About Sofia (in her own words):
I am from Buenos Aires and am currently pursuing my engineering degree at the National Technology University of Argentina. I spent a lot of my childhood playing with computers, taking them apart and putting them back together. That, and my siblings support, got me interested in the area early on and is what made me decide to pursue an engineering degree.
How did you hear about OPNFV and what got you interested in this internship?
It all started after one of my mentors recommended that I look into internships in open source. I first interned at OpenStack where I designed and developed a feature inside Ceph drive. When my internship ended, I attended the OpenStack Summit in Barcelona, where I discovered the OPNFV internship.
Can you talk about your experience working on an open source project? Any previous experiences you can share or key learnings from working on OPNFV so far?
My main goal while interning at OPNFV was to containerize VNFs running in Kubernetes and provide the applications to the community. It was a very different experience for me interning for OPNFV because my team was based in China. I’ve never had to work with a team in a different time zone. I learned a lot from the experience and it has taught me a great deal about effective communication. I can say hands down, working as an OPNFV intern was one of the coolest things that has happened to me.
What’s the best thing you’ve learned from your internship?
The best thing I learned as an intern is more effective communication despite the barriers of location and time zones.
Who is your mentor and what’s the experience been like?
My mentors are Xuan Xia and Ruijing Guo. They are amazing mentors who are passionate about their work. They taught me a great deal and were so helpful. My managers, David and Ray were amazing as well and very kind. Additionally, I’ve met some awesome people at the third OPNFV Plugfest.
What do you want to do next?
Since my internship I have worked on a paper about the benefits of VNFs and cloud computing (in Spanish) that was selected for CoNallsi 2018 (Argentine Congress of Engineering). In addition, I am now an associate software engineer for OpenStack at Red Hat, and look forward to attending more summits and learning more about open source.