This post is part of the OpenStack Open Mic series to spotlight the people who have helped make OpenStack successful. Each week, a new contributor will step up to the mic and answer five questions about OpenStack, cloud, careers and what they do for fun.
Julie Pichon is a Software Engineer at Red Hat. She focuses her efforts on Horizon, the OpenStack web dashboard, and is a member of the core team. You can follow her on Twitter @jpichon_net.
1. What do you do when you’re not obsessing over and working with OpenStack?
I’m usually found immersed in learning Japanese, or organising events and workshops for my local hackerspace here in Dublin (Tog.ie).
2. What was your first commit or contribution and why did you make it?
My first contribution was a patch for the Horizon security groups form, to allow a security group to set itself as an allowed source of inbound traffic. I’d been working with AWS for a while and the problem was fresh in my mind, and the fix looked simple enough for a first contribution. It was interesting to figure out places where Horizon uses Django differently, such as the test fixtures. Getting set up with the development tools like Gerrit was a breeze thanks to the wiki documentation.
3. What other OpenStack developers deserve a shout out for the work they’re doing in the community? Who are our unsung heroes? Your own?
I’m really excited about the work Daisy (Ying Chun Guo) is doing to shape the internationalization team and increase the visibility of the translation and internationalization work. It’s important in order to make OpenStack more accessible and increase its adoption, and related issues shouldn’t come as a second thought.
4. What do you think are the benefits of the open, community-driven approach to development?
Personally, I enjoy the way it brings together people from all over, with their own perspective and strengths to enrich the project with. It avoids wasted, duplicated effort behind walls. It’s a great way to get interested people involved and to bring them up to speed, making the project more sustainable. There are many more.
5. What is your favorite productivity hack? Secret trick? Shortcut you’re slightly embarrassed to admit?
Since I usually work with different versions of devstack and openstack in multiple VMs, I found my life greatly improved when I discovered emacs’ TrampMode for editing remote files. I find it much easier to have all the files I need open in the same editor on my main machine rather than sessions or editors open everywhere. It’s saved me a couple of time too, when a VM died an untimely death…
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