Hello! My name is Shedrack Akintayo - A Devops Engineer and Developer Advocate. I grew up with 3 siblings in a small town in the northern part of Nigeria, I really enjoyed it there and how close knit the community there was. Everybody wanted to either be a musician or a footballer at the time while I was growing up, but I found software development interesting because I had always fancied computers and when my dad got me a laptop that changed everything.

Currently, I work as a Community Manager for eBPF and Cilium at Isovalent. On the side, I run a non-profit called DevRel Community Africa. The community is meant to help foster and grow the presence of developer relations in Africa.

My journey into open source

I've been hearing about open source since the start of my career, thanks to the folks in the tech ecosystem in Nigeria talking about it. That propelled me to check out projects I could contribute to. There was a funny moment that I still laugh at every time I remember - I opened an issue in one of the Sugar Labs repos and said their design wasn’t great and I’ll send a PR with an update. I was met with a very strict response because it didn’t make sense to do that but I was still navigating the open source space as a first time contributor so I was naive.

A major challenge I faced was confidence. I didn’t think I was qualified enough or know enough to contribute to open source but I realized that it didn’t matter because the highest thing that can happen is your PR not getting accepted - nothing else! It doesn’t take away anything from me. If it gets rejected, we go again!

I currently maintain the goignore project. I was learning golang and wanted to try out my hands at solidifying my knowledge. I noticed that i had to always manually create a .gitignore file for every single time I created a new project, so I decided to automate this process with goignore and thought it would make sense to also open source the project so that other people learning golang can also contribute. In addition, I'm a contributor to Cilium also.

My advice to software developers is that at every stage in your career, you should contribute to open source. It helps increase your skill level, allow you collaborate with people from various aspects of life and most importantly, it enables you to build things that might be useful to people. Just start doing what you want to do even though you have no plan. Doers run the world and you should make it a habit. Nothing is more satisfying than seeing people solve problems with a tool you built/contributed to it’s development.

Open source has created some of the most useful tools in the industry, we should do the very least to carry on the culture.

Open source has played a huge impact in my immediate community. I’ve seen people get incredible opportunities in their careers because of their contributions to open source. For the world, Linux is one of the most important piece of software in the history of computing. The project is open source and we’ve seen a lot of important aspects of the world today that is powered by Linux. This alone attest to the great impact of open source in the world.

I’m excited about the cloud native space recently, I’m trying to understand how the infrastructure that powers a good number of applications work.

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