As the academic year wraps up, seniors at Dickinson College have completed their capstone course, where they learned a lot during the past year, including new concepts, how OpenInfra works, working with the Swift core team, and we getting to attend the Project Teams Gathering (PTG).
This year, James Nguyễn, Nathan Nguyễn, and Boosung Kim were among the fortunate few who had the chance to work with OpenStack. In a recent interview with one of the students, Boosung Kim shared insights into how he became acquainted with OpenStack, what surprised him the most, the challenges he encountered, and the advice he’d offer to future students.
Boosung is a senior double majoring in Computer Science and Math, graduating this year. He is currently wrapping up his final semester while contributing to OpenStack Swift. Outside of school, he enjoys attending hackathons and swimming!
What Open Infrastructure project are you working with and what made you interested in that project, as opposed to some of the other options?
I’m working with OpenStack Swift. I was drawn to it because of my interest in large-scale systems and backend infrastructure. Swift stood out from other projects due to its clean design, active community, and relevance to the kind of distributed systems I want to build professionally.
How did you get started? What was the hardest part?
I got started by joining Dickinson College’s seminar focused on open source development, where I chose Swift for a technical deep dive. I began by exploring the codebase, setting up a dev environment, and meeting the Swift team during the 2024 PTG.
The hardest part was grasping new concepts like race conditions, erasure coding, and heartbeats. These were outside the scope of my usual coursework, so it took extra time to understand how they fit into a distributed system like Swift.
What could have made the getting started process easier?
Clearer beginner-focused documentation on core concepts like consistency, replication, and concurrency in Swift would have helped. But the dev team was willing to hop on a call to explain these concepts in-depth, so everything worked out regardless.
How have you contributed to the community?
I’ve contributed code patches to the Swift project, participated in review discussions, and gave a tech talk at my college to introduce others to OpenStack and Swift. I hope that my contributions can be of help to Swift users and that more students from my college will work with OpenStack.
What’s the biggest benefit from your involvement?
The biggest benefit has been learning how real-world distributed systems are built and maintained. I also gained experience navigating large codebases, writing production-level code, and communicating effectively in an open-source community.
What advice do you have for students who want to get started with open source?
Don’t try to perfect your patches before submitting for review like I did. Aim for quick, purposeful iterations so that you can get reviews fast and ship fast.
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