Blog: add interview with Anushka Saxena #401

FloorD · 2026-01-02T10:59:53Z

@SaxenaAnushka102 let me know if this still reads like you. I loved the detail in your answers!

Will fix width after review.

Signed-off-by: Floor Drees <[email protected]>

content/blog/lfx-mentorship-documentation-anushka-saxena/index.md

Co-authored-by: Anushka Saxena <[email protected]> Signed-off-by: Floor Drees <[email protected]>

sxd · 2026-01-08T10:51:40Z

content/blog/lfx-mentorship-documentation-anushka-saxena/index.md

+
+Anushka is a contributor to the Cloud Native ecosystem, with a particular focus on developer-centric projects where infrastructure, documentation, and community intersect. With a background in community leadership for major cloud providers, she remains active in CNCF initiatives, open-source projects like AsyncAPI, and the broader Developer tooling landscape.
+
+"One community that’s especially close to my heart is Data on Kubernetes (DoK). I first got involved during my college days as a volunteer for DoK Community Days, which was my introduction to cloud-native data workloads and open-source communities by Bart Farell, a mentor and a very well-known personality in the CNCF space. Coming back to the CloudNativePG ecosystem as a mentee later on felt like a full-circle moment!"


Probably worth a link to his linkedin?

IMO only the interviewed person's Linkedin profile should be linked in posts.
But if Bart has a personal site, a CNCF profile page or some such, that would be fair to link.

sxd · 2026-01-08T10:53:01Z

content/blog/lfx-mentorship-documentation-anushka-saxena/index.md

+
+Anushka is a contributor to the Cloud Native ecosystem, with a particular focus on developer-centric projects where infrastructure, documentation, and community intersect. With a background in community leadership for major cloud providers, she remains active in CNCF initiatives, open-source projects like AsyncAPI, and the broader Developer tooling landscape.
+
+"One community that’s especially close to my heart is Data on Kubernetes (DoK). I first got involved during my college days as a volunteer for DoK Community Days, which was my introduction to cloud-native data workloads and open-source communities by Bart Farell, a mentor and a very well-known personality in the CNCF space. Coming back to the CloudNativePG ecosystem as a mentee later on felt like a full-circle moment!"


Suggested change

"One community that’s especially close to my heart is Data on Kubernetes (DoK). I first got involved during my college days as a volunteer for DoK Community Days, which was my introduction to cloud-native data workloads and open-source communities by Bart Farell, a mentor and a very well-known personality in the CNCF space. Coming back to the CloudNativePG ecosystem as a mentee later on felt like a full-circle moment!"

"One community that’s especially close to my heart is Data on Kubernetes (DoK). I first got involved during my college days as a volunteer for DoK Community Days, which was my introduction to cloud-native data workloads and open-source communities by [Bart Farell](uhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/bart-farrell/), a mentor and a very well-known personality in the CNCF space. Coming back to the CloudNativePG ecosystem as a mentee later on felt like a full-circle moment!"

sxd · 2026-01-08T10:55:08Z

content/blog/lfx-mentorship-documentation-anushka-saxena/index.md

+
+Anushka worked on automating the import of versioned documentation into the CloudNativePG docs site so that new operator releases automatically trigger the correct documentation build. It started with a major "housekeeping" task: she wrote and executed a series of Node.js utility scripts to sanitize over 60 Markdown files. This involved converting MkDocs-style admonitions to Docusaurus syntax and fixing MDX spacing issues to ensure the build wouldn't crash.
+
+She also worked on the Sidebar Position Multiplier, [a script](https://github.com/cloudnative-pg/docs/pull/22) that intelligently re-indexed our documentation pages (10, 20, 30...) to allow future contributors to insert new pages without breaking the order. Finally, she helped architect the [Auto-Sync Pipeline](https://github.com/cloudnative-pg/docs/pull/18), a GitHub Action that automatically pulls documentation from the main repo into the docs repo whenever a new release is published. This involved writing a reusable import script, integrating it into a GitHub Actions workflow triggered by upstream releases, and validating the output in a Docusaurus-based documentation setup. 


