We talk with Nikhita Raghunath, Nabarun Pal, and Paco Xu. Nikhita, Nabarun, and Paco have each held various leadership positions related to the Kubernetes project. They talk about their journeys, the various leadership roles they’ve been in, and offer advice for new contributors and those who want to move into leadership in the project.

Nikhita is a Staff Software Engineer at Broadcom. She is currently a member of the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) overseeing all technical matters of the CNCF. In the past, she was a member of the Kubernetes Steering Committee, a technical lead for SIG Contributor Experience and has also won the CNCF Top Committer Award. Currently, she is also a co-chair of the KubeCon+CloudNativeCon conference.

Nabarun is a Staff Software Engineer at Broadcom, a maintainer of the Kubernetes project, a member of the Kubernetes Steering Committee and a chair of Kubernetes SIG Contributor Experience. In the past, he was the release lead for Kubernetes 1.21 and has served eight release teams. Nabarun also works actively with the Python community by organizing PyCon India and has been recognized in media publications for his work.

Paco is an open source team lead in DaoCloud. He started to work on container/docker in 2016 and later started to participate in the Kubernetes Community in 2018. He is a current member of Kubernetes Steering Committee and works mainly on kubeadm and sig-node. He is Co-chair of KubeCon+CloudNativeCon China 2024.

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News of the week

Blog: 10 Years of Kubernetes

CNCF-Hosted Co-Located Events Overview

CFP for CNCF-hosted Co-located Events

Kubernetes Community Days

Links from the interviews

CNCF Technical Oversight Committee

SIG ContribEx

Leading Kubernetes into its Second Decade