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.
Jay Lau (Guang Ya Liu) is an Advisory Software Engineer at IBM CSTL. He is the Technical Leader of the IBM Platform Resource Scheduler project. He has 5+ years of experience in large scale distributed system, SOA and Cloud Computing. He joined the OpenStack community in 2013. Now, he mainly focus on OpenStack compute, storage and application management. You can follow him on Twitter at @jaylau513.
1. What behavior has helped get you the furthest as a developer?
I want to say it is interest and passion. OpenStack is really an amazing project and it makes me want to work for it anywhere, at any time, with any device that can access Gerrit 😉
2. What is your favorite project that you’ve contributed code to?
Hmm, may I say I love all projects? 😉 To be honest, my current focus is nova, but also extending to cinder and heat.
3. How did you learn to code? Are you self-taught or did you learn in college? On-the-job?
If I want to lean code for a product, I will first get familiar with the key features of the product, and then think how the code will be written and then start to read and debug code. For OpenStack, you also need strong system technologies if you want to understand the code.
4. How did you first get involved in OpenStack?
When I first get involved in OpenStack for some research work in 2011, I set up a demo environment with StackOps and found that scheduler is very simple and weak in OpenStack. My company has a very good product named PRS (Platform Resource Scheduler) which is very good at resource scheduling. Hmm, you know how I start my journey on OpenStack then.
5. Define what “open source” means to you.
IMHO, “open source” means contribution and collaboration. Worldwide engineers from different companies collaborate together to contribute to create the best software. As a software engineer, “open source” can make us grow quickly in community.
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