My Progress Into Apache Cassandra

Hi Everyone, Last week I was looking at possible issues to attack for Apache Cassandra. From those selected, I decided to look into writing documentation as my first issue. The reason behind this is because it will allow me to build confidence by getting over that first fear of making my first pull request, it will allow me to understand the architecture and codebase of the system better, and it will help the community.

The way I started solving this issue was by reading about the architecture of the system and looking at the codebase to see which areas of the code did what. Apache Cassandra is a distributed database, which means lots of networking and concurrency in the code. I knew this going in, because I wanted to learn about how a distributed system is built. That is why I chose this project. But there is also a less forgiving learning curve.

Having said that, I have been learning pretty fast about how concurrency in a distributed system works and I am becoming more confident in reading the codebase.

I also have some friends interested in contributing to open source as well and we have formed a team. We all agree that learning how a distributed system is built is the first important thing if we want to be able to make meaningful contributions to the project. We have all read a variety of resources and have come together to share them and to get more comfortable with how the code works.

I think I now understand enough about the architecture to begin writing the documentation by next weekend.

I also saw the General Manager of the Board of Directors of the Open Source Initiative speak at my school this week. I did not understand how many opportunities they were in open source as a career and how highly sought after of a skill it is for employers. That was exciting to hear.