The PR cloudnative-pg/docs#22 is closed and has nothing like a script, just a change in some links and a config :S

sxd · 2026-01-08T10:56:19Z

content/blog/lfx-mentorship-documentation-anushka-saxena/index.md

+
+Anushka worked on automating the import of versioned documentation into the CloudNativePG docs site so that new operator releases automatically trigger the correct documentation build. It started with a major "housekeeping" task: she wrote and executed a series of Node.js utility scripts to sanitize over 60 Markdown files. This involved converting MkDocs-style admonitions to Docusaurus syntax and fixing MDX spacing issues to ensure the build wouldn't crash.
+
+She also worked on the Sidebar Position Multiplier, [a script](https://github.com/cloudnative-pg/docs/pull/22) that intelligently re-indexed our documentation pages (10, 20, 30...) to allow future contributors to insert new pages without breaking the order. Finally, she helped architect the [Auto-Sync Pipeline](https://github.com/cloudnative-pg/docs/pull/18), a GitHub Action that automatically pulls documentation from the main repo into the docs repo whenever a new release is published. This involved writing a reusable import script, integrating it into a GitHub Actions workflow triggered by upstream releases, and validating the output in a Docusaurus-based documentation setup. 


The PR cloudnative-pg/docs#18 it's a rename of from dev to devel not a pipeline

jsilvela

IMO the paragraphs could use more punctuation, some of the sentences feel run-on. And also perhaps focus on making fewer points.
Nice work on Docusaurus by the way!

jsilvela · 2026-01-09T08:25:21Z

content/blog/lfx-mentorship-documentation-anushka-saxena/index.md

+---
+
+In the summer we wrote about how CloudNativePG was back for the September-
+October-November LFX term with [several projects for mentoring](https://cloudnative-pg.io/blog/2025-term3-lfx-cncf-mentorship/). One of them was around the Docs. 


"projects for mentoring" I think can be misread.
Maybe we could rephrase to "... CloudNativePG was back for the September-October-November term of LFX Mentorship with several projects.

jsilvela · 2026-01-09T08:29:41Z

content/blog/lfx-mentorship-documentation-anushka-saxena/index.md

+
+## Start at the beginning
+
+Anushka has always been motivated by curiosity and the desire to understand how systems work. "Over time, open source became a natural extension of that curiosity because it offered a way to learn by contributing, asking questions, and building things that real people use." What really drew her in was when she realized that great software often faces issues not because of poor engineering, but because it’s hard to understand or adopt. "That realization shaped my interest in documentation modernization and contributor experience as first-class technical problems."


Meta-comment: because of no line breaks, my comment on the last line of this paragraph seems to apply to the whole paragraph :/

Suggested change

Anushka has always been motivated by curiosity and the desire to understand how systems work. "Over time, open source became a natural extension of that curiosity because it offered a way to learn by contributing, asking questions, and building things that real people use." What really drew her in was when she realized that great software often faces issues not because of poor engineering, but because it’s hard to understand or adopt. "That realization shaped my interest in documentation modernization and contributor experience as first-class technical problems."

Anushka has always been motivated by curiosity and the desire to understand how systems work. "Over time, open source became a natural extension of that curiosity because it offered a way to learn by contributing, asking questions, and building things that real people use." What really drew her in was when she realized that great software often faces issues not because of poor engineering, but because it’s hard to understand or adopt. "That realization shaped my interest in documentation and contributor experience as first-class technical problems."

The way it's written, "document modernization and contributor ..." would need a comma before "and" to help parsing.
But I also think "modernization" is not "a first-class problem". Documentation is.

jsilvela · 2026-01-09T08:32:03Z

content/blog/lfx-mentorship-documentation-anushka-saxena/index.md

+
+Anushka is a contributor to the Cloud Native ecosystem, with a particular focus on developer-centric projects where infrastructure, documentation, and community intersect. With a background in community leadership for major cloud providers, she remains active in CNCF initiatives, open-source projects like AsyncAPI, and the broader Developer tooling landscape.
+
+"One community that’s especially close to my heart is Data on Kubernetes (DoK). I first got involved during my college days as a volunteer for DoK Community Days, which was my introduction to cloud-native data workloads and open-source communities by Bart Farell, a mentor and a very well-known personality in the CNCF space. Coming back to the CloudNativePG ecosystem as a mentee later on felt like a full-circle moment!"


