{"id":6337,"date":"2014-07-10T11:15:02","date_gmt":"2014-07-10T16:15:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.openstack.org\/blog\/?p=6337"},"modified":"2014-07-14T14:56:08","modified_gmt":"2014-07-14T19:56:08","slug":"open-mic-spotlight-4th-birthday-edition-kashyap-chamarthy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.openstack.org\/blog\/open-mic-spotlight-4th-birthday-edition-kashyap-chamarthy\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Mic Spotlight, 4th Birthday Edition: Kashyap Chamarthy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"kashyap\"<\/a>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. For the month of July, we’re focusing on Q&A specific to OpenStack’s 4th birthday. If you\u2019re interested in being featured, please choose five questions from this form<\/a>\u00a0<\/a>and submit!
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

Kashyap currently works for Red Hat on most things related to open\u00a0<\/span>source virtualization\/cloud related projects (OpenStack). He works\u00a0<\/span>remotely, from India. Kashyap enjoys reading, traveling, and learning to\u00a0<\/span>be conscious to live minimally and in an ecologically sustainable way.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

1. Where were you when you first heard of OpenStack? What were you doing?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It was in 2012 in Brussels, Belgium. I was there to participate in the\u00a0(no-nonsense) FOSDEM conference. For most of the second (and the last)\u00a0day of the conference I was hanging out in the “Virtualization Dev” room\u00a0and attended the final session of the day: an OpenStack community panel\u00a0discussion moderated by Thierry Carrez (current OpenStack release\u00a0manager) & co. Most of the debates in that session were around evolving\u00a0project governance, roles of linux distributions, release process and\u00a0plenty their related topics. That’s when I learned about OpenStack.<\/p>\n

2. What drew you to OpenStack?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I got involved in OpenStack around 2013 through RDO project (a community\u00a0OpenStack distribution that stays close to upstream trunk, started by\u00a0Red Hat). I’d say it’s the sheer range of areas one can contribute to in\u00a0many useful ways. By the time I was starting with OpenStack, it\u00a0clearly helped to have been closely familiar with some of the\u00a0under-the-hood open source virtualization technologies (like libvirt,\u00a0QEMU, KVM and a ton of tooling around it) that OpenStack relies on. I\u00a0feel it’s a nice progression to work on a higher-level project like\u00a0OpenStack that already takes advantage of these and connects them all\u00a0together in a meaningful way (and not some afterthought bolt-on).<\/p>\n

Others factors would be OpenStack’s commitment towards technical\u00a0meritocracy, its fair (walking the walk style) approach in governance and\u00a0community interactions, and flat out fun in participating\u00a0in such a large\u00a0community-based software project.<\/p>\n

3. What does “open source” mean to you?<\/strong><\/p>\n

To me, it’s the strong belief that it is the most sensible approach to\u00a0develop software. Secondly, the realization that “hey, I get to benefit\u00a0immensely from the work of scores of open source communities (at the\u00a0tap of a keystroke — thanks to innovations like GPL, Creative Commons\u00a0and the likes), so it’s just fair to contribute back to those\u00a0communities on whose labour I’m building my existing work.”<\/p>\n

4. Which OpenStack debate gets you the most fired up? Why?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Hmm, off the top of my head I can’t single out something. But there are a lot\u00a0of interesting technical\/community related debates on the very\u00a0high-traffic upstream openstack-dev mailing list. It’s a great\u00a0experience for a new person to learn the community culture by following\u00a0discussions (with some good mail filters), getting a sense of tone on\u00a0the lists, what kind of topics to bring up (and how) and many more\u00a0things — just by plain old observation.<\/p>\n

I don’t mean to imply that everything is rainbows and butterflies. Sure,\u00a0there are (open\/closed) conflicts too —\u00a0like any massive project with a\u00a0lot of moving parts, but the civilized manner in which most of them are\u00a0resolved is heartening to see.<\/p>\n

5. What is your favorite memory from am OpenStack summit?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I haven’t been to an OpenStack summit, yet. But I was at an OpenStack\u00a0meetup (“OpenStack in Action 4” by eNovance, last November in Paris).\u00a0In the\u00a0conference lobby, I noticed Mark McClain (current Neutron project PTL)\u00a0passed by —\u00a0I walked up, politely introduced my self and had a brief\u00a0conversation. Before I left him alone, I asked him to share a piece of\u00a0wisdom that can help one wrap his\/her head around the complexity of\u00a0Neutron (OpenStack Networking project) and its associated open source\u00a0plugins. “Read ‘iproute2’ man pages, read carefully and experiment more,\u00a0it’s full of useful details,” Mark said. And I still haven’t gotten to
\nit. So, by saying it out loud here, hopefully I’ll get my act together\u00a0and spend some quality time with it. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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. For the month of July, we’re focusing on Q&A specific… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":41,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[474],"tags":[465],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.openstack.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6337"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.openstack.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.openstack.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.openstack.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/41"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.openstack.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6337"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.openstack.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6337\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6340,"href":"https:\/\/www.openstack.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6337\/revisions\/6340"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.openstack.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.openstack.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.openstack.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}