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July 28, 2026

I am Running for Kubernetes Steering Committee

Hi everyone,

I’m self-nominating for the 2026 Kubernetes Steering Committee election. I’m running as an independent this year — not representing any company, just myself and the community I’ve grown up in.

I’ve been a technical lead for engineering teams since 2013, including the last 8.5 years at Google, where I’ve led minikube since 2019. Under that leadership, minikube grew from 35K to 17.9M downloads, and I’ve had the privilege of welcoming and mentoring hundreds of new contributors for whom minikube was their first gateway into the Kubernetes world. The CNCF users survey has repeatedly named minikube the most popular way to start a Kubernetes cluster.

My open source path started well before Kubernetes. I was president of the DePaul Linux Community during college, and I never really stopped — that same instinct has carried me through dozens of open source projects since.

I’m honored to have been recognized among Kubernetes’ top all-time contributors at its 10-year anniversary, with more than 7,500 contributions — most recently ranked #4 for 2025 and featured on the official CNCF contributor card.

Leading minikube also taught me what inclusion means in practice, not just in policy. A few things I pushed for because they mattered to real people, not metrics:

  • minikube is the only Kubernetes CLI tool translated into 12 languages, because contributing shouldn’t require fluency in English.
  • Better support for users on slow or restricted internet connections — including many across Africa and Asia — who are too often an afterthought in tooling design, but deserve the same on-ramp into Kubernetes as everyone else.
  • The broadest platform support of any local Kubernetes tool: over a dozen VM and container drivers, and all three container runtimes — Docker, containerd, and CRI-O. minikube never picks a winner for you; you choose what fits your machine and your values.

If elected, I want to bring that same instinct to Steering: representing the voice of the underrepresented, and advocating for a culture of real inclusion across the project.

Thank you for considering my nomination.

— Medya (@medyagh)