In fact, there is no textbook strict definition of how Apache Way should be defined. Everyone who contributes to the Apache community has their own understanding and interpretation. A thousand hamlets for a thousand people.

— ZhaiJia

ApacheCon is the official worldwide conference series of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). ApacheCon is one of the earliest known events in the open source movement.

As early as 1998, before ASF was founded, ApacheCon had attracted participants at all levels to explore the “technologies of tomorrow” in more than 300 Apache projects and their diverse communities. It was also the year that the developers of HTTPD services got together and decided to launch the Apache Software Foundation.

ApacheCon, held annually in Europe or North America, is a great opportunity for Apache developers to meet, discuss, and meet offline. It’s also a rare place to share ideas and brainstorm ideas. Showcase the latest developments and emerging innovations in the Apache project through hands-on presentations, keynotes, actual case studies, training, and hackathons.

This year, in order to better serve the rapidly growing number of Apache users and contributors in Asia Pacific, the ApacheCon Organizing Committee and the Apache Software Foundation are pleased to announce that ApacheCon Asia, the first ApacheCon online conference for Asia Pacific time zones, will be held online from August 6-8, 2021.

In order to let you know more about open source and ApacheCon Asia, SegmentFault will interview some Track Chair or conference lecturers to let you know the background of the conference preparation and the stories of these experts.

Today we have an interview with Zhai Jia, co-founder of StreamNative.

The following is an interview with Zhai Jia by SegmentFault:

About ZhaiJia

Hi, I’m Zhai Jia, thanks to SegmentFault for arranging this interview. I am currently a PMC member and Committer of Apache Pulsar and BookKeeper, the top projects of Apache Software Foundation. I have been active in the open source community for a long time, and currently focus on preaching Apache Pulsar in China. To better understand the benefits and features of Pulsar as a cloud-native message flow system.

I am also a co-founder of StreamNative, an open source foundation software company founded in early 2019 by members of the founding Team of Apache Pulsar to support the Apache Pulsar community. At the same time, we provide commercial service of Apache Pulsar to help customers better use Apache Pulsar and provide the most professional solution in the scenarios such as Message Queue and Streaming.

In ApacheCon Asia 2021, I was responsible for the promotion of Messaging system Track. I would like to thank lecturers from North America, India and China for their support and cooperation for Messaging system Track.

The story of Zhai Jia’s first contact with open source

I know something about open source in college, but I haven’t been particularly involved in any open source project. When I graduated from the Graduate school of Computer Science of Chinese Academy of Sciences, I joined EMC to engage in file system and distributed design and development. During this period, I had the honor to contact and use Apache BookKeeper — a distributed storage engine based on WriteAheadLog with low latency, high performance and strong consistency. I will continue to participate in and contribute to Apache open source projects. Later, he gradually became a PMC Member of Apache Pulsar and BookKeeper.

What have individuals and companies learned from participating in open source and contributing to the Apache community?

The open source and Apache community is a treasure trove of magic, which enables me to make more friends who agree with open source and technology. Our daily communication can bring great inspiration, and many people become colleagues and partners from the user ID. Since we started StreamNative, we have chosen the open source commercialization path in the belief that open source can also lead to commercial success. StreamNative’s current team management also borrowings from the open source community, adhering to a self-driven, asynchronous communication, telecommuting, no office, very flat engineer culture.

“The Apache Way”?

Apache Way is also what we often say “The Way of Apache”, in fact, there is no strict textbook for the definition of Apache Way, everyone who participates in the Apache community has their own understanding and interpretation, a thousand people have a thousand Hamlet.

But in the long process of collaboration and governance in the Apache community, several principles have been abstracted that are now generally accepted and agreed upon, such as winning authority, peer community, open communication, consensus decision making, project autonomy, independence, and community over code.

Of these, “community over code” is probably the most widely cited and one I remember the most, which is that a healthy community is a higher priority than quality code, and having a strong community to fix problems at the code level is what keeps communities active. We have to really believe in the power of the community, believe in it, stay with it.

Apache Way is not only suitable for Apache Software Foundation open source projects, but also for other vendors’ open source and other open source foundation projects. In the open source community, communication can be referenced to each other.

Join us at ApacheCon Asia!

ApacheCon Asia is ApacheCon’s first Summit in Asia. Let’s work together to make this “first”!

About StreamNative

StreamNative is an open source foundation software company, formed by the founding team of Apache Pulsar, a top project of the Apache Software Foundation, to build the next generation of cloud native streaming fusion data platform around Pulsar. StreamNative is an Apache Pulsar commercial company that focuses on open source ecology and community building, and is committed to innovation in cutting-edge technologies. Founding team members have worked for major companies such as Yahoo, Twitter, EMC, And Splunk. If you love open source culture and want to work full time, then join us!

Resume email: [email protected].

ApacheCon Asia full agenda address: https://www.apachecon.com/aca…

Immediately registered address: https://hopin.com/events/apac…