IMO only the interviewed person's Linkedin profile should be linked in posts.
But if Bart has a personal site, a CNCF profile page or some such, that would be fair to link.

jsilvela · 2026-01-09T08:35:22Z

content/blog/lfx-mentorship-documentation-anushka-saxena/index.md

+
+She also worked on the Sidebar Position Multiplier, [a script](https://github.com/cloudnative-pg/docs/pull/22) that intelligently re-indexed our documentation pages (10, 20, 30...) to allow future contributors to insert new pages without breaking the order. Finally, she helped architect the [Auto-Sync Pipeline](https://github.com/cloudnative-pg/docs/pull/18), a GitHub Action that automatically pulls documentation from the main repo into the docs repo whenever a new release is published. This involved writing a reusable import script, integrating it into a GitHub Actions workflow triggered by upstream releases, and validating the output in a Docusaurus-based documentation setup. 
+
+"A key part of my approach was treating documentation as production infrastructure: iterating locally, validating assumptions, opening pull requests, and refining solutions based on maintainer feedback. The goal was not just to make things work once, but to reduce long-term manual effort and make the documentation workflow more contributor-friendly and reliable."


The second part of this paragraph "The goal ..." really needs some commas to help digest the ands.

jsilvela · 2026-01-09T08:41:15Z

content/blog/lfx-mentorship-documentation-anushka-saxena/index.md

+
+Anushka says that working with mentors Gabriele, Francesco, and Leonardo was the highlight of her mentorship. "We had a very collaborative rhythm!" Through Slack, GitHub issues, weekly sync calls and pull requests, the team was responsive and generous with feedback, making it easy to iterate and improve. Anushka appreciated that discussions were clear, constructive, and focused on long-term project health rather than quick fixes. "Gabriele, Francesco, and Leonardo constantly provided the overall high-level vision that helped me see how my small scripts would affect the project as a whole."
+
+Seeing my contributions become part of CloudNativePG’s documentation workflow and knowing they would support future releases, is very rewarding. The trust the maintainers placed in me by always encouraging me to take ownership of increasingly complex pieces of the docs pipeline rather than limiting my scope as “just a mentee”, really made me feel included."


This paragraph is complex and has a crammed feeling. Some ideas.

Suggested change

Seeing my contributions become part of CloudNativePG’s documentation workflow and knowing they would support future releases, is very rewarding. The trust the maintainers placed in me by always encouraging me to take ownership of increasingly complex pieces of the docs pipeline rather than limiting my scope as “just a mentee”, really made me feel included."

Seeing my contributions become part of CloudNativePG’s documentation workflow, and knowing they would support future releases, is very rewarding. The trust the maintainers placed in me, and their encouragement to take ownership of complex pieces of the pipeline, really made me feel included; not "just a mentee."

jsilvela · 2026-01-09T08:50:55Z

content/blog/lfx-mentorship-documentation-anushka-saxena/index.md

+
+## What’s next 
+
+While debugging the MDX sanitization, Anushka realized that Docusaurus is much stricter than standard Markdown. A failed build because of a single unclosed `<td>` tag taught her about how modern documentation engines render content as React components, and changed how she now views "docs as code". "Also, realizing how deeply documentation is tied to release engineering made me ponder upon how docs aren’t just reference material, but a critical part of user trust, operational safety, and adoption, especially for something as production-critical as Kubernetes-native PostgreSQL!" Certainly something she'll be taking into her next projects.


This is a "lessons learned" paragraph, and I think like the previous one, it feels a bit crammed. IMO should be condensed. I like the unclosed td anecdote.

Blog: add interview with Anushka Saxena

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Signed-off-by: Floor Drees <[email protected]>

FloorD requested a review from a team as a code owner January 2, 2026 10:59

Update index.md

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Signed-off-by: Floor Drees <[email protected]>

SaxenaAnushka102 reviewed Jan 7, 2026

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Co-authored-by: Anushka Saxena <[email protected]> Signed-off-by: Floor Drees <[email protected]>

sxd reviewed Jan 8, 2026

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jsilvela reviewed Jan 9, 2026

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		Anushka is a contributor to the Cloud Native ecosystem, with a particular focus on developer-centric projects where infrastructure, documentation, and community intersect. With a background in community leadership for major cloud providers, she remains active in CNCF initiatives, open-source projects like AsyncAPI, and the broader Developer tooling landscape.

