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Mentorship in Open Source — Part 2: The Mentee Playbook

Last time I wrote about why I keep saying yes to open-source mentorship. This post is the how: specifically, how to be a mentee in 2026. I’ve spent the last few years on the mentor side of CNCF LFX LFX Mentorship — the Linux Foundation’s structured mentorship program. Cohorts run quarterly, projects are scoped to ~12 weeks, and mentees receive a stipend. , Google Summer of Code ( GSoC A Google-funded program where students contribute to open-source projects over the summer, paired with mentors from those projects. ), and GoBridge, through Thanos, Prometheus, and now OpenTelemetry projects. Every cohort I’ve run, the same questions keep coming up from people who want to apply but don’t know how to start. ...

May 29, 2026 · 13 min · 2576 words · Kemal Akkoyun

Making Drone Builds 10 Times Faster!

We open sourced drone-cache, a plugin for the popular Continuous Delivery platform Drone. It allows you to cache dependencies and interim files between builds to reduce your build times. This post explains why we are using Drone, why we needed a cache plugin, and what I learned while trying to release drone-cache as open source software. Read on for the story behind drone-cache or if you want to jump into action directly, go to the github.com/meltwater/drone-cache, and try it for yourself. ...

April 10, 2019 · 7 min · 1291 words · Kemal Akkoyun