What It Takes to Become an Apache SeaTunnel Committer in Six Months: Niu Zhiwei’s Story

Apache SeaTunnel recently welcomed a new Committer!

Many members of the community may already be familiar with him. He has been actively involved in discussions across GitHub Issues, contributing to the project while also sharing his hands-on experience through a series of articles on using and contributing to Apache SeaTunnel. These practical write-ups have provided valuable guidance for users and helped more developers get involved with the project.

In just over six months, he progressed from Contributor to Committer through sustained contributions to code, technical discussions, and community building, earning the community’s recognition and taking on greater responsibility.

What did his journey into open source look like? What experiences and contributions shaped his growth? In this community interview, let’s meet Apache SeaTunnel’s newest Committer and learn more about his technical work and open source journey.

About the Committer

Hi, I’m Niu Zhiwei, a Senior Software Engineer at Lianchuang Group. My main areas of focus include real-time data integration, Change Data Capture (CDC), distributed data processing engines, connector architecture, and performance and reliability engineering. Within the Apache SeaTunnel community, I primarily contribute to the development and maintenance of the Zeta Engine, Connector V2, configuration validation framework, performance benchmarking, and E2E testing infrastructure.

Interview

1. How long have you been involved in open source, and what attracted you to it?

I started contributing to open source in March 2026, and Apache SeaTunnel was the first open source project I contributed to.

What attracts me most to open source is the way it brings real-world problems, engineering practices, and collaboration between people together. When you solve a problem within a company, the impact is usually limited to a particular business or team. But when you contribute a general solution to an open source project, it can benefit users across different industries and with different technical backgrounds.

2. When did you start contributing to Apache SeaTunnel, and what prompted you to get involved?

I started submitting code to Apache SeaTunnel in March 2026. The initial trigger was a periodic flushing issue I encountered in a real-world data synchronization scenario involving JDBC Sink. For low-throughput jobs, the batch size might not be reached in time, which could delay writes to the target system.

That issue led me to take a deeper look at SeaTunnel. I gradually became involved in improvements across REST APIs, CDC, connectors, and the engine. As I became more familiar with the project and the community’s way of working, my contributions expanded into areas such as configuration validation, testing infrastructure, and performance engineering.

3. You have now been selected as a SeaTunnel Committer. Could you summarize your contributions to the community, including both code and non-code contributions?

My contributions have mainly focused on engine capabilities, configuration validation, performance engineering, edge data collection, and test stability.

• Driving STIP-23: Unified Periodic Flushing at the Engine Level

To address the problem of low-throughput jobs taking too long to flush data to the target system, I helped drive STIP-23, which moves periodic flushing from individual JDBC Connector implementations into a shared engine-level capability. The engine now centrally schedules Flush Actions and handles exception propagation, Writer lifecycle management, and safeguards for non-2PC scenarios. The capability has now been adopted by connectors including JDBC, Elasticsearch, Doris, StarRocks, ClickHouse, MongoDB, and Hudi.

• Driving STIP-28: A Declarative Configuration Validation Framework

To address fragmented configuration validation logic and inconsistent error messages across plugins, I helped improve the OptionRule-based declarative validation framework. This work added support for Map conditions, mutually exclusive and combined option constraints, and pluggable custom validation. It also addressed issues such as exception aggregation and the loss of error context. I subsequently helped drive the migration of JDBC, Kafka, RocketMQ, Elasticsearch, and Transform V2 to the unified rule system, reducing both plugin development effort and the cost of troubleshooting for users.

• Building Performance Benchmarks and Continuous Performance Regression Testing

I helped drive STIP-32, a long-term benchmarking framework built around JMH and real engine execution paths. The framework covers benchmarks for Source-Sink pipelines, Transform, Checkpoint, state storage, queues, and serialization, and incorporates error margins and coefficients of variation into benchmark reports. Based on benchmark results, I also optimized lock contention in ProtoStuff schema lookup. The goal is to establish a complete performance engineering loop covering discovery, diagnosis, optimization, and validation.

• Driving STIP-24: Edge Data Collection

I helped drive STIP-24, which builds a lightweight data collection pipeline from edge devices to the Zeta Engine. On the engine side, a new EdgeSocket Source supports token-based authentication, compression and encryption, reconnection, and backpressure. On the edge side, an independent Edge Agent supports file collection, resumable reads, SQLite WAL, retry handling, and standard distribution packages. E2E tests have also been added to validate the complete Edge Agent → EdgeSocket → Zeta → MySQL pipeline.

