Introduction

Hi, I'm Rishi Raj, a third-year B.Tech student in Computer Science and AI at Newton School of Technology, Rishihood University. I like to know how something works underneath before I build on top of it, so I end up writing a lot of things from scratch: a vector database in Go, a news pipeline that runs on its own, and an environment where LLM agents learn by trial and error.

Most of 2026 went into open source. I was a maintainer and LFX mentee at Meshery, a CNCF project, and these days I'm sending fixes to C2SI, Open Food Facts and Kolibri. I'm looking for software engineering and AI/ML roles where I can keep working this way.

I · Experience

Full CV →

Feb 2026 – Oct 2026
Maintainer
Meshery (CNCF)
2026 · Term 2
LFX Mentee, Models Support for OCI Registries
Meshery (CNCF)

II · Projects

All projects →

Go
Quiver
A vector database written from scratch, about 75% as fast as FAISS on SIFT1M.
Python · LLMs
HELIX
A news pipeline that reads 400 articles a day and emails each reader a personal digest.

III · Writing

Soon
No posts yet. My first one will appear here.

Open source · Meshery (CNCF) and beyond

Open Source Contributions

Maintainer & LFX Mentee · Meshery (CNCF) · Feb – Oct 2026

133merged pull requests

300+pull requests reviewed

LFXMentee · CNCF Meshery

github.com/rishiraj38 every merged pull request ↗

Counted from GitHub on 21 Oct 2026. Gold links are still open for review.

01Permission shield and RBAC

Put every permission check in Meshery UI, Meshery Cloud and Kanvas behind one shared component, driven by keys generated from the schemas.

Built the permission shield in Sistent. An overlay, a provider and hooks that any component can use with only a permission key and an action.
sistent#1686 sistent#1704 sistent#1756 sistent#1774
Moved Meshery UI onto it. Replaced the old CAN() checks across navigation, component authorisations, telemetry and connection buttons.
meshery#20590 meshery#20697 meshery#20860 meshery#21008 meshery#21068
Generated permission constants from the schemas. Keys now come from meshery/schemas instead of hand-kept lists, and the docs table is built from the same source.
schemas#974 meshery#20354 docs#1111 docs#1119
Made switching organisations permission-aware. The switcher lists only the organisations you can act in, and clears stale keys when you switch.
meshery#21366 sistent#1793 meshery#20032 meshery#19933
Wrote it down. A component guide, a permission-key guide and a blog post on the migration.
layer5#7961 meshery#19620 meshery.io#2850

02OCI registry support

My LFX mentorship project: ship Meshery models as standard OCI artifacts.

Push and pull models with ORAS. Models are stored with OCI manifests, blobs, digests and media types, so any OCI registry can host them.

03Sistent and the Meshery UI

Day-to-day work on the shared design system and the app that uses it.

Moved Meshery off direct MUI imports. The app shell, theme wrapper and root primitives now come from Sistent.
meshery#19021 meshery#19126
Filled gaps in Sistent's icons and tests. New icons, consistent exports, automated icon tests, and Jest moved to SWC.
sistent#1466 sistent#1467 sistent#1468 sistent#1530 sistent#1518 sistent#1586 meshery#19735
Added design relationship evaluation. An Evaluate button in the UI and the matching endpoint in the schemas.
meshery#19798 schemas#916

04Keeping the repos building

Small changes across many repositories so builds and CI keep passing.

Upgraded the Go toolchain to 1.26.4 in six repos.
kanvas-site#235 kubectl-meshsync-snapshot#86 meshery-academy#118 meshery-istio#767 meshery-linkerd#662 meshery-nighthawk#84
Fixed Hugo builds on six academy sites.
exoscale-academy#404 academy-example#138 academy-theme#202 layer5-academy#226 digitalocean-academy#48 meshery-academy#115
Repaired broken CI workflows.
meshery#19159 meshery#19209 layer5#7816 layer5#7856

05Beyond Meshery

Since September 2026, in other open-source organisations.

C2SI, 13 merged. A Hough line operator, affine transforms and pipeline export in imagelab; clearer validation errors and a loss-function picker in tensormap; dark-mode charts in dataloom.
imagelab#389 imagelab#376 imagelab#375 imagelab#419 tensormap#418 tensormap#416 dataloom#532 dataloom#519
Open Food Facts, 1 merged and 5 open. A country filter and 30-day summary for the prices stats API, dark mode for knowledge panels, and autocomplete for traceability codes.
open-prices#1464 open-prices#1461 webcomponents#679 webcomponents#646 explorer#2091 open-prices-frontend#2477
Learning Equality, 3 merged. Accessibility and per-user settings fixes in Kolibri, plus a test migration to Vue Testing Library.
kolibri#15431 kolibri#15434 kolibri#15466
Single fixes in large projects. An error check in CPython's string interning, two minikube fixes, an eBPF profiler extension for OpenTelemetry, and fixes in Submitty and FOSSASIA.
cpython#157898 minikube#23663 minikube#23652 otel-releases#1679 Submitty#13374 scrum_helper#865
Waiting for review. New features for MetaCall, and a nil-check fix for Uber's nilaway.
faas#168 launchpad#43 nilaway#528

Introduction

I · Experience

Maintainer

LFX Mentee, Models Support for OCI Registries

II · Projects

Quiver

HELIX

III · Writing

Things I've built end to end.

Quiver

HELIX

Smart Emergency

AeroPrep