My Journey and Contributions in the Apache Flink Community

Introduction Li Benchao, a streaming computing engineer at ByteDance responsible for Flink SQL, introduces himself and mentions his recent invitation to become an Apache Flink Committer.

Community Participation He began contributing to the Flink community in late 2019 by reporting bugs, fixing them when possible, following the user and developer mailing lists, and answering questions, gradually moving from a user to an active contributor.

Committer Selection The community evaluates committers based on balanced contributions such as code, documentation, translations, discussions, and user support; Li highlights his active participation, especially in the user mailing list.

Article Overview The article outlines his experience in five parts: first encounter with the Flink community, how he integrated, what he gained, his contributions, and suggestions for others.

First Encounter with Flink Community His initial exposure to Flink was in 2017 during graduate studies, where he mistakenly thought Spark Streaming would suffice, delaying deeper involvement for two years.

Second Encounter In the summer of 2018, a Flink Meetup in Beijing inspired him, showcasing the expertise of community members and the practical use of Flink at ByteDance.

Third Encounter After joining ByteDance in summer 2019, he worked on the Blink planner, contributing features such as CREATE TABLE/VIEW, computed columns, and WATERMARK, and filed issues that were later merged into Flink 1.10.

Integration: First Users of Blink Planner He describes how his team adopted the Blink planner early, complemented missing features, and contributed bug fixes and improvements, including a notable example of implementing computed columns.

Yearly Gains He lists three main benefits of community involvement: staying aligned with the latest Flink developments, expanding scenario knowledge through global user interactions, and early detection of critical bugs (e.g., a COUNT DISTINCT state cleanup bug). He also notes increased personal and company influence.

Contributions to the Community His team has fixed numerous hard‑to‑find bugs and submitted improvements, such as FLINK‑15430, FLINK‑16589, FLINK‑15428, FLINK‑16181, FLINK‑14546, FLINK‑15494, FLINK‑17942, FLINK‑16068, FLINK‑17025, and is planning future features like FLINK‑18202, FLINK‑18379, and FLINK‑17137.

Some Suggestions He advises newcomers to be persistent, courageous, and proactive: engage in mailing lists, answer questions, submit issues, watch interesting topics, and pay attention to code quality, as the community reviews even minor formatting details.

Promotional Section The article concludes with a promotional campaign offering discounts, giveaways (e.g., Flink‑branded hoodies), and a call to try the commercial version of Flink on Alibaba Cloud, encouraging readers to click the “Read Original” link to participate.