Apache Pulsar adds 2 PMC members: Lin Lin and Chen Hang

About Apache Pulsar

Apache Pulsar is the top-level project of the Apache Software Foundation. It is the next-generation cloud-native distributed message flow platform. It integrates messaging, storage, and lightweight functional computing. It uses a separate architecture design for computing and storage to support multi-tenancy, persistent storage, Multi-computer room and cross-regional data replication, with strong consistency, high throughput, low latency and high scalability and other streaming data storage characteristics.

2 new PMC members in the Chinese community: Lin Lin and Chen Hang

In August of this year, after PMC's recommendation and voting, two Committers who made outstanding contributions in the Apache Pulsar community were nominated as PMC members. They are former BIGO Staff Engineer Chen Hang[1] and Tencent Cloud senior engineer Lin Lin[2].

Those who follow the Apache Pulsar Chinese community must often see two new PMC members in the Chinese community. Among the code contributors listed in the Pulsar weekly report alone, two of them are almost absent and continue to participate in the polishing of Pulsar. Let us get to know these two "old acquaintances" together.

(The order of introduction below is in the order of PMC member's official announcement time)

Open source + middleware lover Lin Lin

Lin Lin is a Level 10 engineer of Tencent Cloud Middleware. Before contacting Pulsar, Lin Lin was an open source and middleware enthusiast. She has been in the open source community all year round. She likes to study the source code and design ideas of various middleware, such as message queues, RPC frameworks, and distributed transactions. Later in the work, because I was responsible for the message queue related work in the middleware team, I came into contact with Apache Pulsar when doing related research. Lin Lin contributed more than 160 features in Pulsar Broker, Function, Schema, IO, etc., and participated in 5 PIPs (major improvements).

Lin Lin's pulse "heart"

Lin Lin said in a previous conversation that he believed that Pulsar has great potential for development and its design ideas are elegant and avant-garde, so he began to understand and gradually participate in the Apache Pulsar project. Different from the nervous first PR of others, his first PR was hand-held while delving into the source code of Pulsar to solve simple issues in the warehouse, which opened the first step towards becoming a Pulsar PMC member.

Since Lin Lin studied the source code at the beginning of the contribution, there were relatively few domestic introductory materials, so in order to lower the threshold of Pulsar source code understanding and make it more convenient for developers and users in the Pulsar Chinese community, Lin Lin began to prepare Pulsar Chinese books, sharing his deployment and use , Pulsar operation and maintenance experience accumulated during debugging.

Lin Lin's PMC style

In addition to active code contributions, Lin Lin's enthusiasm for the community is also one of the reasons why he was elected as a PMC member. Lin Lin actively participates in community activities and shares his experience with the community. You can witness the demeanor of this Pulsar PMC member at Pulsar Summit Asia 2020, Apache Pulsar Meetup Shenzhen Station, and ApacheCon Asia 2021.

Lin Lin's speech video through train:

• Apache Pulsar's practice in Tencent Cloud-stability building on the cloud [3]
• Apache Pulsar's high availability practice in Tencent Cloud[4]
• Pulsar dynamic expansion and contraction combat [5]

"Stepping on the pit" pioneer Chen Hang

Chen Hang used to be a BIGO Staff Engineer. He introduced Apache Pulsar to the BIGO messaging platform and integrated it with upstream and downstream systems such as Flink, ClickHouse and other internal systems for real-time recommendation and analysis. During BIGO, Chen Hang focused on Pulsar performance adjustment, new function development and Pulsar ecosystem integration. Its main contributions to Pulsar include Pulsar Node balance, performance tuning, KoP, Pulsar Flink connector SQL, etc.

PMC being "ground in"

Share a little fun fact: Pulsar community developers once praised Chen Hang’s technical blog post "The Performance Tuning of Apache Pulsar in BIGO" in the chat (please refer to the following post for the content of the blog post). When the editor stated that this is the result of BIGO’s messaging team’s efforts to polish the product, the community partners said: “This is not polishing, this is polished in!” Indeed, it is the BIGO messaging team that is dedicated to participating in Pulsar and its As for the adjustment and development of the surrounding ecology, a Pulsar PMC member and a KoP (Kafka-on-Pulsar) maintainer have been produced ("milled in") in the team.

Goodbye Kafka, throw in Pulsar

During BIGO, the Kafka system at that time required a lot of time and energy for operation and maintenance, and frequent alarms led to overtime work until early in the morning. The team decided to launch Pulsar after investigation and stress testing. Although the early version of Pulsar also had some incompatibility issues, the elegant infrastructure of Pulsar was enough to solve the Kafka problems faced by the team at that time, including many customizations of Kafka and other messaging systems that are now taking the path of Pulsar.

In the process of using Pulsar, Chen Hang continued to participate in the community, solve the problems encountered, and gradually became a leader in experience sharing, and also grew into a member of Committer and PMC. The new PMC also said: Welcome everyone to catch bugs!

Chen Hang's experience sharing blog through train:

• From Kafka to Pulsar, BIGO creates a real-time messaging system
• The performance tuning of Apache Pulsar in BIGO (Part 1)
• The performance tuning of Apache Pulsar in BIGO (Part 2)

Apache Pulsar: a loving community

At the request of the two new PMC members, I would like to thank the community and developers such as Guo Sijie and Zhai Jia for their support, and I would like to thank Pulsar PMC member Li Penghui for their great help in the process of their contributions.

From the initial contact with the Pulsar community to the involvement of the Pulsar community, the two PMC members witnessed the friendly atmosphere of the community through personal experience. After becoming members of Committer and PMC, the two are also using their own strength to continue the community culture of love, mutual assistance and friendship.

Thanks to the two new PMCs for their continuous contributions to the project and the community, congratulations again! Through continuous contributions, continue to "win authority". This is also a manifestation of the "Apache Way" followed by the Apache Software Foundation. We look forward to more and more Apache Pulsar contributors gaining the due community reputation and growth. Refer to the following, starting from the first PR, let's build a friendly Pulsar community together!

Join the Apache Pulsar community

Participating in open source can be recognized by the company and the community inside and outside, and make friends with like-minded people from various fields; at the same time, it can also increase personal influence and promote personal development. Participating in open source is not exclusive to code farmers. Community, documentation and other aspects can allow everyone to play their skills.

As a global open source project, as of now, Apache Pulsar has 440+ contributors, 9.5K+ Star, and 2.4K+ Fork. We have provided you with a guide for participation, and welcome more and more small partners to help the continuous development and advancement of the Apache Pulsar project.

Apache Pulsar official contribution guide [6]

Related Reading
• Fu Rui, Function Mesh Development Engineer: User-Developer-Committer Road
• Good news | KoP development engineer Xu Yunze is selected as Apache Pulsar Committer

Reference link

[1] Chen Hang: https://github.com/hangc0276
[2] Lin Lin: https://github.com/315157973
[3] Apache Pulsar's practice in Tencent Cloud-stability building on the cloud: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1tQ4y1Z7zh
[4] Apache Pulsar's high availability practice in Tencent Cloud: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Gf4y1i7Vk
[5] Pulsar dynamic expansion and contraction combat: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1ay4y1G7oq?p=4
[6] Apache Pulsar official contribution guide: http://pulsar.apache.org/en/contributing/