This is a part of the Elections Interviews series for Fedora Linux 38. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts on Monday, 29 May and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Sunday, 11 June.

Interview with Major Hayden

Questions

Why do you want to be a member of FESCo and how do you expect to help steer the direction of Fedora?

The community has so many talented people with great ideas and FESCo is in a unique position to guide these ideas into production for all kinds of users. I enjoy playing a small part in the innovation and sustainability of Fedora as a member of FESCo.

FESCo membership requires plenty of consideration for various Fedora use cases ranging from small desktops up to large servers and cloud infrastructure. I believe I can represent these users well as I examine proposed changes and consider their effects.

My goal for Fedora as a member of FESCo are to grow the community by making Fedora more friendly to changes that fit our common values from the Four Foundations. Proposing changes to Fedora feels daunting for newcomers and I want to encourage new changes from a wider array of contributors and debate these changes with an experienced group of people.

How do you currently contribute to Fedora? How does that contribution benefit the community?

I’m a member of the Cloud SIG where we expand Fedora to new clouds and improve experiences with existing clouds. This brings the Fedora experience to more users in more regions and makes that experience more consistent.

I write posts occasionally on Fedora Magazine because I love sharing what I know with other people.

My work on packaging has expanded lately and I’m a core maintainer or co-maintainer for 218 packages. Most of my packaging work is on Python SDKs and tools, but I also maintain many Golang packages. I’m a package sponsor and I’m teaching my team at Red Hat how to help with package maintenance.

How do you handle disagreements when working as part of a team?

I start by asking if we’re all starting with the same information and assumptions. Often times the disagreements start because multiple people are coming to the problem from different perspectives and with different pieces of information. Writing these down helps to get a consistent understanding of the problem from everyone. The why behind a problem or change is often the most important part, but it is easily overlooked.

From there, I encourage the team to discuss the problem without proposing solutions or deep diving into technologies. For example, you can ask basic questions, such as: What isn’t working? Who is affected? What could be made better? Are there examples of this elsewhere?

Level-setting the conversation leads to a better understanding and gets everyone working from the same starting point.

What else should community members know about you or your positions?

One of my biggest beliefs is iterating.

We can break down big changes into logical parts and build a plan that includes all of them. This allows teams to celebrate small wins along the way. It builds momentum which in turn builds confidence that the team is making progress.