While I was enjoying the coast, I received a message from my friend and mentor, Luiz Real, something like:
“We need to have a brand. What’s mine? What’s yours? How do you want people to remember you? Are you building a cool brand?”
As if that wasn’t enough, he also dropped:
“Is it really your focus? What are your dreams? Does what you’re doing help you achieve your dream?”
Being quite evasive, I let out a “Just difficult questions today, huh?! “ and went on with an explanation about my dreams.
But why the hell am I telling you this? Well, it’s very simple — that’s how it started.
A mentorship. That’s what defined the next 12 months of my career.
If you read my previous article, you know I defend open source as the greatest equalizer of opportunities in the IT job market. Now, I’m taking this seriously: the goal is to become a committer for a relevant Quarkus extension or even Quarkus Core.
The Moment of Clarity
Last weekend, I had a meeting for a little over 2 hours with Luiz Real. It was a very rich moment and certainly an inflection point in my career.
The mentorship with Luiz Real made me confront three simple questions:
- What are your dreams for the next 12 months?
- What prevents you from achieving them?
- What is the action plan?
The answers led me to a clear goal: to get paid to work with open source. And the path to that? Becoming a committer.
With the mentorship, I realized I was contributing in a scattered way. PRs here and there, on random projects, with no direction. It wasn’t bad, but it also wasn’t taking me anywhere.
Why Committer?
It’s not about the title. It’s about what it represents: a community trusts you to maintain a project that thousands of developers use in production.
Real impact. It’s solving problems that affect real people.
Motivation
Becoming a committer may seem grandiose, but my dreams are actually quite common — I want my own house, financial freedom to retire without depending on the government, to be a reference for my community, etc. I don’t think it’s very different from what most devs want.
I’ve always thought an international career would make this easier, and although I’ve insisted quite a bit on these things, Luiz was always provoking me: “Ok, but what would really make you say from here in 1 year that you had the best year of your life?!”
After 1 hour of conversation, I had the epiphany:
“It would be really cool to get paid to work with Open Source!”
Those who know me know I’m obsessed with this — I spend all my free time reading issues and trying to find projects I can contribute to, so getting paid for this would be a real dream, besides also tying all the other dreams together.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m very happy in my current job, but he wanted to know what would make it the best year of my life.
First Step
The first step was to do a small case study on Core extensions and on Quarkiverse based on the number of community interactions (number of issues, stars, and forks) as applicable, so I could map the most relevant extensions and choose two of them.
The extensions are Quarkus Hibernate and Quarkus LangChain4j, two extremely relevant extensions for the community. I confess they’re not the most accessible, but that won’t stop me.
I’ve already opened my first PR for Quarkus Langchain4J, see here: https://github.com/quarkiverse/quarkus-langchain4j/pull/2301.
This doesn’t mean I’ll stop contributing to other projects/extensions, just that my contributions will be more focused. I still want to continue contributing to Quarkus Roq to migrate my blog from Hugo, for example.
Which extension/project is indispensable to you?
The Journey
I intend to bring posts here on the blog about this journey, but I’ll create more detailed content and even live streams on The Dev Vault OSS.
You probably have no idea what that is, right?! It’s my Discord server to gather people interested in contributing to Open Source. It’s through this server that I promote my free mentorship for people who want to follow this path.
Let’s go?! I help you, you help me, and together we grow. Access the link at the end.
Acknowledgment
I couldn’t fail to thank Luiz Real, who kindly gave more than 2 hours of his time to guide me and really made all the difference for me. I feel compelled to execute and achieve results through our plan as a gesture of gratitude to him.
But it doesn’t end there! Did you know you can also have a mentorship with him? He has an open waitlist, contact him for more details. I’ll leave his contacts at the end of the article.
Conclusion
I know becoming a committer isn’t something you say casually, and that doing this in just 12 months will be a Herculean journey. Nobody will pay me for having updated a README.md, and even if I try harder than possible, I may only get closer to this dream.
Today is 04/04/2026, the mentorship took place on 03/28/2026, meaning I no longer have 12 months, but I’m 100% committed to my goal. I have my plan laid out and a kanban board for each task. I really believe in this “Build in Public” philosophy, and this article will serve as motivation over the next few months.