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.
Ionuț Arțăriși is a senior software engineer at SUSE. You can reach him at https://github.com/mapleoin.
1. How did you first get involved in OpenStack?
I first became involved when I joined the SUSE Cloud team. I started working on fixing test failures from our CI infrastructure. It was mostly small fixes for things that broke on SUSE due to package version incompatibilities or backports of fixes we found useful.
By the way, you can see our openSUSE Cloud jenkins jobs here:
http://ci.opensuse.org/view/OpenStack/
And here’s a nice matrix of all the unittest jobs:
http://ci.opensuse.org/view/Cloud/job/openstack-unittest/
And the packages are in the Open Build Service:
https://build.opensuse.org/project/show?project=Cloud%3AOpenStack
2. What publications, blogs, mailing lists, etc do you read every day?
I read quite a few mailing lists, though there can be too much traffic to keep track of sometimes. Specifically, I like the usual OpenStack, Openstack-dev and Opensuse-cloud mailing lists. I’ve been doing some work on OpenStack Chef cookbooks lately, so I’m also reading the chef-openstack list and the chef and chef-dev lists from opscode.
These are the main ones right now. There are also those of past projects I’ve been involved with, internal mailing lists and other stuff that I occasionally find interesting, like opensuse-packaging.
I also read HackerNews (http://news.ycombinator.org/) a lot. I think it’s been my go-to website for interesting news for more than five years now. It has OpenStack news as well, too from time to time :).
3. What do you think is the coolest thing that’s happened with OpenStack over the past three years?
I think the coolest thing has been the wide adoption and the speed with which the community has grown. It feels like the rate of growth has been constantly accelerating on the traditional OpenStack projects (nova, keystone etc.), but also with a lot of new initiatives popping up and quickly gaining a lot of traction (cinder, heat etc.). It’s really amazing to look at such a big community and think that it’s only three years old. I recommend http://www.stackalytics.com/ for some really interesting statistics – there are around 1600 people contributing from around 150 companies. In a way, it’s also surprising that the growth seems to be sustainable.
It’s still fairly easy to contribute a commit as a newcomer. There is a lot of good documentation on setting up a development environment and contributing a patch and it’s all pretty sane, especially compared to other projects of this size. There is a lot of infrastructure working in the background to make this easy and a lot of people doing a good job working on that and on documentation.
4. Define what “open source” means to you.
I think it’s the best way to develop software. Being able to collaborate on a project with virtually anyone in the world makes a huge difference.
Projects like OpenStack have proven that it’s possible for big companies competing against each other to collaborate on the same project, even though in the end each has its own product. This makes a lot of sense because we’re all basically solving the same problem. With closed source software, each company would have to come up with its own solution, different from the others and this wastes a lot of resources compared to having everyone work on the same base project. As a developer, it’s also great to be able to work together with some of the best minds in the world, across country and company borders.
5. Where’s your favorite place to code? In the office, at a local coffee shop? In bed?
I mostly code from the office and sometimes from my standing desk at home. But I do remember an especially nice coding place. I spent a couple of days coding at a friend’s house in the Hungarian countryside.
There was a really nice patio in the garden with an old wooden table and wooden bench. The weather was warm, there was natural light, fresh air and even some butterflies. What more could you ask for?
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