The MariaDB Foundation Sea Lion Champions program celebrates the people and organizations who help make the MariaDB ecosystem stronger, more open, and more useful for everyone.

Today, we’re thrilled to introduce Fariha, a recent nominee for the MariaDB Foundation Sea Lion Champion program in the Technical Excellence category. Fariha’s journey into the world of databases and open-source contributions is both inspiring and a testament to the vibrant MariaDB community. We sat down with Fariha to discuss her path, her work, and what this nomination means to her.

The Interview

lefred: Fariha, congratulations on your nomination for the MariaDB Foundation Seal Lion Champion program in the Technical Excellence category! What does this nomination mean to you?

Fariha: Thank you! It’s truly an honor. I only graduated from university in 2024, and before that, I had never made any open-source contributions and had only taken one introductory SQL course. My background was actually in firmware and embedded systems, so moving into database engine development and becoming a core upstream contributor in under two years has been a huge and exciting transition.

To be nominated now, after joining Amazon’s RDS open source team and contributing upstream to MariaDB, feels incredible. It’s a meaningful validation of the work I’ve been doing and a reminder that fast growth is possible when you have strong mentorship, a supportive team, and an active open-source community around you.

lefred: That’s a remarkable journey, especially coming from a firmware background into databases. How did you start writing code for MariaDB?

Fariha: When I first joined Amazon, I knew I’d be working on engine code for MySQL and MariaDB. We were fortunate to be mentored by Otto, a former CEO of MariaDB Foundation who was working at Amazon at the time. He taught us new grads how to contribute upstream, from finding bugs on Jira to writing good commit messages and PR descriptions. That really kick-started my involvement.

Seeing progress on my pull requests and receiving frequent communication from the community made me more interested, so I started dedicating my spare time to finding Jiras and diving deep into the source code.

lefred: It sounds like a great onboarding process. How does your team at Amazon continue to foster this open-source spirit?

Fariha: We continue to make contributions as a team, and open-source work is now a very active part of our collaboration. We’ve started hosting monthly internal hackathons where we dedicate a day to working on Jiras, exploring new ideas, fixing core bugs and regressions, and building or improving plugins.

Those hackathons have helped create a lot of momentum. They encourage stronger communication within the team, give people focused time to contribute upstream, and often lead to concrete output that benefits both our work at Amazon and the wider MariaDB community.

lefred: That’s fantastic. How important is MariaDB in your daily work now?

Fariha: MariaDB is very important in my daily work. We work with MariaDB almost every day, especially around releases. A large part of our work involves fixing MTRs, investigating regressions, and making sure changes are stable before they affect customers or the broader community.

For example, even a small regression in a release can cause delays, so we spend a lot of time testing, debugging, and validating changes. It’s an integral part of our daily life at Amazon. We also teach new interns how to build MariaDB, contribute upstream, and build RDS MariaDB as one of their first tasks.

lefred: You mentioned the community and contributions. Are you familiar with the MariaDB Foundation, and what are your thoughts on its role?

Fariha: Yes, our team actively works with the MariaDB Foundation, with Tony Chen serving as our close liaison. Internally, we often refer to the MariaDB Foundation simply as MariaDB because our work focuses on the open-source server and community side, rather than on MariaDB Enterprise.

I think the Foundation plays an important role in keeping the open-source codebase collaborative, transparent, and sustainable. Strong communication between the Foundation, contributors, and companies like Amazon is essential for improving the server and supporting long-term development.

lefred: Indeed, the MariaDB Foundation focuses on adoption, openness, and continuity. We aim to grow MariaDB Server usage, keep development transparent, handle contributions, and ensure the codebase remains stable and maintainable over the long term. Speaking of contributions, have you or your team interacted with the MariaDB Ecosystem Hub?

Fariha: I haven’t personally interacted with it in depth yet, but I know our teammate Tony Chen, who liaises closely with MariaDB, looked through it and provided feedback, mainly on documentation improvements. It sounds like a great initiative to centralize tooling and plugins, and I’m excited to see how it develops.

lefred: As someone who primarily codes, you might not be as familiar with all the end-user features. But are there any new features in MariaDB that particularly interest you or your team?

Fariha: My focus has been heavily on engine internals, releases, testing, and upstream bug fixes, so I tend to approach features from the perspective of how they interact with the core server and how we can help keep things stable and performant.

I’ll also be owning the MariaDB release next quarter, which is giving me great exposure to a broader set of features across the server. One feature that stands out for our team is MariaDB Vector. My manager, Hugo Wen, contributed a lot to the review of the Vector feature, which is definitely significant to us. It’s exciting to see MariaDB continue to expand into new areas while maintaining its focus on performance and reliability.

lefred: Absolutely, the similarity search on the vector data type is very cool and fast! I also really like the online schema change inside the server and the InnoDB-based binary logs for performance. Finally, do you know any of the other nominees in your category?

Fariha: I don’t know them personally, but I’ve seen activity from Mark Callaghan. When the blog post about the nominees was published, I looked up the others. Everyone is so experienced, with diverse backgrounds—some have their own websites and blogs, others are pursuing master’s or PhDs. It was a little intimidating, but also really cool to see the different paths everyone took to end up in the same space.

lefred: It’s a great community, and I really encourage you to attend live events and respond to calls for papers. That’s where you meet people like Mark and many others. Events like FOSDEM in Belgium, a major European open-source developer conference, or Percona Live, which recently took place in the US and will be in Amsterdam in September, are excellent opportunities. MariaDB also hosts a day around FOSDEM.

Fariha: That’s wonderful! I’d love to move to Europe someday, so hopefully, I’ll become a regular at these meetings. I appreciate the encouragement to submit CFPs.

lefred: Thank you so much for your time, Fariha! And good luck with the award!

Fariha: Thank you for the opportunity! I really appreciate it. I hope I presented myself well.