To showcase the journeys of first-time contributors, we reached out to individuals from Apache Software Foundation (ASF) projects to learn about their initial tasks and contributions. Code contributions emerged as the most common starting point, with 92 percent of respondents indicating that code was their first-ever contribution. 

In this post, part of our #FirstASFContribution Campaign, we highlight five talented coders who have introduced new functions, features, or capabilities to enhance ASF projects, as well as some of the community members who have supported their work along the way.

Maytas Monsereenusorn – Enriching Apache Druid with the ANY Function

Maytas Monsereenusorn made his first contribution to ASF via Apache Druid, a data store designed for sub-second queries on real-time and historical data. Inspired by Druid Meetup talks in San Francisco, Maytas submitted his first pull request to implement a new ANY function that retrieves the first value found. He is grateful to Gian Merlino, Clint Wylie, Jihoon Son, and Jonathan Wei for their assistance with his first contribution.

Nuwan Jayawardene – Enhancing Apache Synapse with Environment Variable Injection

Nuwan Jayawardene started his journey with ASF through Apache Synapse, a lightweight, high-performance enterprise service bus and mediation engine. Nuwan had the opportunity to work on the Synapse project as a participant in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2021. His initial contribution involved adding environment variable injection for SOAP and WSDL endpoints. Nuwan continued his journey with ASF and became an Apache Committer in 2022. Check out his contributions in this article and pull requests: PR 54 and PR 55. Special thanks go to Isuru Udana and Vanjikumaran Sivajothy for their guidance.

Lenny Primak – Integrating Jakarta EE Modules into Apache Shiro

Lenny Primak’s first contribution was to Apache Shiro, a software security framework that provides authentication, authorization, cryptography, and session management. Lenny’s contribution involved integrating Jakarta EE modules into Shiro, a task he described as “12 years in the making.” His dedication and persistence paid off, and pull request PR 563 was successfully merged. Lenny thanks the Shiro PMC, especially Brian Demers, for their support.

Jatin Bhateja – Powering Up Apache Parquet-mr with Vectorized BytePacker Decoder

Jatin Bhateja made his first contribution to ASF with Apache Parquet-mr, a columnar storage format for Hadoop that offers efficient data storage and encoding. Jatin’s contribution involved using Java VectorAPI to vectorize the BytePacker decoder, harnessing the power of Intel architecture for significant performance gains. His pull request PR 1011 was merged earlier this year. Jatin extends thanks to the Parquet-mr PMC for their guidance and support.

Hongyue Zhang – Enhancing Apache Iceberg with Parallelism in RemoveOrphanFiles

Hongyue Zhang’s first ASF contribution was to Apache Iceberg, a high-performance format for massive analytic tables. Hongyue submitted a pull request to support parallelism in RemoveOrphanFiles, addressing data retention challenges within the Iceberg table format. You can explore Hongyue’s pull request here. Hongue gives thanks to Szehon Ho for his assistance.

The Community Over Code Ethos

The experiences of these first-time contributors exemplify the “community over code” ethos deeply embedded in ASF’s open source communities. They contributed new functions, features, and capabilities to ASF projects while collaborating with the community to help ensure the long-term stability of ASF projects. We applaud the collective efforts of these coders and recognize that the open source community’s strength lies in collaboration and support.