Over a two-month period, contributed to Kong’s core repositories by enhancing backend reliability and configuration management. Addressed data integrity in the Kong/kong Admin API by implementing validation logic in Lua to reject null or empty tag arrays, accompanied by automated tests to enforce contract correctness. In Kong/go-kong and go-database-reconciler, improved plugin configuration synchronization and diffing accuracy by introducing logic in Go to clear deprecated fields and align API responses, reducing false positives during configuration comparisons. Updated integration tests in Kong/deck using YAML and Go to ensure test data accurately reflected plugin configurations, supporting stable deployments and backward compatibility.