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. 

Christopher works for Rackspace on the OpenStack Heat project, focusing on autoscaling. I’ve been contributing to open source software for over ten years now, and I love working in Python. I spent a bit of time in the game industry, and while it can be fun, I’m happy to be back working on system/framework-level software, especially open source!

 He lives near Dallas, TX. He loves Greenville Ave Pizza, Revolver beer, and RPG video games 🙂 You can follow him on Twitter @radix.

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

Usually a gallon jug of water is sitting on my desk. I also run to my local indie cafe at least once a day to have a break and drink a cortado.

2. What is your favorite project that you’ve contributed code to?

That’d have to be Twisted — it’s where I cut my teeth on open source hacking, and also where I have developed many friendships in the community. I don’t get as much time as I’d like to contribute to it these days, but when I do I’m in my happy place 🙂

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

Self-taught, with casual mentorship from people in the Twisted community (especially Glyph Lefkowitz, Jean-Paul Calderone, and Allen Short).

4. How did you first get involved in OpenStack?

I became a contributor to OpenStack recently when Rackspace hired me to work on Heat. It’s been a pleasure getting involved with the Heat community and learning a lot of stuff about orchestration that I didn’t previously know. I can’t wait for everyone to start orchestrating their deployments with Heat!

5. What are your tips or tricks for surviving jet lag or long conferences?

5mg of Melatonin at 11:00pm (unless I’m out until 1am at the pub…). Definitely helps me get a good 7-8 hours of sleep even while jetlagged!

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. 

Julien is a Free Software hacker working as a independent consultant. He’s the Project Technical Leader for OpenStack Ceilometer, and a member of Oslo core. He also contributes to other free software projects, like Debian and GNU Emacs, regularly. You can follow him on Twitter @juldanjou. 

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

Coffee, without surprise, especially in the morning. However, I can’t drink coffee during my late evening coding sessions, for obvious reasons (I do need to sleep), so I enjoy scotch whisky once in a while.

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

I think being pragmatic most of the time helps a lot. It’s very hard to keep this in sight, as I, like many developers I guess, do have a tendency towards building some sort or perfect systems. But you have to make compromises all the time, and being ready to do so every day helps a lot building successful communities and projects. Also when dealing with open source projects, being humble and diplomatic is also a key to get your contributions accepted. You have to remember that you’re entering a zone where people don’t owe you anything and may be smarter than you.

3. What is your favorite project that you’ve contributed code to?

I think that it’s the on I use the most (I’m typing this in it), and it’s GNU Emacs. I do a lot of things with Emacs, coding obviously, reading and writing my mails, chatting on IRC, etc. It’s a really powerful tool for developers, and is easy to leverage to help in you in any tasks. And it got me into Lisp, a fabulous programming language, I’m thankful for that!

4. Have you organized an OpenStack meet-up/event or spoken about OpenStack at an event? What did you learn? What was the best part?

I spoke at a couple of events, and it was really great. I think the best part is getting feedback from users on what you built. This is really rewarding at a personal level, and valuable at a product level. That way, you know that you’re on the right track, or not.

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

This isn’t going to be original, but I do like to code at my desk at home. I find it hard to work in corporate offices most of the time, due to the noise, people going in and out, etc. I do prefer quiet and calm places so I can concentrate. Though I experienced doing OpenStack code reviews from a deckchair in the garden this summer, and it’s definitely something that I’ll have to try again!

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. 

Julie Pichon is a Software Engineer at Red Hat. She focuses her efforts on Horizon, the OpenStack web dashboard, and is a member of the core team. You can follow her on Twitter @jpichon_net. 

1. What do you do when you’re not obsessing over and working with OpenStack?

I’m usually found immersed in learning Japanese, or organising events and workshops for my local hackerspace here in Dublin (Tog.ie).

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

My first contribution was a patch for the Horizon security groups form, to allow a security group to set itself as an allowed source of inbound traffic. I’d been working with AWS for a while and the problem was fresh in my mind, and the fix looked simple enough for a first contribution. It was interesting to figure out places where Horizon uses Django differently, such as the test fixtures. Getting set up with the development tools like Gerrit was a breeze thanks to the wiki documentation.

3. 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’m really excited about the work Daisy (Ying Chun Guo) is doing to shape the internationalization team and increase the visibility of the translation and internationalization work. It’s important in order to make OpenStack more accessible and increase its adoption, and related issues shouldn’t come as a second thought.

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

Personally, I enjoy the way it brings together people from all over, with their own perspective and strengths to enrich the project with. It avoids wasted, duplicated effort behind walls. It’s a great way to get interested people involved and to bring them up to speed, making the project more sustainable. There are many more.

5. What is your favorite productivity hack? Secret trick? Shortcut you’re slightly embarrassed to admit?

Since I usually work with different versions of devstack and openstack in multiple VMs, I found my life greatly improved when I discovered emacs’ TrampMode for editing remote files. I find it much easier to have all the files I need open in the same editor on my main machine rather than sessions or editors open everywhere. It’s saved me a couple of time too, when a VM died an untimely death…