Very few people set “becoming an ASF Member” as a clear goal.
Not because it lacks appeal, but because there is no application process and no defined path. It is more of an outcome, something that happens after sustained contributions are naturally recognized within a community.
Fan Jia followed exactly that kind of path.
Recently, he was invited to join the Apache Software Foundation as a Member. Taking this opportunity, we had an in-depth conversation with him. More than a recognition of achievement, the discussion felt like a reflection on his journey—from data integration, to open source participation, to system design and community understanding—tracing how an engineer gradually arrives at this point.
Starting from Data Integration
Fan Jia’s current work focuses on data integration, particularly in areas such as data synchronization, Change Data Capture, and data infrastructure. As he describes it, his day-to-day work can be distilled into one core objective: enabling data to flow reliably across different systems.
In practice, this is far more complex than it sounds. It involves synchronizing data between heterogeneous systems, handling schema evolution, and ensuring stability in complex production environments. Alongside this, he has been actively contributing to the Apache SeaTunnel community over the long term.
What stands out is that his starting point was not open source itself, but a set of concrete and persistent engineering problems. Those problems became the foundation for his later involvement in open source.
How He Got Into Open Source
When asked how he first got involved in open source, his answer was straightforward—it started with his job. After joining WhaleOps, he became involved in the development, maintenance, and partial architectural design of Apache SeaTunnel.
In the early stage, his contributions were similar to those of most engineers, focusing on solving specific issues such as fixing bugs and improving features. Over time, however, his attention shifted toward system design and how the project could run reliably across broader and more diverse scenarios.
This transition did not happen overnight. It emerged gradually through continuous involvement. As his focus moved from isolated problems to the system as a whole, his role evolved along with it.
From User to Maintainer
He describes this phase as a shift in perspective and responsibility.
As a user, the focus is on whether a feature exists and whether it meets immediate needs. As a maintainer, the concerns expand to system stability, backward compatibility, adaptability across different use cases, and the real experience of community users.
At the same time, the sense of responsibility becomes more concrete. Writing code is no longer just about completing a task. It becomes part of maintaining a system that runs in real production environments, making every technical decision more deliberate.
Once this shift in perspective happens, the truly complex problems begin to surface.
A Memorable Technical Challenge
During his time contributing to SeaTunnel, one of the most memorable challenges was building the Zeta engine from scratch.
This was not about solving a single isolated issue, but about tackling a combination of complex system-level problems. At the execution model level, the engine needed to support both batch and stream processing, balancing throughput and latency while avoiding bottlenecks under high concurrency.
From a concurrency perspective, multi-threaded execution introduced challenges such as race conditions, deadlocks, and unpredictable execution order. These issues are often difficult to reproduce and tend to surface only after prolonged runtime.
In terms of resource management, real production workloads involve long-running tasks and large data volumes. Memory control, thread pool isolation, and backpressure handling become critical. Out-of-memory errors are especially dangerous, as they can impact not only individual tasks but the stability of the entire service process.
For stability and recoverability, the system must guarantee no data loss, avoid uncontrolled duplication, and correctly restore state after failures or restarts. This typically requires integrating checkpointing and state management mechanisms.
Overall, this was not a single technical problem, but a full-scale systems engineering challenge.
These experiences also shaped how he understands collaboration in open source.
The Most Important Skill in Open Source
When asked what matters most in an open source community, his answer was patience.
A pull request in open source rarely gets merged immediately. It usually goes through multiple stages, including initial implementation, community review, several rounds of revision, CI validation, and documentation updates. Along the way, various issues can arise. Without patience, it is easy to give up midway.
However, consistently pushing through these details is exactly what defines high-quality contributions.
This understanding of the process is also reflected in his advice to newcomers.
Advice for New Contributors
For developers just getting started in open source, he believes the most important things are curiosity and the willingness to act.
Often, the biggest barrier is not technical difficulty, but simply not getting started. Once you take the first step—submitting a small PR or joining a discussion—everything else tends to follow naturally.
He also emphasizes the importance of expressing your own ideas and even questioning existing designs. Open source communities are inherently open environments, and everyone starts as a beginner.
As participation deepens, feedback from the community becomes more visible.
