The OpenStack Blog Everything in & around OpenStack in written words.

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. 

Paul Michali is a Technical Lead on the OpenStack team at Cisco. Although new to OpenStack (started in 2013), Paul has been a software developer for over 30 years working at various companies and industries. His current focus is on VPNaaS, and he has been trying to drink from the fire hose for all things Neutron. An empty-nester, he lives in New Hampshire, USA, with his wife and pets. Outside of work, Paul enjoys photography, playing soccer and volleyball, watching sci-fi and action movies on his home theater, and playing on the skid pad with his BMW. Follow him on Twitter @pmichali

2. What publications, blogs, mailing lists, etc. do you read every day?

Besides reading the OpenStack developer mailing list (well, ok, maybe I just browse it 🙂 ), I like browsing through StackExchange areas StackOverflow, Super User, Ask Ubuntu, Ask Different (Mac), Programmers, Unix & Linux, and Photography on a daily basis. For leisure reading, I try to get some news and info via Twitter feeds, and I visit Lifehacker.com daily.

3. What behavior has helped get you the furthest as a developer?

Probably the best thing that helps me grow as a developer, is the desire to constantly learn new things. I try to read a technical book every month or two, am constantly seeking new techniques, methods, and processes that I can apply, and help people as much as I can. I’m frequently humbled by how much one can learn by reviewing other peoples’ code, and by explaining things to others. It helps solidify one’s knowledge and tests past assumptions and learning.

4. How did you learn to code? Are you self-taught or did you learn in college? On-the-job?

A mixture. Initially, I was self taught. When we got an ASR-33 Teletype connected to a school computer (don’t ask how long ago that was) in high school, I started writing small BASIC programs during free time. The infection took hold, and by the time I was a senior in high school, I had a part time job, at the first personal computer store in my home town, selling computers and writing small custom business apps for small companies in the area.

By then, I clearly knew what I wanted to be when I grew up, and couldn’t wait to get my own pocket protector (yes, I did get one in my first “real” job). I went to college and learned a ton, filling my head with several languages. From there, I started working, and pretty much in each job I’ve had to learn a new language: microcode, Pascal, C, Java, Perl, and for OpenStack, Python.

5. How did you first get involved in OpenStack?

At the very end of 2012, the whole group I was in had completed a major project and had handed off the reins to another development team. As a next assignment, we were offered two different projects, one of them joining the OpenStack team, of which there was a very limited number of openings. It would be a leap of faith for me, to work in a new area (cloud computing), with a new language (Python), using a new process (open source/community based), and as part of another organization in the company.

I had toyed with Python a bit before, writing some tool scripts, and was intrigued by the language. The thought that I could move away from a more traditional development process using C, and into a much more iterative and incremental process with Python, encouraged me to jump at the opportunity and I haven’t looked back since. It’s been the happiest time for me in my career.

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.

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. 

Tatiana Ovchinnikova (nee Mazur) was a mathematician fond of coding. One day she got bored, and turned into a coder fond of maths. She has focused her efforts on Horizon, the OpenStack web dashboard, and now she is a member of the core team. She hopes that she will make Horizon even better than it already is.

In 20 years OpenStack will be used to power every device, big or small, from cell phones to microwave ovens. Just because it will be so perfect and lightweight that everyone will want to use it. As for 50 years, I believe that at some point before that OpenStack will contact us to discuss our future collaboration.

2. How did you learn to code? Are you self-taught or did you learn in college? On-the-job?

I’m a proud self-taught. All has begun with programs to help with everyday activity: for counting Star Date, for EEG processing and visualisation and other small and fun projects. Later I realized that there are a lot of complex problems yet to be solved and there is a plenty of room beyond small hobby programs to apply good coding skills.

3. Define what “open source” means to you.

Open source is an endless library of good and bad examples of coding styles, manners of thinking and communicating ideas. It’s up to you only which way and side to choose, when and how to develop your expertise. Also it is a huge collection of extremely useful and easily customizable tools for everyday work.

4. If you couldn’t be a developer, what would your dream job be?

That is a tough question. I can come up with several dream jobs and it is not so easy to pick one. First of all, I could be an interpreter, this time not from human language to code, but for example from French to Klingon or to Toki Pona. Or to depart from interpretation completely and be a monk in Tiger Temple (tigers are awesome).

5. Vulcan or Romulan?

Kling akhlami buhfik.