✨ Series: Getting to know the wonderful Continuous Delivery Community
Utkarsh Kumar Sharma
Pronouns: He/Him
Location: London, UK
Who are you?
I’m a Software Engineer and a Data Science Enthusiast. I have been developing scalable, cloud-native solutions, using modern cloud architecture for 5 years now. I love solving problems with technology and am always excited to learn and try new things.
I’ve had the fortunate opportunity to work across diverse sectors, including research, telecommunications, and retail each of which has significantly enhanced my knowledge of the world. Most recently, I worked for Cisco, where I developed solutions on real-time data with nanosecond latency for one of the telecommunication products.
Over the last year, I’ve been diving deeper into AI and machine learning, aiming to gain knowledge and increase my contribution in this field, complementing my current role as a Machine Learning Engineer at a UK-based company. I like contributing to open source projects and am currently honored to serve on the Ortelius Governing Board.
What are your hobbies?
I really like coding so most of the time you will find me doing that or learning new technology. When I am not coding, I like hiking, camping, and exploring places. I also play football sometimes. I like mentoring students so I actively participate as a mentor in mentorship events.
What did you want to be when you were a kid?
I wanted to become a scientist when I was a kid. I used to spend a lot of time watching science shows on Discovery and I used to get amazed with those cool science tricks and feel like knowing more about it.
What led you to a career in tech?
As a science student, I had a thirst for solving real-world problems and I always used to think about how advancement in technology is making people’s lives much easier and how it can be used to solve current challenges in the world. That is why I decided to do my bachelor’s in Electronics and Communications Engineering. It was the best decision of my life to take that degree program because after that I knew what I liked and what I would do for the rest of my career.
Do you remember your first open source contribution?
I still remember my first open source contribution. It was for the Ortelius open source project. I still remember how afraid I was while pushing my code for review. I was at the Ortelius architecture meeting and there was some discussion going on related to the backend and I volunteered to help. Even though I had less knowledge about the project as a whole, with the help of other members I was able to develop and deploy a flask server with backend APIs for frontend service.
How did you get involved in the Continuous Delivery Foundation?
I was looking for projects to contribute to and the one I found was from the Apache Foundation, which still follows the traditional way of communication, but it wasn’t engaging to me. I wanted a project with lots of communication, meetings, clear visibility of the work, and transparency. I found exactly what I was looking for with Ortelius, an open source project under CD Foundation. Since then, I’ve been an active member of this community and contributing to other CDF/CNCF projects like Jenkins X and Keptn.
What is your favorite thing/project/tech to work on?
I like working with data, be it developing an ML model to cater to a problem, just data science to find some insights from data, or creating a scalable data pipeline for transforming the data. Throughout my career, I’ve seen and worked with a diverse range of data and software engineering to address data-related challenges and solutions, which gives me an edge. Hence, this is something that I enjoy the most working on.
Tell us about the thing you’re most proud of and why?
Apart from my contributions to the product, I’m especially proud of the network I’ve built through this community. Through open source, I have made friends from different nations. I know people with diverse skills and competencies that I would have never known, not to mention the hours of good discussion that I had with the community, which has surely helped me become a better engineer.
What is the best connection you’ve made through open source?
There are plenty, I met amazing people like Steven Taylor, Tracy Ragan, Sacha Wharton, and Arvind Kumar from the Ortelius community. I met great CDF Ambassadors like Brad McCoy and Saim Safdar.
What is your #1 top tip for getting involved in the community?
Don’t think too much and don’t be afraid to reach out to people.
Most people are afraid of how they will fit into the community. Will I be able to contribute? It looks too difficult! How can I contribute? All these questions and thoughts pop up in their mind. I always ask folks to spend some time with the community, because with time, their understanding will grow and everything will become much easier.
What’s your favorite open source conference?
A few of my favorite open source conferences are KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, cdCon, and Open Source Summit.
Where can we find you?
More about Utkarsh
Congratulations to Utkarsh, who won this year’s Top CDF Contributor Award, as well as the Most Valuable Ortelius Project Contributor Award! View all 2024 CDF Award Winners.
