Graduated, Grateful, and Growing: Lessons and Opportunities from My Mentorship Journey

🎓 After Graduation: Still Here, Still Contributing

After multiple rejections, I was finally selected for the CNCF LFX Mentorship and honestly, the excitement hasn’t faded. Even after more than 30 commits across Kyverno and its sub-repos, I still get the same thrill and dopamine hit as I did with my very first contribution.

Even though my main responsibility during the mentorship was to write sample policies and documentation for the new policy types in Kyverno, I never limited myself to just that. I continued contributing wherever I felt I could add value just as I had been doing before the mentorship.

I’ll admit: I wasn’t great at writing documentation. In fact, I had barely written any structured docs or policies before this. Figuring out what to include, how to structure it, and what to leave out was tough.

The policies I worked on were actively being developed, so I had to test them while they were still evolving. That made me the tester too and while debugging edge cases, I even found some bugs. Writing end-to-end tests using Chainsaw taught me a lot. I’m especially thankful to Kyverno maintainers Shuting, Frank, and Mariam Fahmy for always listening and helping out.

For documentation and optimizing CEL expressions in the new policy types which are quite similar to Kubernetes’ ValidatingAdmissionPolicy I got incredible help from Jim Bugwadia. His guidance helped me write cleaner, more structured, and optimized docs and policies. Of course, I still made silly mistakes like typos but I fixed them. And I’m still fixing things, because I’m not going anywhere.

Through this mentorship, I learned how to write better documentation not just dumping everything in, but understanding what to explain, and what to leave for users to explore. My mentor shared a great blog from GitHub Documentation Done Right which helped me shift my mindset.

I also learned why testing is so critical. Debugging, finding edge cases, and thinking from both the contributor and user’s perspective are skills I now carry with me. These improvements are still ongoing and that’s the nature of open source.

I won’t list every policy I wrote here you can check them directly in the official Kyverno docs:

• ValidatingPolicy

• ImageValidatingPolicy

One of the biggest lessons I learned was the value of reviews from multiple maintainers and contributors. Their suggestions often led to better, more reliable solutions, and helped catch bugs early. That’s the real strength of open source: knowledge sharing that compounds over time.

And one of the most exciting moments yet:
My mentor Jim Bugwadia nominated me and fellow mentee Kushal Agarwal to co-present a talk at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon India 2025, alongside the amazing and experienced speaker Sonali Srivastava.
We received an official confirmation:

“We have accepted your submission, Kubernetes Policy as Code for Platform Engineers*, and would like to welcome you as a speaker for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon India 2025, taking place 6–7 August 2025 at the Hyderabad International Convention Centre (HICC) in Hyderabad, India.”*

For someone like me, still early in my journey, this is a huge opportunity sharing the stage with seasoned professionals at one of the biggest cloud-native events in the world.

And now, after graduation, I’m not stepping away I’m just getting started. My goal is to continue contributing, stay close to the project, and hopefully become a reviewer in the next year (or earlier!).

I’m committed to learning more, helping newcomers onboard, and making this community as welcoming and supportive as our maintainers have been to me. That’s why I stayed not just because the project is amazing, but because the people are too.