This is a part of the Council Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts on Thursday, December 6th and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Thursday, December 20th, 2018.

Interview with Dennis Gilmore (ausil)

Questions

What’s your background in Fedora? What expertise do you bring based on past experience, and what projects are you actively involved in now?

I started as a packager for fedora.us in 2003, I continued on with Fedora Extras, getting involved with infrastructure I took over managing plague the buildsystem in use at the time. Because of infrastructure work Mike McGrath and I started EPEL as we had needs for extra software to run on top of RHEL. As a result of my work in building and shipping in Fedora and for EPEL, I ended up being heavily involved in doing the work to setup and move to koji when Core and Extras merged. Shortly after the merge I worked as the release engineer for OLPC, helping them to move to a newer Fedora and get their changes upstreamed into Fedora. Working at OLPC led to me joining Red Hat as a release engineer, I took over Fedora Release Engineering and lead getting Fedora out the door from Fedora 14 until Fedora 27. I have been on the council, the old Fedora Board as well I have been a FESCo member at various times over the years.

I have a lot of experience in figuring out how to integrate and deliver new artifacts and deliverables, as well as a deep understanding of many pieces of and the history of Fedora.
I have been actively involved in Release Engineering and infrastructure, working on how we build and ship Fedora to enable us to work smarter. Today I manage a team in Red Hat that is actively tasked to support a long time passion of mine enabling Multi-Arch efforts for both Fedora and internal products.

What do you plan to accomplish on the Council? What are the most pressing issues facing Fedora today? What should we do about them?

Fedora is growing a a rapid pace, some of the older solutions no longer scale well. I would like to look at how we can improve automation to replace and remove manual processes such as package reviews and updates in order to enable contributors to work on more interesting problems. I would like to see us push for the use of machine learning and automated systems to automate as much of the review, build and delivery pipeline as possible.

What are your interests and accomplishments outside of Fedora? What of those things will help you in this role?

I am working on a MBA currently and hope to bring the new skills I am learning to help Fedora grow and be stronger. I have been involved in many team sports over the years, it has helped me work on skills to work well as part of a team.