New contributor: Interested in helping with cloud-init

[degerahmet]

Hi maintainers,

I'm Ahmet, a backend and Linux-focused software engineer currently exploring Canonical's cloud infrastructure and packaging ecosystem.

I'm reaching out because I’m preparing for a system-level engineering interview with Canonical and want to meaningfully contribute to open-source projects like cloud-init — both to learn and to show my genuine interest in this space.

I’ve already cloned the project, reviewed the contribution docs, and set up a local environment.

Would you be able to recommend:

• Any beginner-friendly issues I could start with?
• Areas of the codebase related to cloud initialization, packaging, or public cloud logic?
• Documentation or test files that might need improvement?

Also, is it necessary or recommended to use Ubuntu locally when contributing to cloud-init?

I'm currently using macOS as my main development environment. I can spin up an Ubuntu VM, container, or cloud instance if that's more aligned with how contributors usually work. Just let me know what's preferred.

Thanks a lot for your time 🙏 I’d love to start collaborating and learning from you all.

Best regards,
Ahmet

GitHub: https://github.com/ahmetdeger
Launchpad: https://launchpad.net/~ahmetdeger

[holmanb]

These questions are pretty high level and apply to most open source projects so I'm not going to try to answer them all. This is what I would say to any beginner: Start by diving in and learning. Read the docs, try using the project. Form a mental model of how the project works and see what's confusing or doesn't work how you expect it too. Iterate.

I'm currently using macOS as my main development environment.

I don't know of anybody currently developing cloud-init on macOS, but that shouldn't generally be an issue - virtual machines or cloud instances are typical ways to develop. Something that would actually be quite helpful would be to run unit tests on your local machine (make sure you have tox and a supported version of Python installed) and file a bug if you see any errors and try to fix any that you see.

Any beginner-friendly issues I could start with?

Did you check for issues with the good first issue tag?

[degerahmet]

Hey @holmanb, Thank you for your clarification!

Did you check for issues with the good first issue tag?

Yes, I did check, but the most recent one was from quite a long time ago, so I wasn’t sure if it was still an active issue.

I’ll start with the points you suggested.

Thanks again!