Learn how Shubham Tatvamasi got started with Magma as a student.

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Open source projects can only be as strong as their community.

The open source community is made up of a diverse group of individuals all at different experience levels. The Students of OpenInfra Series takes a look into universities and their approach to teaching open source in their curriculum. 

Shubham is a self-learner who is currently associated with the University of Delhi as a Research Associate and is a part of a team working on an educational platform using OpenEdX for the University. Besides this, he is actively involved in the Magma project, both as an open source contributor, and by way of providing consulting services to various companies involved in this project. His experience as an organizer for various Meetup groups has allowed him to create a Magma India Meetup group for collaboration and help developers learn and contribute to the Magma project.

One may consider his skill set as a byproduct of his active involvement with the community. This way he is not only learning and growing in the open source field himself but also is able to motivate and guide as many geeks as possible. All it takes is consistency and self-motivation to constantly learn and perform in an emerging field like this.

Check out how Shubham got started working with Magma as a Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA).

What Open Infrastructure project are you working with and what made you interested in that project, as opposed to some of the other options?

I am working on Magma. It’s an open-source telecom core platform. This project is on a path to constructively contribute to open, flexible, and extendable mobile core network solutions. It is fulfilling my quest to work in the cloud-enabled telecom industry.

How did you get started?

As a Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), I started working on Magma with the deployment of its Orchestrator on a bare-metal Kubernetes cluster. The task was fun to perform as I got to set up everything from the scratch.

What was the hardest part about getting started?

As of now, priority is set to deploy magma using terraform on a Public cloud provided by AWS only. However, I have been trying to deploy Magma’s Orchestrator on bare-metal. This in turn is not well-documented.

What could have made the getting started process easier?

An active community can substantially speed up the resolution and the development processes of the Magma project. The getting started and the continuation process could be made a lot easier when queries and issues raised to the community are promptly addressed by its members. A lot of times replies to my queries on Slack channels come from Facebook people only. Connection with the vision of the magma project is indispensable to ensure the support of an active community which could have made the getting started process easier.

How have you contributed to the community?

I have been helping community members on Slack by replying to questions related to the setting up of Magma. Besides this, I have been taking Zoom calls with the members and guiding them step by step to set up Magma’s Orchestrator and Access Gateway.

What’s the biggest benefit from your involvement? (hard or soft skills, connections, etc)

My experience of working in Open Source projects for the past 5 years and my ability to keep myself actively involved in the community discussions and processes is definitely a plus. Furthermore, I am able to dedicate as much time as possible to the Magma project. The motive in mind is to build a strong and active community for which I have been motivating people to join and contribute to the Magma project.

What advice do you have for students who want to get started with open source?

First, look for the area you want to work in. Then join its community. Start looking into Open Github issues and see if there is something you can work upon.

Check out Shubham’s Magma contributions to date: https://github.com/magma/magma/commits?author=ShubhamTatvamasi

Find Shubham Tatvamasi on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shubhamtatvamasi/ 

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