• Improving CI and E2E Test Stability

I have continuously worked on stabilizing tests across JDBC, Kafka, Redis, Kudu, CDC, RocketMQ, and other modules. The main approaches include condition-based waiting, dynamic port allocation, explicit container readiness checks, process cleanup, and test sharding. The goal is to reduce flaky tests and unnecessary reruns so that CI can provide a more accurate signal of code quality.

• Non-Code Contributions

Beyond code, I regularly participate in Issue analysis, PR reviews, design discussions, and test failure diagnosis. I have also contributed documentation covering Kubernetes deployment, Zeta backpressure, periodic flushing, and performance benchmarking, and participated in community Meetups to exchange practical experience with developers and users. I hope these efforts can both improve the project and help more people understand and contribute to SeaTunnel.

4. What do you see as SeaTunnel’s differences or strengths compared with other solutions? What areas could be improved? What keeps you involved in the community?

I see three main strengths in SeaTunnel. First, it supports multiple execution engines, including Zeta, Flink, and Spark, giving users the flexibility to choose an engine based on their specific use cases. Second, SeaTunnel has its own Zeta Engine, which enables the project to continuously optimize performance and reliability for data synchronization workloads. Third, it has a rich connector ecosystem that supports data synchronization across a wide range of heterogeneous data sources.

There are also some clear areas for improvement:

• There are many connectors, but they still differ in terms of feature completeness, semantic consistency, and maturity.
• The engine still needs continued iteration to further improve performance and reliability.
• CI operates at a very large scale, and reducing flaky tests and shortening feedback cycles remain long-term challenges.

What keeps me involved is, on the one hand, the fact that the project has many meaningful engineering problems where contributions can make a real difference. On the other hand, the community is open and welcoming. Contributors can start with a small issue and gradually take on more complete solutions through discussions and code reviews. The community’s recognition of practical contributions and sustained involvement also makes me feel that my efforts can genuinely help move the project forward.

5. Have you done any custom development based on SeaTunnel’s limitations? If so, have you contributed it back to the community? Could you walk us through the approach?

I have not developed a separate customized version of SeaTunnel. When I encounter issues or feature requirements that are broadly applicable, I prefer to discuss them openly in the community and contribute the solution upstream so that more users can benefit from it, rather than maintaining a long-term private fork.

6. Does your company use SeaTunnel? What are the main use cases?

My company uses SeaTunnel primarily for data synchronization between different data sources. SeaTunnel’s rich connector ecosystem and unified data integration capabilities help reduce the development and maintenance costs of synchronizing data across heterogeneous systems.

7. What kind of support would you like to receive from the SeaTunnel community to further your personal growth?

I hope to continue learning from other community members, particularly their approaches to problem-solving and system design. Through community participation, I want to broaden my technical perspective and further improve my design, communication, and collaboration skills.

8. How do you understand the role of a Committer? What should Committers do, and what role should they play in the community?

I believe that being a Committer is not merely an honorary title, but a long-term responsibility. It means that the community recognizes a contributor’s technical judgment, collaborative approach, and sustained commitment. It also means shifting the focus from simply “getting your own PR merged” to helping the project and community grow in a healthy and sustainable way.

In my view, Committers should continuously maintain the project, carefully review contributions, help new contributors get involved, and follow the Apache Way by advancing the community through open, transparent, and consensus-driven collaboration.

9. How do you feel about becoming a Committer? Is there anything you would like to say to the community? What suggestions do you have for the project’s future development?

I’m very grateful to the community for trusting me and recognizing me as an Apache SeaTunnel Committer. I also want to thank everyone who has helped me review code, discuss designs, and troubleshoot issues. Many changes went through multiple rounds of discussion and iteration before they were finally merged. Those experiences have given me a deeper understanding of data integration, distributed systems, and open source collaboration.

For the project’s future development, I would suggest continuing to expand the connector ecosystem while placing greater emphasis on capability consistency, performance baselines, and long-term reliability. It would also be valuable to establish clearer standards for connector maturity and compatibility, while continuing to improve documentation, diagnostic tools, and the onboarding experience for new contributors. For critical paths, I hope we can build stronger feedback loops connecting design documents, automated testing, performance data, and real-world user cases.

10. What are your plans for contributing to the community in the near future?

Going forward, I plan to focus on the following areas:

1. Continue improving the performance and reliability of the Zeta Engine, with particular attention to core paths such as Checkpoint, state storage, serialization, task lifecycle management, and failure recovery.
2. Further develop the long-term performance benchmarking system so that performance changes can be reproduced, compared, and tracked, and ensure that benchmark results become part of everyday code reviews and release processes.
3. Contribute more high-quality PR reviews and help new contributors progress from their first Issue toward participating in complete technical solutions.