Opensource-Learnings

I’ve been studying the Node Readiness Controller codebase lately. It’s a Kubernetes project and like most Kubernetes projects, it has a Makefile. Makefiles are usually large files spanning over 300+ lines, so my immediate reaction to it was to close it and come back to it later. This weekend, I did some research on what Makefiles are and why are they needed. Now, I do have a good idea on what they are, so I decided to document my understanding in case I need to come back to it later. ...

A maintainer asked me to look at a merged PR in node-readiness-controller and figure out how to get it into NRC documentation. That was the whole assignment as it was given to me. I opened the PR #263 and the first thing I saw was a variable called HEARTBEAT_PERIOD. I had no idea what it did neither did I knew what a “heartbeat” meant in this context. I want to write down what it actually took to go from that to actually document it and ultimately get it merged as part of the NRC documentation. ...

Introduction: Why I’m Writing This Hi! This is where I write about the lessons that I learn from open source contributions! This is not a polished “here’s how to contribute to open source” tutorial written by someone who has done it a hundred times. The project is Minikube, the tool that lets you run a Kubernetes cluster on your local machine for development and testing. The contribution I worked on was adding Node Readiness Controller (NRC) as a Minikube addon, so that anyone in the world can type minikube start --addons=nrc and have it just work. ...