From Zero to Apache Tomcat Committer: My Journey Through Open Source at Alibaba

First Open‑Source Experience

In 2014 I joined Alibaba's middleware team and was tasked with unifying the company's application containers to Tomcat. Having never worked with Tomcat before, I took on the seemingly impossible goal of becoming an Apache Tomcat committer.

After studying the Tomcat documentation, I submitted my first patch fixing a failing WebSocket test case. The community quickly reviewed and merged it, and seeing my name in the Tomcat release notes was a huge boost.

Apache Roadshow China

In October 2015 I attended the Apache Roadshow China in Beijing, where I heard from Apache Foundation leaders and discussed community development processes. Their advice—start with simple bug fixes and participate in release votes—still guides my contributions today.

Becoming a Tomcat Committer

Our team aligned internal Tomcat builds with the upstream project, making contributions easier. We contributed fixes for high‑concurrency NIO/Async Servlet issues, servlet‑spec violations, and performance optimizations. In August 2016 I received an invitation from Tomcat core developer Mark Thomas to become a committer, a moment I will never forget.

Tomcat PMC Membership

After becoming a committer, I continued to contribute and was later invited to join the Tomcat PMC. I presented Alibaba’s large‑scale, high‑concurrency experiences at ApacheCon 2017, receiving strong support from the community.

Joining the Dubbo Project

In 2017 Alibaba revived the Dubbo open‑source project and donated it to the Apache Incubator. I helped guide Dubbo through the incubation process, handling licensing, trademark, and community governance challenges, and documented the release workflow.

Becoming an Apache Foundation Member

Shortly after Dubbo’s graduation, I received an invitation to become an Apache Software Foundation member, joining the 771 global members. This role expands my focus from individual projects to the broader foundation, reinforcing my commitment to open‑source values.

In the concluding remarks I thank mentors such as Mark Thomas and my Alibaba leaders for their support, emphasizing that large‑scale production environments provide unique opportunities to contribute high‑quality code to the open‑source community.