Apache ShardingSphere Committer Meng Haoran: My open source journey continues

briefly summarize what I understand as "The Apache Way" is community, openness, love, and continuity.

———Meng Haoran

ApacheCon is the official global series of conferences of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). As a prestigious open source feast, ApacheCon has attracted much attention in the open source community and is also one of the well-known activities in the early days of the open source movement.

As early as 1998, before the establishment of ASF, ApacheCon had attracted participants at all levels to explore "tomorrow's technology" in more than 300 Apache projects and their different communities. Also in this session, developers who developed HTTPD services gathered together and decided to establish the Apache Software Foundation.

ApacheCon is held once a year, usually in Europe or North America. It is an excellent opportunity for Apache developers to communicate, discuss, and meet offline. It is also a rare occasion for sharing ideas and exciting ideas. Through hands-on practice, keynote speeches, actual case studies, training, hackathons, etc., showcase the latest development and emerging innovations of the Apache project.

This year, in order to better serve the fast-growing Apache users and contributors in the Asia-Pacific region, the ApacheCon Organizing Committee and the Apache Software Foundation are pleased to announce that the first ApacheCon online conference for the Asia-Pacific region will be held in August 2021. Held online from 6th to 8th.

In order to let everyone know more about open source and ApacheCon Asia, SegmentFault will interview some Track Chairs or conference lecturers to let you know the stories behind the preparations for the conference and the stories of these experts.

Today, what we bring to you is our interview with Apache ShardingSphere Committer Meng Haoran.

The following is the content of SegmentFault’s interview with Meng Haoran:

Meng Haoran

Hello, everyone, I am Haoran Meng, SphereEx senior java engineer, and Apache ShardingSphere Committer. Worked at JD.com, responsible for database product research and development, loves open source, and pays attention to database ecology. Currently, he is responsible for the research and development of Apache ShardingSphere distributed database middleware and the construction of open source community.

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The story of Meng Haoran’s first exposure to open source

I believe that, like most Java programmers, when I first started working, I was already in touch with and using some Apache open source projects. But at that time, there was no concept of open source, and I didn't know the meaning of open source.

Speaking of my open source journey, I would like to thank Mr. Zhang Liang, the founder of ShardingSphere. I am honored to join JD Technology's database research and development team led by Zhang Liang in January 2020 and start participating in the research and development of ShardingSphere.

ShardingSphere is a very large project with more than 100 modules. It is difficult to directly submit code to contribute from the very beginning. Under the guidance of the community, I started with some novice tasks, such as modifying documents, improving unit test coverage, code optimization, etc., while understanding the project, I became familiar with the communication methods in the community.

As I became familiar with the entire project, I then started to learn about the source code from the distributed governance module that I was good at, thinking about the direction of optimization, participating in the reconstruction of module functions, and then leading the development of certain specific functions.

In this process, my code contribution to the community and my participation in the community have been steadily increasing. Until July 3, 2020, I passed the email voting of the ShardingSphere community and officially became the Committer of the Apache ShardingSphere community. Contribute to the community with a new identity.

In May of this year, I also joined SphereEx smoothly, focusing on building an open source distributed database ecosystem based on ShardingSphere. Of course, my open source journey continues.

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When participating in open source and contributing to the Apache community, what are the personal and company gains?

For individuals, the improvement of their own technical capabilities is the most direct gain. The Apache open source project represents the most cutting-edge technology in the world. At the same time, it has high requirements for architecture, code, and even documentation. Therefore, in the process of participating in open source, you must use the highest requirements as the standard, and refactor your submitted code and documents over and over again, which is precisely polishing your own technical capabilities;

Secondly, in the process of participating in the Apache community, I also got to know many technical experts in various fields who also love open source. They love technology and are willing to share. Every time I communicate with them in the community, I have gained a lot.

For a company, participating in an open source project means being able to understand the development of related technologies in the first time, and at the same time, it can improve the company's product capabilities, and it can also find more professional technical talents from the community and save recruitment costs. In short, there are many benefits. I hope that more companies and individuals will join open source in the future and build an open source ecosystem.

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Meng Haoran understands "The Apache Way"?

Because I grew up step by step with the help of the ShardingSphere community, the way the ShardingSphere community practices "The Apache Way" is actually what I understand as "The Apache Way". With an open mind, ShardingSphere has been actively guiding and helping students who love technology and open source to join the community, and has always insisted on being community-driven to continue to promote the healthy development of the project. To briefly summarize what I understand as "The Apache Way" is community, openness, love and sustainability.

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Meng Haoran and ApacheCon Asia

My track is middleware, and the topic of the speech is "The Way of Database Governance in Apache ShardingSphere Distributed Database Middleware Ecosystem". As one of the core functions of Apache ShardingSphere, database governance provides solutions for data consistency and service high availability in a distributed environment; this sharing will bring you the best practices of Apache ShardingSphere in distributed database governance. It will introduce its architecture and implementation principles as well as the planning of future functions from many aspects such as service governance and data governance.

I hope that after listening to my sharing, you will have a preliminary understanding of the overall architecture and design ideas of the latest version of ShardingSphere, as well as an overall understanding of ShardingSphere’s core functions such as data fragmentation and read-write separation. Through in-depth analysis of ShardingSphere’s service governance , Data governance and other aspects of the architecture and implementation principles, understand how to use ShardingSphere to provide data services in a distributed environment.

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Join us in ApacheCon Asia!

ApacheCon's first Asian conference, a technical feast consisting of 140+ conferences, friends who love technology and like open source must not miss it. Welcome to sign up!

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About Apache ShardingSphere

Apache ShardingSphere is an ecosystem composed of a set of open source distributed database solutions. It is composed of three products, JDBC, Proxy, and Sidecar (planned) that can be deployed independently and support mixed deployment. They all provide standardized data horizontal expansion, distributed transactions, and distributed governance functions, and can be applied to various diversified application scenarios such as Java isomorphism, heterogeneous languages, and cloud native.

As the commercial company behind ShardingSphere, SphereEx has been adhering to the concepts of open source, sharing, ecology, and platform, committed to cutting-edge technological innovation in the data field, and building a new type of distributed data infrastructure. The concepts of "Database Plus" and "Database Mesh" first proposed are aimed at creating new data usage concepts, improving the level of enterprise data application, and easily coping with complex data application scenarios.

Currently, SphereEx is recruiting excellent talents. Friends who pursue technology and love open source are welcome to join SphereEx by submitting their resumes through [e-mail] to start a full-time open source journey.

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ApacheCon Asia full agenda address:
https://www.apachecon.com/acasia2021/zh/sessions.html

Register address now:
https://hopin.com/events/apachecon-asia-2021