The Moment He Became an ASF Member
When he learned that he had become an ASF Member, his first reaction was excitement and happiness.
Unlike many achievements, this is not something you apply for. It is a recognition from the community based on long-term contributions, which makes it especially meaningful.
At the same time, he sees it not just as an honor, but as an increase in responsibility.
What This Role Means
In his view, being an ASF Member is fundamentally about responsibility.
It is not only about continuing technical contributions, but also about fostering a healthy community, helping new contributors grow, and participating in higher-level governance. It also means being accountable to users, ensuring that projects run reliably in real-world environments.
As his role evolves, so does his understanding of the community.
Understanding The Apache Way
He summarizes his understanding of The Apache Way in one phrase: Community Over Code.
The long-term success of an open source project depends not only on its technology but also on whether it maintains open and transparent decision-making, encourages contributors from diverse backgrounds, and builds governance based on consensus.
These factors ultimately determine the vitality of a project.
With this perspective, he approaches projects from a broader viewpoint.
How He Sees SeaTunnel
In his view, SeaTunnel’s strengths lie in several areas.
From an architectural standpoint, it supports a multi-engine model, allowing users to choose the most suitable execution engine for different scenarios. From an ecosystem perspective, it provides a rich set of connectors, enabling integration with various databases, data lakes, and messaging systems.
In terms of capabilities, CDC is a key strength, supporting both data change capture and schema evolution, making the system more adaptable to complex production environments.
At the same time, despite these capabilities, SeaTunnel maintains a relatively lightweight design, allowing users to adopt and use it at a lower cost.
These insights come from long-term hands-on experience.
How Open Source Changed Him
Open source has had a significant impact on his career, especially in how he approaches problems.
Within a company, systems are usually designed around specific business needs. In open source, however, solutions must consider much broader and more general use cases, which pushes engineers to make longer-term architectural decisions.
Collaborating with developers from different companies and backgrounds also expands one’s technical perspective.
One Sentence About Open Source
When asked to summarize open source in one sentence, he said
Open source is not just about sharing code, it is a process where developers and communities grow together
It may sound simple, but when viewed in the context of his journey, it is less a conclusion and more a natural outcome.
From solving concrete data problems, to participating in system design, to thinking about how projects run reliably across different scenarios, and eventually to engaging in community collaboration and consensus building, there is no clear boundary between these stages.
It is a continuous process where perspective gradually expands through doing the work.
Becoming an ASF Member is not the end of this journey, but a milestone along the way. It reflects recognition of past contributions and signals greater responsibility ahead.
If there is one deeper takeaway from this experience, it may not be a specific technology or a single project, but a more enduring capability
The ability to keep investing in uncertainty and to continue doing the right thing even when there is no immediate reward
About Apache SeaTunnel
Apache SeaTunnel is an easy-to-use, ultra-high-performance distributed data integration platform that supports real-time synchronization of massive amounts of data and can synchronize hundreds of billions of data per day stably and efficiently.
Welcome to fill out this form to be a speaker of Apache SeaTunnel: https://forms.gle/vtpQS6ZuxqXMt6DT6 :)
Why do we need Apache SeaTunnel?
Apache SeaTunnel does everything it can to solve the problems you may encounter in synchronizing massive amounts of data.
Data loss and duplication
Task buildup and latency
Low throughput
Long application-to-production cycle time
Lack of application status monitoring
Apache SeaTunnel Usage Scenarios
Massive data synchronization
Massive data integration
ETL of large volumes of data
Massive data aggregation
Multi-source data processing
Features of Apache SeaTunnel
Rich components
High scalability
Easy to use
Mature and stable
How to get started with Apache SeaTunnel quickly?
Want to experience Apache SeaTunnel quickly? SeaTunnel 2.1.0 takes 10 seconds to get you up and running.
https://seatunnel.apache.org/docs/2.1.0/developement/setup
How can I contribute?
We invite all partners who are interested in making local open-source global to join the Apache SeaTunnel contributors family and foster open-source together!
Submit an issue:
https://github.com/apache/seatunnel/issues
Contribute code to:
https://github.com/apache/seatunnel/pulls
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Development Mailing List :
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