This post is part of the OpenStack Open Mic series to spotlight the people who have helped make OpenStack successful as we celebrate the third birthday of the project. Each day in July, a new contributor will step up to the mic and answer five questions about OpenStack, cloud, careers and what they do for fun.
Joe Gordon was first introduced to OpenStack Cactus as an intern at Fujitsu Labs of America, and began actively contributing during Essex development while at Cloudscaling. He currently works solely on OpenStack as a member of nova-core and hacking-core on behalf of HP.
1. What are the essentials for someone just getting started with OpenStack? Sites? Books? Conferences? People?
Start playing with it. When I first started using OpenStack, there was very little documentation and it took two of us several weeks to get something working, now one can get something like devstack up and running in under a few hours.
2. What other OpenStack developers deserve a shout out for the work they’re doing in the community? Who are our unsung heroes? Your own?
Everyone in the #openstack-infra for helping make OpenStack development work at a massive scale. With 290 contributors and 2,288 commits in June alone, keeping everything running efficiently is a huge accomplishment.
3. How do you think the OpenStack community will need to evolve over the next few years in light of the fast growth and maturing user needs?
I would like to see more people focus on making sure OpenStack is stable, scalable and robust. As a technical contributor I would like to see OpenStack become so widely used and mature that no one thinks twice about using it, similar to electricity, cars, the Linux kernel, and MySQL.
4. What is your favorite productivity hack? Secret trick? Shortcut you’re slightly embarrassed to admit?
As a nova-core I spend more time than I care to admit doing code review, and use my email as a review queue. I recently wrote a script to help keep my queue up to date by marking unread emails for recently merged gerrit patches as read.
5. What is your biggest hope for the OpenStack community in the next 5 years? What would be really, really amazing?
I hope to see all the OpenStack cloud providers succeed and continue contributing back to the community. This will validate OpenStack based clouds as a business model.
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