Open Mic Spotlight: Melanie Witt

Melanie WittThis 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.

Melanie Witt is a software engineer working on OpenStack at Yahoo!. She has been having fun contributing to the V3 API effort and squashing bugs in Nova.

1. What was your first commit or contribution and why did you make it?

One of my first commits was a fix for a bug I uncovered while I was working on integrating OpenStack with internal services at Yahoo!. The bug prevented admin users from seeing a backtrace when showing a VM in error state. This was significant because we have a lot of users, and the more efficient it is for ops to examine errors, the better. I immediately wanted to share the fix with other OpenStack users, and the community makes it very easy to do.

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?

I think the infrastructure team deserves a lot of recognition. The continuous integration system is impressive. It ensures high quality of the code base by thoroughly testing every submitted patch and merging the code. It has been a pleasure to use.

 3. What do you think are the benefits of the open, community-driven approach to development?

I think gathering different perspectives is a great benefit of the open, community-driven approach to development. Each developer comes to the project from a different context and brings ideas from her point of view. We have a lot to learn from each other and, by working together, we can build something even better.

 4. How do you describe OpenStack to your parents?

I describe it as a set of building blocks anyone can use to assemble a computing cloud.

5. 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 think the community will focus more on performance, scalability, and reliability as user needs mature. I see users building bigger clusters, provisioning resources in larger volume and demanding faster performance. The community is already moving in this direction, and I think there will be many exciting improvements to come.

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