CONTRIBUTING: Maartje Eyskens on cert-manager
Tags: hacktoberfest, kubernetes
Published: 2020-09-25 15:08:28

> Leading up to (and during) the month of October, we want to help you discover open source projects to work on, and put your Hacktoberfest contributions to excellent use. Meet [Maartje Eyskens](https://github.com/meyskens), maintainer of the [cert-manager](https://cert-manager.io/) project.

>*Check out [this page](https://www.contributing.today/) regularly for more interviews with contributors & maintainers*

**What can you tell us about your project?**

[Cert-manager](https://cert-manager.io/) is an x509 certificate management solution for Kubernetes but that's a mouthful of words. What cert-manager does, it automates your certificate lifecycle inside Kubernetes. Just like Kubernetes would manage anything else for deployments, cert-manager will do the same for your certificates inside Kubernetes.
What cert-manager then allows you to do, is use these certificates to secure your application. For example, your ingress, but even your internal applications within Kubernetes can be secured using
cert-manager. To do this, cert-manager plugs into enterprise solutions such as [Vault](https://www.vaultproject.io/) and [Venafi](https://www.venafi.com/). However, cert-manager can also manage its own certificates and it can even get certificates from an ACME CA issuer like [Let's Encrypt](https://letsencrypt.org/).

**What contributions are you welcoming?**

We are welcoming all kinds of contributions to the project. This goes from helping out users in our [Slack](https://slack.cncf.io/), to improving our documentation and our
general website. In the code base there are also a lot of things to do: from fixing small bugs, to implementing one of our 100 open feature requests. This can be for a specific cloud provider you're familiar with or for the general Kubernetes controller.

**What skills do people need to contribute?**

Experience with [Kubernetes](https://kubernetes.io/) is a must-have and knowing [Go](https://golang.org) is also nice-to-have. However, I see many people who just jump into the project and start learning Go while contributing.

**How do I get started?**

You can go to our [GitHub repository](https://github.com/jetstack/cert-manager) and look for 'Good first issues'. We label the ones that we think are best to
get started there.
Also, if you have any questions, we are available every day in the [Kubernetes Slack](https://slack.cncf.io/) in cert-manager-dev, for any development-related questions. 
Also, feel free to jump into our [community meeting](https://zoom.us/j/904964148) which is every two weeks, where we talk about the latest updates. And you can even join in our [daily standup](https://meet.google.com/eum-fyvt-xpa) which is also public.


*Join, October 2nd, for [CONTRIBUTING.md - a virtual Hacktoberfest meetup](https://organize.mlh.io/participants/events/4258-contributing-md), free and open for anyone who wants to join. Learn what Open Source projects are looking for contributions, which communities are looking for new members, and who is looking for advice from someone with your exact skill set. Check [this page](https://www.contributing.today/) regularly for more interviews with contributors & maintainers which we'll release until the event.*