I, Thierry Carrez, apply for core-dev.

Who I am

I am a 36-year-old man living in the center of France with my wife and two daughters. I'm originally a mechanical systems engineer, specialized in systems administration and IT management. I was hired by Canonical in 2008 as an Ubuntu Server developer, to work as a generalist on the Ubuntu Server stack.

My Ubuntu story

I've been using Linux more or less for 14 years now, both personally and professionally. My active contributions to Open Source started when I became a Gentoo developer in 2004, working on their Security team. I switched to using Ubuntu, both Desktop and Server, in 2006 when I changed jobs and couldn't spend as much time on Gentoo. I applied for a job at Canonical in January 2008 and started getting more involved with Ubuntu development. During the Intrepid cycle I was a contributing developer, and was accepted as MOTU during the Jaunty cycle.

My involvement

Examples of my work / Things I'm proud of

• Packaging Tomcat 6 for Ubuntu main (and making sure Debian would adopt it afterwards) was my first Ubuntu achievement. Even if I'm not a Java fan, I'm proud of the work I've done to improve the state of the Java stack in Ubuntu in general, and this work will continue as I tackle the state of Eucalyptus Java dependencies in Karmic.
• Working on etckeeper integration was a pleasure, both from an upstream relationship point of view and from a community perspective. Everyone was (and still is) very motivated by bringing this useful tool to the general public.

Areas of work

• On the development side, as part of my Canonical Server developer job, I have to package and integrate new features for the Ubuntu Server product. This included working on Tomcat 6, Eucalyptus, a CIM/WBEM stack, Likewise-Open...
• On the maintenance side, I now maintain several server-related packages in universe (etckeeper, tomcat5.5, sblim-*...) and in main (openvpn, dnsmasq, nagios3, tomcat6, likewise-open...). In all cases, I try to develop good relationship with the upstream project and the Debian maintainer. Where I'm not the main maintainer, I try to stay on top of bugs by triaging and proposing fixes (in particular for the samba package).
• On the community side, in addition to the Server team community I also participate in the Ubuntu Java team and try my best to share with others my experience in handling Java packages.

Things I could do better

Ever since I became MOTU I tried to spend time doing mentoring and sponsoring, but in the Jaunty cycle I didn't have as much time as I wanted to devote to it. I hope to be able to improve that, especially if I become core-dev and can act as a main sponsor.

Plans for the future

Karmic cycle

For the Karmic cycle I'll work on cleaning up the Eucalyptus Java dependencies packages and making them suitable for main/CD inclusion. I'll also work on convergence between likewise-open5 (universe) and likewise-open (main) so that they both seamlessly upgrade to future version 5.2 (in main). Time permitting, I'll continue integrating etckeeper and bzr into a more powerful configuration management tool, and update the CIM/WBEM stack I introduced in universe as of intrepid.

General objectives

I want to make Ubuntu Server the best technical server solution out there. We need to start integrating industry best practices into the server stack, to make a powerful and pleasant systems administration experience. We need to start making choices and deliver a Server product rather than a Server platform.

What I like least in Ubuntu

Coming from a distribution with a fully VCS-driven package archive (Gentoo), I find tracking changes across packages in Ubuntu quite tedious. I place high hopes in the DistributedDevelopment initiative: how it will change the way we work and lower the barrier of entry for new contributors.

Comments

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Endorsements

As a sponsor, just copy the template below, fill it out and add it to this section.

TEMPLATE

== <SPONSORS NAME> ==
=== General feedback ===
## Please fill us in on your shared experience. (How many packages did you sponsor? How would you judge the quality? How would you describe the improvements? Do you trust the applicant?)

=== Specific Experiences of working together ===
''Please add good examples of your work together, but also cases that could have handled better.''
=== Areas of Improvement ===

CategoryCoreDevApplication