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· 3 min read
zuobiao-zhou

Self-Introduction

Hello everyone, I'm Yuxuan Zhang, a graduate student from Beijing University of Technology. I am deeply honored to become a Committer for the Apache HertzBeat project.

My Journey with Apache HertzBeat

I came across the HertzBeat project through this year's Open Source Promotion Plan event. I was thrilled by the project's introduction, which mentioned "Agentless" and "Full web-based operation." I thought to myself, could monitoring really be this simple? At the time, our lab had just set up a new server, which I used to monitor with this project.

The project also supports one-click deployment via Docker, making it incredibly easy to get started. The refreshing interface also caught my eye. After using it, I was deeply attracted by the project's simplicity, ease of use, and comprehensive monitoring features. Moreover, issues and PRs in the project were responded to quickly, which motivated me to get involved in the project's development.

Contributing to a project takes time, so the first step was to thoroughly understand it. I usually start with the project documentation. It so happened that there was an issue about improving the documentation, so I took it on. By referencing the user interface, examining the source code, and following the existing document format, I successfully submitted my first PR to the project.

As I dug deeper, I added a monitoring template for OpenAI accounts via the HTTP protocol. Later, I implemented support for the IMAP protocol and features to monitor systems directly via script commands on Windows and Linux.

During this time, I also submitted several minor fixes and feature PRs, such as correctly displaying the monitoring status after creating, modifying, or restarting monitoring and implementing cascading parameter lists on the front-end.

Experience Sharing: University Students Participating in Open Source

University students can learn excellent coding styles and design patterns from projects while participating in real-world development.

Passion is the best motivation. First, find a project you're interested in, whether it's for its functionality, interface, or something else.

A good community environment is also crucial. This is usually reflected in having active contributors, detailed and comprehensive README and project documentation, and quick responses to issues and PRs.

Once you've found a project that meets the above criteria, you can pull the project's code to your local machine, follow the documentation to deploy and run it. Start as a user, and during this process, you might notice minor issues or incomplete features, which naturally leads to filing issues and attempting to fix them, even if it's just correcting a typo or misspelling. The community will always welcome it. You can gradually dive deeper through the project documentation and contribute to the project.

Conclusion

I'm very happy to become a Committer for the community. This is an important milestone for me, and I will continue contributing to the Apache HertzBeat community in the future. I also hope that Apache HertzBeat will successfully graduate from the incubator and that the community will continue to grow.

I want to extend my heartfelt thanks to TJxiaobao for guiding me in getting started with the project and for always supporting my contributions. I also want to thank Tom for the prompt and detailed reviews of my PRs.