✨ Blog post number 1! Woooo!

👩‍💻 I have been at VMware (and Pivotal before it was acquired) for over 5 years, which means I am able to apply for a 3 month “sabbatical”. Usually people work on other teams that they are interested in, but I decided to spend my 3 months becoming a golang contributor.

📄 Below is the proposal I put together to convince my leadership that it was a good use of time.

Contributing to Golang Open Source

During my sabbatical I want to become a golang open source contributor and gain a deeper understanding of networking in golang. This will enable me to better support our customers when TAS has problems where golang is the root cause.

Why this is relevant

I am an engineer on the Cloud Foundry Networking Team. I have been building and maintaining networking and routing components written in golang for 3.5 years, including: cf-networking-release, silk-release, and routing-release.

Things regularly come up that require looking deeper into how golang implements its networking stack. Some examples:

For all of those examples I was involved in digging through the golang code to determine the root cause of an issue.

I have gotten better at poking around in the code, but I want to be able to contribute to it. I don’t want to be forced to wait months until they look at our issue. When these big issues come up, I want to be able to submit a PR to golang to help solve our customer’s issues.

Quantitatively Measurable Outcomes

  • Submit PRs with docs changes
  • Submit PRs with bug fixes
  • Be involved in discussion on issues
  • Build a professional network in the golang community

Qualitatively Measurable Outcomes

  • Become more comfortable debugging golang
  • Gain a deeper understanding of networking with golang
  • Gain the ability to easily submit PRs to golang in the future
  • Become more active in the golang community

🍀 So that’s the idea! Wish me luck!