It was early 2017, and I was working remotely as a software developer for a company in London. But I wanted to do something in the open-source world. Around that time, Kubernetes was starting to rise. I didn’t know anyone running Kubernetes in production yet, but I remember projects like Flocker (it all felt like interesting, early ideas). I had a lot of friends working around the cloud-native space, not quite in the Kubernetes world yet, but trying to get there. I was mostly working with VMs, and there wasn’t really a path for us to move into Kubernetes.
I remember watching DockerCon videos one day and seeing Thomas Graf, a long-time kernel contributor and bmon creator (something I was using a lot back then). That’s how I knew Thomas. He had just started Cilium project.
At the same time, I wanted to fulfill my dream of working in open source. So a few months later, I emailed Thomas and asked if I could get support while contributing to Cilium. He replied: “Absolutely!”
It was one of the first times I contributed to a project in Go. It was also my first deep dive into kernel-level work. I wanted to learn more about BPF, XDP, and all that low-level networking stuff, especially since I was coming from a VoIP background. We ran into all kinds of problems, and it was such a cool project to be part of. Thomas and the Isovalent team were incredible teachers. The way they were building Cilium and thinking about the system just blew my mind. I kept thinking, “Wow, this is incredible.”
That summer, I decided to take a break in my career. I left my startup and thought, “Okay, I’m going to focus on this for two or three months and see what happens. After that, I’ll look for another job.” I also wanted to work for another country if possible. I was in my late twenties and wanted to explore how the world works.
So I started contributing to Cilium heavily. I remember looking at the CI scripts and thinking, “Oh wow… this is messy.” It was good, but also chaotic in that early-stage-project way. I thought, “I can migrate this to Ginkgo,” and that’s actually why I fell in love with Ginkgo at the time.
It was a great period of my life. I worked incredibly hard, but it felt so good to collaborate with people who were so smart and passionate. I learned so much! Toward the Oct of that year, around the end of my holidays, reality hit a bit. I needed to go back to a stable job. I wanted to build a house and plan for the future, and I couldn’t keep living off my savings.
So I was lucky that Isovalent offered me a job, and I could keep working on Cilium for a longer period.
A few weeks ago, there was a 10-year anniversary stream for Cilium on YouTube. I joined just for fun, to see the retrospective of how everything evolved. At one point, André mentioned that one of the cool early moments for the project was when I showed up and became one of the first external contributors really focusing on it. Hearing that, ten years later, was incredibly emotional.
It was so cool to realize that, even after all this time, that work still mattered.
When you get a cancer diagnosis and the future looks dark, I was so happy that one day I just went for it and tried. That experience shaped so much of my career. My only regret is that I didn’t do something like this earlier. I joined Isovalent during such a complicated moment in my personal life. I was building a house, had a kid, and couldn’t keep the same pace I wanted to. I always felt like I could have given more, and impostor syndrome also hit hard.
But still, being part of it, even for that period, was amazing. Seeing that message ten years later made all the struggle worth it. I still love Cilium. I just wish I could have contributed at the level I wanted, without all the life pressures happening at the same time.
It was an incredible ride, and I’m grateful I got to be there. And it also makes me happy that they've reached global success, something I had no doubt about.
PS: Fast forward, it was March 24, and I got an email on a Saturday from someone at Isovalent asking me how I was and how the recovery process was going. I still remember it today, and thanks for sending that email, you made me smile that day when everything was dark ❤️.