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| 1 | +--- |
| 2 | +title: "Contributor Spotlight: Jeff Mealo" |
| 3 | +date: 2025-05-11T14:51:43+02:00 |
| 4 | +draft: false |
| 5 | +image: |
| 6 | + url: jeff.jpeg |
| 7 | + attribution: |
| 8 | +author: fdrees |
| 9 | +tags: |
| 10 | + - alerts |
| 11 | + - dashboards |
| 12 | + - chaos-engineering |
| 13 | + - performance |
| 14 | + - CNCF |
| 15 | + - postgresql |
| 16 | + - open-source |
| 17 | + - spotlight |
| 18 | +summary: "In a mini-series on this blog we highlight the work of the community. |
| 19 | + Today we meet Jeff Mealo, Senior Software Engineer at Gisual." |
| 20 | +--- |
| 21 | + |
| 22 | +Building and maintaining an open source project takes a village. In a |
| 23 | +mini-series on this blog we would like to highlight the work of our |
| 24 | +maintainers, component owners, and members of the larger community. |
| 25 | + |
| 26 | +Today's superstar: [Jeff Mealo](https://github.com/jmealo/). Jeff is a |
| 27 | +Senior Software Engineer at Gisual, where a CloudNativePG-powered |
| 28 | +outage-analytics platform turns hours of triage into minutes of insight. |
| 29 | +Any business that can’t afford downtime due to power outages, fiber cuts, |
| 30 | +or other faults can pinpoint the issue in minutes and dispatch the right |
| 31 | +technicians only when needed. Gisual doesn't just use CloudNativePG to keep |
| 32 | +the lights on for themselves and their customers; they actively contribute |
| 33 | +engineering to ensure it shines brightly for the entire community. |
| 34 | + |
| 35 | +It's no wonder Jeff ended up in Tech, he has always had an insatiable |
| 36 | +curiosity to figure out how things work: |
| 37 | +> "We got our first home computer at 8, and the internet at 9. The internet |
| 38 | +> was one of those things, and I found myself creating video game fan sites |
| 39 | +> using HTML and Perl from ages 9-10. One game wasn’t enough and this exploded |
| 40 | +> in scope to helping create the largest database of video game cheat codes |
| 41 | +> using PHP, and my ambitions quickly exceeded what free hosting could achieve |
| 42 | +> at the time. So I did what any 11 year old would do, start a computer salvage |
| 43 | +> operation on eBay using old gear that folks in my community had donated to me |
| 44 | +> to get a dedicated server and then sell enough web hosting to keep the lights |
| 45 | +> on!" |
| 46 | +
|
| 47 | +He tells me that because he didn’t have any real life mentors, only strangers |
| 48 | +helping him on IRC, he was unaware that this was a career path. While working |
| 49 | +two jobs to try to pay for college, a classmate observed Jeff working the |
| 50 | +night shift at a convenience store and asked why he wasn’t doing anything with |
| 51 | +computers. Thanks to that guy we now get to work with Jeff! |
| 52 | + |
| 53 | +Jeff first came across CloudNativePG when he was looking to achieve equivalent |
| 54 | +or better performance, availability, reliability than a managed service. |
| 55 | +CloudNativePG was the only operator that ticked all the boxes and it had a |
| 56 | +thriving open source community. "With CloudNativePG now under the CNCF umbrella, |
| 57 | +we feel like we made the right choice!" |
| 58 | + |
| 59 | +While vetting CloudNativePG for production usage, Jeff did a lot of chaos |
| 60 | +engineering and really put it through its paces before deciding to migrate |
| 61 | +away from the safety of managed Postgres. "It met and exceeded our |
| 62 | +expectations, but we continued to have issues with volume snapshots and a |
| 63 | +couple of other edge cases that were very difficult to isolate and reproduce." |
| 64 | +Even though prior to this, Jeff hadn’t done any Go development, with the help |
| 65 | +of some gophers on the Go slack, he was able to find the root cause of the |
| 66 | +issues with the operator: connection handling in the instance manager. |
| 67 | +If 3 backups failed in a row, it would no longer report its status properly |
| 68 | +which resulted in numerous failures (luckily, none of which caused an outage |
| 69 | +in themselves, just reduced redundancy). |
| 70 | + |
| 71 | +Jeff has a wishlist for the project: |
| 72 | +* Support for other topologies (namely distributed Citus) |
| 73 | +* Out of box experience: a wizard that helps you configure things to get the |
| 74 | +best performance/availability/reliability/recovery time – there’s so much to |
| 75 | +consider and it’s rare to find an individual who possesses enough knowledge |
| 76 | +on all the moving parts to get things right the first time! |
| 77 | +* Polishing alerts and dashboards and gathering first hand experience and |
| 78 | +guidelines for production usage. |
| 79 | + |
| 80 | +Anyone interested working on the above topics, find Jeff in the CloudNativePG |
| 81 | +channels on the CNCF Slack workspace, or on [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/jmealo.bsky.social)! |
| 82 | +Jeff's also active in the #postgresql channel on Libera, and while he's |
| 83 | +still getting used to chatting on Slack and Discord for Open Source, he is |
| 84 | +a member of the gophers.slack.com, victoriametrics.slack.com, |
| 85 | +postgresteam.slack.com, and cloud-native.slack.com. |
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