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. 

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.

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. 

Morgan Fainberg is a Principal Software Engineer at Metacloud.  He has worked on a number of high-profile and large-scale properties across a number of industries (everything from Social Media, to Web Hosting, to Video Games).  He currently spends most of his time working on Keystone and is a member of the Keystone Core team. You can follow him on Twitter at @mdrnstm or read his blog here. 

1. What is your go-to beverage or snack while coding? 

Do you mean I must make a definitive choice between coffee, espresso, and tea (there is a big difference between espresso and coffee!)?  I guess it all depends on the type of code I’m writing.  If I happen to find myself writing new features, I think a pour-over of a dark, heavy, oily coffee (even better a French press) is the drink of the day.  When it comes to refactoring code (especially those refactors that seem to be made of edge cases upon edge cases and rabbit holes), a perfectly pulled shot of espresso followed by an Italian-style cappuccino.  For anything that is more research oriented, tea is the drink of choice.  Sometimes I can’t believe how much time I spend thinking about the consumption of caffeine.

2. Where’s your favorite place to code? In the office, at a local coffee shop? In bed?

Based upon my “go-to” beverage answer, I am sure you can guess my favorite place to write code is the local coffee shop.  I definitely prefer the shops that roast their own beans, have specialty pastry items, and are generally more of the “local” scene than the big corporate shops.  A close second would be sitting in front of 12,556,800 pixels at my desk.

3. What do you think is the coolest thing that’s happened with OpenStack over the past three years?

The coolest happening in OpenStack is the interest and adoption that has occurred.  There are few pieces of software (or any form engineering) that really meet the needs of such a varied audience.  It’s very cool to see the big players, the small players, the independents, the public cloud providers, the private cloud deployers, and everyone else involved come together in a friendly a professional way to develop something amazing.

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

Open Source is more than just a licensing view (like some people or companies would like to think).  It’s a philosophy of sharing and community.  The idea is to not only develop something fun and awesome, but to collaborate (especially in the case of OpenStack) across company lines and create a network of like-minded individuals.  It fascinates me to see what the Open Source communities (software developers, artists, even musicians) can accomplish together.  If the Open Source community members did not come from many different backgrounds much of the “ground breaking” work may not have surfaced as quickly (or at all).  Perhaps it is best to equate Open Source as a lifestyle above and beyond anything else.

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

I like to jump into projects at the deep-end.  I have, historically, stuck my nose into projects that no one else wanted to look at due to difficulty or complexity (especially in corporate environments).  This behavior has made it easier to dig into the core of any challenge and come up with solutions to interesting issues and problems.  At the very least I have been exposed to a wide variety of technologies and development philosophies.  It all boils down to wanting learn something new each time I sit down to write code.

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. 

Sergey Lukjanov is a Senior Software Engineer at Mirantis. He’s the Project Technical Leader of Savanna project and he focuses on Savanna, Infra and Oslo initiatives. Sergey is experienced in Big Data projects and technologies (Hadoop, HDFS, Cassandra, Twitter Storm, etc.) and enterprise-grade solutions. He’s contributing to different open source projects now, including Twitter Storm and OpenStack. Follow him on Twitter at @lukjanovsv. 

1. What do you think is the coolest thing that’s happened with OpenStack over the past three years?

I think that it’s an enormous growth of both community and adoption. You can now see folks from totally different companies contributing to and using OpenStack.

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

That’s my initiative — to start coding and take part in different programmer-specific things. 🙂 Unfortunately, there were not very helpful lessons in college. There was some kind of real wish to understand what it’s all about — and this wish is still with me. It’s so amazing to find solutions for problems that you couldn’t even think about yesterday, and to imagine what interesting tasks you’ll face tomorrow.

3. Where’s your favorite place to code? In the office, at a local coffee shop? In bed? 

It depends, really. I always do a lot in the office, but there are many activities not connected with programming there like meetings, Launchpad, Gerrit things and so on. So, if we’re speaking about coding itself, I love doing that at home — usually with some coffee and cookies.

4. How did you first get involved in OpenStack?

OpenStack is our company’s main vector of development and future, so even when I was not completely involved in OpenStack projects, I spent time learning and understanding how it works. At that time, I was taking part in different Big Data initiatives including Twitter Storm, and I continued working on it as a part of the OpenStack ecosystem. I started working on OpenStack during early 2012. Creating an OpenStack cloud future is a big challenge for me, and I really appreciate that I have this opportunity.

5. Be honest – are you more likely to know your project collaborators by their IRC nic or their actual name?

Of course, by their real names. IRC nics are better than nothing, sure, but I’d like to know all of the guys I’m working with by their actual names, and see them in real life — not only on IRC meetings and calls. I know almost every Savanna contributor personally, and I believe that these simple human relationship are still really important to do the most effective job. On the other side, IRC nics are very useful for setting up auto highlights. 😉