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.
Chang Bo is an OpenStacker on IBM’s CSTL cloud team. He has been working on the OpenStack project since October of 2012, with the first batch of OpenStackers from the team in BJ. His first OpenStack contribution can be traced back to 2012, when he worked on the PowerVM driver under Nova to support IBM Power Systems. Now, he mainly focuses on OpenStack Oslo and Nova, and his wish is to work worldwide with top engineers to build the most efficient and high quality common library for OpenStack’s success— Kernel of the Cloud! Find his ‘gpthread’ at http://weibo.com/u/3977991006 or find him on LinkedIn here.
1. What publications, blogs, mailing lists, etc do you read every day?
The openstack-dev is the mailing list I must read every day. It is like morning coffee to me, with which I can follow community trends. Another important web site that I read every day is http://www.openstack.cn/. It’s OpenStack China’s technical community. They report on the latest news from OpenStack’s China-based companies as well as technical sharings.
2. If you couldn’t be a developer, what would your dream job be?
I planned to be a physicist when I was young. Physics show the rules of nature, and every new discovery will improve our view of the world. I always got the highest physics score in my high school :).
3. What behavior has helped get you the furthest as a developer?
Always reading code and practicing in a real environment. We learn too much knowledge about how the operating system is running and how to program in different languages. These are just keys to the treasure, and hands on experience makes me feel close to the truth. For instance, I wrote code snippets to verify the wrong usage of sqlalchemy — the code is small but enough to show the truth.
4. What is your favorite project that you’ve contributed code to?
Oslo, the common library for all OpenStack projects. It is very important and useful for each project. We need to guarantee the quality of code to make it work well. I still remember when my first patch for Oslo was merged after a long term review. In this project, we have Python experts and domain experts. New common ideas are raised here, and to review them, I have to dig into Python standard and third party libraries and learn domain knowledge that will help me grow quickly.
5. What do you think is the coolest thing that’s happened with OpenStack over the past three years?
We seem to have finally found a direction that most people believe to build an open cloud ecosystem, and more and more companies and people join the community. I was surprised by this fact, and my friend one day told me that his company had been training them with OpenStack. From my view, his company’s business is far from cloud. The rapid spread of OpenStack makes us more close with the cloud.
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