Introduction

Becoming a mentee through the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is a great way to gain experience and knowledge in the field of cloud-native computing. The CNCF mentorship program pairs experienced professionals with mentees who are looking to gain experience and knowledge in cloud-native computing. In this blog, I will share my learnings about the step-by-step roadmap of becoming a CNCF mentee.

What is CNCF?

Cloud Native Computing Foundation is a collection of technologies & practices that automate the deployment and management of highly decoupled and resilient application workloads across elastics infrastructures using a uniform obstruction of computing resources.

💡CNCF Mentorship Programs

1. Google Summer of Code

2. Google Season of Docs

3. LFX Mentorship

4. Outreachy

Getting Started

As the CNCF Members are very nice & welcoming, It's not a tough job to get started. The steps are:

1. Be active on the CNCF mentoring Slack and add a watch to https://github.com/cncf/mentoring the repository.

2. Choose the project you like.

3. Get your hand dirty with the project, start contributing to good first issues and parallel learn the tech stack.

🔮 TIP: Don't Choose a project just because it has more projects for mentorship. Having prior knowledge of the project or tech stack will add value.

✅How to Choose the project?

Choosing the correct project is very important in terms of getting selected. Follow the following tips to choose the correct project!

• Instead of picking multiple projects, pick one of the projects from the mentorship program and start working on it.

• Choose the project you are interested in purpose the feature you would like to implement and request the project maintainers to have it as a part of the mentorship program.

✅Becoming One

• Introduce yourself in slack. Express your interest in the mentorship program.

• Write a design doc with implementation details with different approaches.

• Share the design with the community through a mailing list/ slack channel.

• Initiate the discussion in a community call.

• Keep contributing to the project on good first issues and other areas.

✅Doing it Right After Becoming one

It's one of the toughest things! Because Now you have been handed over the opportunity and you need to make sure that you build it in a way that works well for every user of that project. So...

• Primarily target the working model of the feature.

• Discuss implementation details in the slack channel.

• Write all possible kinds of tests.

• Follow the styling guide.

• Aim for efficient and robust code.

• Iterate quickly over review comments.

• Write docs & blogs on your work.

What if It didn't happen?

• It's not 100% guaranteed that you will get the mentorship in the first go! Many folks got their mentorship in 2nd/the 3rd try. You have to apply multiple times.

• You have done great work by understanding the project, contributing to the good first issues, and writing docs/blogs. so you're already a step ahead to get that.

• Keep applying them for the next cycles of mentorship.

• Try to start early to increase your chances.

Post Mentorship

Many folks apply and get into the program and complete that!

But... What's next??

To get the full mentorship you have to do the following steps:

• Keep contributing to the project.

• Try to answer the questions asked in slack. because by then you will be familiar with the project.

• Attend community calls and share your thoughts/Opinions

• Review the PRs

• Fix Bugs

✅ Final Note: Keep Working on What you love & Cloud Native community is a great place to be in.

Conclusion:

Thank you for reading this Blog. Hope you learned something new today! If you found this blog helpful, please like, share, and follow me for more blog posts like this in the future.