I am in conversation with Gorkem Ercan, founding Distinguished Engineer and CTO of Jozu. Gorkem has experience working and leading teams with various technologies ranging from building IDEs, to building mobile phones, and CI/CD systems. He is an avid contributor and supporter of open source.

In this conversation, Gorkem talks about:

Gorkem's Background:

• Early interest in computers
• Discovering open source while at university and starting to read other people’s code.
• Beginning to contribute to open source projects and eventually published his own
• Subsequent roles at Nokia and Red Hat involved significant open source work.

He also shares Tips for Newcomers to Open Source:

• Being welcoming and patient, starting small, being prepared for asynchronous feedback.
• Keep an open mind, not gettng discouraged by rejection.
• Essential skills: Proficiency with Git and GitHub, understanding of community interaction platforms.

His tips for Reviewing code:

• Functionality: Ensure the code works as intended and is bug-free.
• Style and consistency: Check if the code aligns with the project's coding style.
• Impact: Consider the potential impact on operations, users, and documentation.
• Clear communication: Include clear and concise commit messages.

Gorkem Ercan is a founding Distinguished Engineer and CTO of Jozu. Gorkem has experience working and leading teams with various technologies ranging from building IDEs, to building mobile phones, and CI/CD systems. He is an avid contributor and supporter of open source.

Gorkem is the creator of the wildly popular Eclipse JDT language server and vscode-java extension, as well as the YAML Language server and vscode-yaml extension. He is a committer on various projects, including Eclipse Che, Eclipse Theia and Apache Cordova. Gorkem is a member of the Eclipse Architecture Council, and he is one of the longest-serving Eclipse commiters.

LinkedInl:https://www.linkedin.com/in/gorkemercan/

Website:https://jozu.com/

link to the kitops.ml open source project https://kitops.ml/