🧑‍💻 He’s an enterprise-level AIOps expert
🧠 He’s an active contributor to Apache SeaTunnel
🧗‍♂️ He loves hiking and cycling and is passionate about every adventure in the world of code

In this edition, we’re excited to feature Ni Jiahui from the Cloud Capability Center, China Mobile. Join us as he shares his real, inspiring, and hands-on journey with the SeaTunnel community.

🎯 GitHub ID: @cosmosni
🧠 Expertise: AIOps – Fault Diagnosis / Alert Aggregation / Self-healing Analysis
🏞️ Hobbies: Hiking, cycling
📍 Community Tags: #ActiveContributor #RealWorldPractice #TechnicalGrowth

🔍 First Encounter with SeaTunnel: A Practical Need Sparked It All

“It all started with a need to export historical data from Elasticsearch to other storage systems.”

DataX was too limited. Kettle lacked the flexibility. Custom Spark jobs brought too many issues. While exploring options, Ni came across SeaTunnel through community discussions. He gave it a shot—and it worked perfectly, solving his problem on the first try. That marked the beginning of his open-source journey.

🚀 The First Contribution: From “Pitfalls” to “Breakthroughs”

In April 2023, he submitted his very first piece of code. But it wasn’t until a year later, in April 2024, that his first PR was officially merged.

As a newcomer, he struggled with GitHub Flow, CI pipelines, and coding standards. His early commits frequently triggered CI errors. Fortunately, with guidance from community veterans, he gradually learned:

• ✅ Build and packaging processes
• ✅ Test requirements (including coverage)
• ✅ Code style and naming conventions
• ✅ Review feedback and iterative revisions

“One PR went through over ten revisions and took more than two months. But when it finally got merged—it felt incredibly rewarding.”

🧱 High-Quality PRs That Advanced the Project

From that first contribution onward, Ni Jiahui has consistently submitted valuable PRs, enhancing SeaTunnel’s connectors, engine, and WebUI.

🔹 Enhanced Elasticsearch Connector

Supports both SQL and PIT (Point In Time) read modes, giving users greater flexibility for data retrieval in various sync scenarios.
📌 PRs: #6425, #7052, #8895, #9150

🔹 Prometheus Connector

Enables reading and writing Prometheus metrics, making it easy to integrate monitoring data into warehouses or analytics platforms.
📌 PR: #7265

🔹 SQL Transform Enhancements

Adds unnest and explode functions, empowering users to better process complex and nested data structures.
📌 PR: #7928

🔹 Kafka Native Format Support

Introduces native Kafka format read/write, enhancing ecosystem compatibility and reducing transformation overhead.
📌 PR: #8724

🔹 WebUI Basic Auth Support

Implements basic authentication for the Web UI, helping enterprise users meet security and compliance needs.
📌 PR: #9171

He also fixed several bugs and optimized the connector framework, boosting SeaTunnel’s robustness and overall user experience.

🏭 Real-World Application in Production

“Our company now uses SeaTunnel extensively, mainly for synchronizing data across heterogeneous sources.”

Over time, Ni has customized SeaTunnel for internal use cases:

• 💡 Complex Data Cleansing Logic: Implementing data masking, field standardization, and format transformations
• 🔁 Custom Transformation Plugins: Tailored logic for specific business needs
• 🔄 Workflow Templates: Standardizing common source-sync tasks for easier reuse

All of these extensions strictly follow SeaTunnel’s plugin architecture for maintainability. Many general-purpose features were even contributed back to the community.

Currently, his team is planning to migrate their entire CDC (Change Data Capture) platform to SeaTunnel, unifying their data pipeline and improving both stability and observability.

📌 Core Challenges in Data Integration & SeaTunnel’s Solutions

In Ni Jiahui’s view, modern data integration faces five key challenges:

1. Multi-source heterogeneity: Support for various DBs, file systems, and messaging platforms
2. Data accuracy & consistency: No missing or duplicate data during sync
3. High throughput & concurrency: Scalable for massive datasets
4. Flexibility & extensibility: Custom plugins, rules, and scheduling integration
5. Ease of use & observability: Low entry barrier, simple config, and visual management

“SeaTunnel delivers across all of these aspects. It’s the most enterprise-ready integration tool I’ve worked with so far.”

💬 What Is a Contributor—and What Do They Do?

“Contributors are the driving force of open source.”

In Ni’s eyes, contributors aren’t just code writers—they’re the co-builders of the project. They contribute through:

• ✨ Code contributions: New features, bug fixes, performance improvements
• 📚 Docs & use cases: Sharing tutorials, best practices, and demos
• 💬 Community engagement: Participating in issues, giving suggestions, attending meetings
• 🧲 Ecosystem growth: Promoting the project, bringing in new users

No contribution is too small—every test case, comment, and PR helps move the project forward.

🌱 Open Source Offers More Than Just Code Growth

SeaTunnel’s active and inclusive community has brought Ni many forms of growth:

• 🌍 Connecting with like-minded developers
• 💼 Expanding professional visibility and opportunities
• 🧠 Learning cutting-edge ideas and tools (like the fast-growing MCP toolset)

He firmly believes that open source isn’t just a hobby—it’s something worth investing your passion and energy into.

✅ A Word to Aspiring Contributors: Try Submitting Your First PR!

“If you’re already using SeaTunnel, why not submit a PR—even if it’s just fixing a typo?”

Whether you’re a data engineer, platform developer, architect, or student—you can:

• 📦 Fix a small issue
• 🧪 Add a test case
• 📝 Improve the docs
• 💬 Join a discussion

Every bit counts, and every contribution brings you one step deeper into the open-source world.

📣 If you love tech and open source, we welcome you to join the SeaTunnel community and help build the future!
📌 GitHub: 👉 https://github.com/apache/seatunnel