Fedora Ambassador Mentor badge used for Council

Fedora Council Elections

This is a part of the Council Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts on Wednesday, January 17th and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Wednesday, January 24th, 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 the buildsystem in use at the time plague. Because of infrastructure work Mike McGrath and I started EPEL as we had needs for extra software to run n 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 I was the release engineer for OLPC, helping them to move to a newer Fedora and get their changes upstream in Fedora. Working at OLPC led to me joining Red Hat as a release engineer, I took over Fedora Release Engineering and have lead getting Fedora out the door since. I have been on the old Fedora Board as well as 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 artefacts and deliverables, as well as a deep understaning of many pieces and the history of Fedora.

I am actively involved in Release Engineering and infrastructure, working on how we build and ship Fedora to enable us to work smarter. I have a deep involvement in multiarch work as well.

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.