Over the last few months on chat.fp.o and at conferences I have started joining into conversations- listening, asking questions, making assertions, telling bad jokes. All this activity has led to a recurring question by many people in the community, “uhh, who are you?”
Oops, it’s been a while since I was active in Fedora so reintroductions are overdue. In short, I am a people manager at Red Hat, responsible for Community Linux Engineering, everything from the system administrators to quality engineers to the FPL and many roles in-between: most of the people who work full time in a community-facing capacity are in my group. This is particularly true of Red Hatters who are responsible for the combined whole, as opposed to individual package maintainers.
But this isn’t just an introduction, this is a reintroduction. My first foray into the Fedora community, beyond just running Fedora, was in 2012 when my team at Red Hat started to explore the potential for ARM servers. We, with many of you, bootstrapped armv7hl, then aarch64. We started with a Seneca College partnership, we gave away hardware, we made ugly uboot hacks, ported hundreds of packages, helped establish the Linaro Enterprise Group to do more ports & standardization, and solved seemingly thousands of circular dependencies- and hired a bunch of great contributors along the way, folks like Marcin Juszkiewicz and Paul Whalen. Several of us took what we learned from the experience and replicated the work inside Red Hat with RHEL 7, first for ppc64le, then aarch64- two architectures that are mainstream in RHEL today, but scarcely existed a decade ago. For me that evolved into driving general RHEL development as an individual, then management, then last year I had the opportunity to come back to support Red Hat’s Linux communities in general and Fedora in particular.
I think it’s fair to say that most of the RHEL management team has, as a whole, tended to be hands-off in Fedora’s affairs. There are some notable exceptions of course, but on average, most people working as managers are less involved in Fedora. There’s no written rule about this, so for my part I’ve inferred that most managers don’t think they have a lot of value to contribute compared to the people who they manage who are engaged in Fedora. Even in writing this blog I feel apprehensive: do I have anything to say people want to hear? Maybe just one thing…
Having come full circle, starting a project in the Fedora community, maturing it in RHEL, learning deeply how RHEL works and shaping it, and now back in a community space, I believe I have one valuable thing to offer: insider perspective. In the coming weeks I will be sharing insights and ideas. I’m not sure where it will lead, but that’s part of the fun of sharing with others, the feedback alters the course. I'd love to hear from you.
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