Maintainer Month 2023: Behind the scenes with Yusuke Kuoka

Yusuke Kuoka, a Senior Software Engineer at SurrealDB, shares his journey as an open-source maintainer and his current focus on developing the 'change feeds' feature in SurrealDB. With a background in application and infrastructure development, Kuoka emphasizes the importance of open-source contributions, recounting his experience with projects like 'kube-aws', which automated Kubernetes deployment on AWS, and other popular tools such as helmfile and actions-runner-controller. These open-source efforts have allowed him to introduce and scale Kubernetes within his company and the broader community. His interest in SurrealDB was piqued by its potential to serve multiple database functions within a single solution, leading him to propose and implement a scalable 'change feeds' feature that records all database changes, which he sees as foundational for further development and integration capabilities. Kuoka appreciates the collaborative nature of open-source projects and the ability to make impactful changes, which have been instrumental in his career and current role at SurrealDB.