openstack team mailing list archive

[Michael Still <michael.still@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Greetings. I'd also like to run for the Technical Committee.

About Me
========

I've been a software engineer or ops person for around 15 years. In that
time I've worked for universities, governments, a proprietary software
vendor, Google and Canonical. I've worked both in Australia and in
Silicon Valley. I am also the Director for linux.conf.au 2013, an
awesome Open Source conference in Australia which just happens to have
heaps of OpenStack content this time around.

I've been involved with the OpenStack project since the start of this
year, and am a Nova core reviewer. I have also contributed code to
Glance, although most of my code is in Nova. I am also a very active
Nova code reviewer.

Involvement with Open Source
============================

I released my first open source code in 1999 (a C PDF generation
library), and have been hacking on things ever since. OpenStack however
is by far the largest Open Source project I've been associated with, and
I find that very exciting.

I've also written two books -- one on ImageMagick and one on MythTV.
Don't buy them, they're hilariously out of date now.

What I'd like to contribute
===========================

I spent six years at Google working in site reliability including three
years scaling mobile search, and think I can make an interesting
contribution to OpenStack in the form of encouraging a design direction
that works well at scale. Most of my development efforts have been in
that domain, and we clearly have more to do to make OpenStack something
which is fun for operators.

I do think we're in a better state than we were a year ago, and we
should thank those who have gotten us this far.

There are others working in this space as well, but I think operators
deserve a voice on the Technical Committee. The Committee is especially
important to people who care about operations because its an opportunity
to make good choices before large amounts of code are written.

Technical Leadership
====================

I've been the technical lead for various projects over the years,
including that mobile search job at Google. Some of those projects were
quite high profile, where technical decisions could cost hundreds of
millions of dollars. The Director role for the conference also involves
leading a diverse team of around 20 volunteers, which is much more like
herding cats than I'd like to admit.

I have also sat on the board of two professional associations in the
past, as well as the IT advisory board of a not-for-profit charity group.

Conclusion
==========

Ops is really important to OpenStack adoption. The Technical Committee
is one of the places we need people advocating for operators. However, I
should say that I am confident that all the other candidates will do a
great job, and the outcome of the election wont change my involvement in
the OpenStack project in any way.

Thanks for reading this far.

Mikal