As I was looking into few open, unassigned Jira issues in the Apache Ignite project, I observed this issue about Apache Flink integration - data streaming connector. It was a new feature request from the community about Ignite Flink Streamer, which consumes messages from Apache Flink and streams them into the Ignite cache. I started contributing to the Apache Ignite project in early 2016. I initially started with a few small issues and wanted to contribute new features. I went through the coding guidelines and made changes accordingly and shared my pull request. I was surprised to get initial code review feedback soon on few changes and once those were completed, the pull request was merged to master.

In recent years, the retail sector has been part of the tremendous changes in the technology landscape across many industries. At Target, our chief information officer, Mike McNamara, recognized that these changes required us to build a distinct engineering culture: one focused on continuous learning, experimenting and failing, rewarding, sharing and meeting outcomes – not just due dates. In short, we needed to create an environment of productive learners.