On October 20, I accepted an invitation from the Apache HBase community and became an HBase Committer. At Xiaomi I maintain our internal HBase branch and production clusters, and the company already had six HBase Committers—including one PMC member—so becoming a Committer was a natural next step rather than something extraordinary. Compared with someone doing HBase at a company with no Committers, it takes considerably more time and effort.
Some observations about the community:
Most HBase PMC members are extremely active—contributing almost every day of the year, and replying to JIRA and mail even on vacation when they have network access. For many PMC members, advancing HBase aligns with their employers’ goals, but by daily hours and days active per year they are genuine workaholics next to typical engineers.
Apache projects have a promotion path: when a contributor’s code volume crosses a threshold, PMC members may nominate them as Committer; when a Committer’s impact grows further, they may be nominated to the Project Management Committee (PMC). Committer and PMC status are widely recognized in the industry—for careers and for the project. Many GitHub projects lack this ladder, so contributors can stay contributors forever despite large contributions, which can dampen motivation.
HBase contributors are global—US, India, China, and elsewhere. Time zones stretch issue threads: someone in China comments today, someone in the US replies tomorrow, someone in India adds input, and work starts days later. Community work needs long-term patience. People ask whether following the community at work wastes time; day to day it does not need huge blocks— I focus on company work during the day and spend some evenings on community code. The pace is slow anyway.
Company and community. Xiaomi is relatively open: management encourages open-source participation. Beyond HBase, the company has shipped projects such as distributed KV store Pegasus and the well-known monitoring system Falcon. That builds technical brand and motivates engineers—a platform to work with strong peers worldwide. The trade-off is whether community work helps the company. Bug fixes always do. Features you will never use are harder to justify—if you do not need them, others likely will not either. Bug fixes plus features that matter is the right balance.