		"One community that’s especially close to my heart is Data on Kubernetes (DoK). I first got involved during my college days as a volunteer for DoK Community Days, which was my introduction to cloud-native data workloads and open-source communities by Bart Farell, a mentor and a very well-known personality in the CNCF space. Coming back to the CloudNativePG ecosystem as a mentee later on felt like a full-circle moment!"


		Anushka worked on automating the import of versioned documentation into the CloudNativePG docs site so that new operator releases automatically trigger the correct documentation build. It started with a major "housekeeping" task: she wrote and executed a series of Node.js utility scripts to sanitize over 60 Markdown files. This involved converting MkDocs-style admonitions to Docusaurus syntax and fixing MDX spacing issues to ensure the build wouldn't crash.

		She also worked on the Sidebar Position Multiplier, [a script](https://github.com/cloudnative-pg/docs/pull/22) that intelligently re-indexed our documentation pages (10, 20, 30...) to allow future contributors to insert new pages without breaking the order. Finally, she helped architect the [Auto-Sync Pipeline](https://github.com/cloudnative-pg/docs/pull/18), a GitHub Action that automatically pulls documentation from the main repo into the docs repo whenever a new release is published. This involved writing a reusable import script, integrating it into a GitHub Actions workflow triggered by upstream releases, and validating the output in a Docusaurus-based documentation setup.


		## Start at the beginning

		Anushka has always been motivated by curiosity and the desire to understand how systems work. "Over time, open source became a natural extension of that curiosity because it offered a way to learn by contributing, asking questions, and building things that real people use." What really drew her in was when she realized that great software often faces issues not because of poor engineering, but because it’s hard to understand or adopt. "That realization shaped my interest in documentation modernization and contributor experience as first-class technical problems."


		She also worked on the Sidebar Position Multiplier, [a script](https://github.com/cloudnative-pg/docs/pull/22) that intelligently re-indexed our documentation pages (10, 20, 30...) to allow future contributors to insert new pages without breaking the order. Finally, she helped architect the [Auto-Sync Pipeline](https://github.com/cloudnative-pg/docs/pull/18), a GitHub Action that automatically pulls documentation from the main repo into the docs repo whenever a new release is published. This involved writing a reusable import script, integrating it into a GitHub Actions workflow triggered by upstream releases, and validating the output in a Docusaurus-based documentation setup.

		"A key part of my approach was treating documentation as production infrastructure: iterating locally, validating assumptions, opening pull requests, and refining solutions based on maintainer feedback. The goal was not just to make things work once, but to reduce long-term manual effort and make the documentation workflow more contributor-friendly and reliable."


		Anushka says that working with mentors Gabriele, Francesco, and Leonardo was the highlight of her mentorship. "We had a very collaborative rhythm!" Through Slack, GitHub issues, weekly sync calls and pull requests, the team was responsive and generous with feedback, making it easy to iterate and improve. Anushka appreciated that discussions were clear, constructive, and focused on long-term project health rather than quick fixes. "Gabriele, Francesco, and Leonardo constantly provided the overall high-level vision that helped me see how my small scripts would affect the project as a whole."

		Seeing my contributions become part of CloudNativePG’s documentation workflow and knowing they would support future releases, is very rewarding. The trust the maintainers placed in me by always encouraging me to take ownership of increasingly complex pieces of the docs pipeline rather than limiting my scope as “just a mentee”, really made me feel included."


		## What’s next

		While debugging the MDX sanitization, Anushka realized that Docusaurus is much stricter than standard Markdown. A failed build because of a single unclosed `<td>` tag taught her about how modern documentation engines render content as React components, and changed how she now views "docs as code". "Also, realizing how deeply documentation is tied to release engineering made me ponder upon how docs aren’t just reference material, but a critical part of user trust, operational safety, and adoption, especially for something as production-critical as Kubernetes-native PostgreSQL!" Certainly something she'll be taking into her next projects.

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