How to become on a Apache Hadoop committer

by Marcos Ortiz

A well described message from Todd Lipcon, Software Engineer at Cloudera on the Apache Hadoop General Mailing list explained how to become on a committer of the project.
 
 The first action that you have to take is to review the documentation for new committers of the community site. There, you will find all the necessary information to do this.

The Todd’s thoughts are:

  • Do they have good technical skills in general, and also demonstrate good understanding of some part of our specific codebase? (in other words, can they effectively review and commit new contributor’s work without introducing bad code or bugs)
  • Do they know their limitations? (eg knowing when it’s better to let another committer review a patch because they don’t know the possible ramifications of the change well enough)
  • Are they a team player who can compromise even if it means some extra work for them? (eg adding additional unit tests when asked, changing a design based on some feedback even if they have to throw away some code, etc)
From Todd’s own words:So, if you or anyone else would like to become a committer, the best way is
 to start by showing the qualities above. Here are some concrete steps you
 might take as a new contributor:
  • subscribe to the “dev” mailing lists and watch for broken Hudson builds. If you see a test start newly failing, try to investigate which commit brokeit and do your best to debug what might have caused it.
  • subscribe to the “user” mailing list and answer other users’ questions (this helps demonstrate that you want to help others and that you know the product/code well)
  • find a bug and submit a patch to fix it. Here’s a link to a bunch of tickets that have been deemed easy enough for new contributors.
If you or anyone else would like any more advice about how best to contribute, feel free to reach out to me or the dev lists (specific questions are best!)Thanks
 -
Todd
That’s precisely one of the things that I want to achieve in a couple of years.
Regards and thanks a lot for reading.