what I expected
I already expected that I will not be selected but one good thing happened. I started learning more about CNCF, Kubernetes, and Docker. I joined the k8s slack community, the community is awesome and everyone is ready to help you.
Fast forward 3 months, now it is August and I was working as a Technical writer intern at Cloudyuga where I was learning a lot about Kubernetes and Docker. Now it was the Fall Term for the LFX mentorship and I applied as I thought I have some exposure to the required skill and I might get selected.
This time result was something that I didn’t expect
After not getting selected for the second time I was demotivated and thought of giving up and not applying for the program again. But after going through some of the selected candidate profiles I realized that just knowing about the technology will not get you selected. You need to interact with the project maintainers and solve some “good first issues” for the project you are looking to apply. This will help you to know the project better and increase your chances of getting selected. So, I started working on the Kyverno project as I find it interesting and did solve some “good first issues” . The kyverno maintainers are awesome they really help me to get my first PR merged.
Now it’s October 2021 and we have NA KubeCon. I applied for the scholarship to get the virtual pass for the conference and yes I was selected and was excited to join. There I came to know about Bugbash, after going through the project participating I saw that kyverno was also there as I was already familiar with this project so I thought of participating in the competition.
The competition was for 4 days. For the first 3 days, my ranking was going up and down but on the last day I decided to smash as many bugs I can, I totally loose upon time until my mom came to me and ask why are you still wake up and I saw that it was 4:00 am . On the next day, I saw that I was on the top of the leaderboard and yes I WON!
Fast forward to February 2022, the application for the Spring Term was open and I started looking at all the projects that were participating. I came to know about KubeArmor and this time I didn’t do the mistakes that I did earlier. I interacted with the community for setting up the project for development and also started solving some “good first issues” on the projects.
And this time it happened and I was selected 😲
I was excited and told my parents about this there were very happy.
I did like to give a huge shout-out to Kunal Kushwaha for all the great work he is doing for the community. You can check out his youtube channel to know more about all the awesome content he is building. I think it was his Open-Source video where it all started from.
Conclusion
If you are still reading this, thank you!
To everyone out there if you are struggling with anything and thinking of giving up. I dare you not to, you never know what can happen next.
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