Somtochi Onyekwere is an open-source maintainer and a Senior Software Engineer with over five years of experience building reliable, scalable systems that help developers deploy applications at global technology companies. At Fly.io, she works on Corrosion, the open-source distributed system behind the networking layer. Before Fly, she was a Developer Experience Engineer and maintainer of FluxCD, an open-source project for GitOps on Kubernetes that powers enterprise developer platforms at companies like Microsoft and ControlPlane.
Alongside her engineering work, Somtochi is passionate about building community, a thread that runs back to her time at the Federal University of Technology, Owerri, as a GitHub Campus Expert and Ingressive Campus Ambassador. Today, she co-organises Kubernetes Community Days Nigeria, whose third edition last year drew over 500 attendees from across Africa.
Explain your job to a five-year-old.
I work on the tools that let other people run their websites and apps, the ones you use on your phone every day. Itās a bit like building houses for people. Normally, if you wanted a house, youād have to buy the land, gather the materials, and put it all together yourself. The companies I work with handle all of that for you. You just show up with your stuff and move in.
