Fedora Engineering Steering Council badge, awarded after Fedora Elections - read the Interviews to learn more about candidates

Fedora Engineering Steering Committee

This is a part of the FESCo 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 Jared K. Smith (jsmith)

Questions

Describe some of the important technical issues you foresee affecting the Fedora community. What insight do you bring to these issues?

I think the biggest challenge that FESCo will have in the coming year is the increasing complication of the operating system as it gets stretched in different directions (desktop/server/cloud/IoT). I bring a lot of industry experience to the role, and hope to improve the communication between the various people working on Fedora.

What objectives or goals should FESCo focus on to help keep Fedora on the cutting edge of open source development?

The first objective needs to be usability. My opinion is that it’s great to be cutting-edge, but if you lose focus on making the technology usable, then you’re going to be cutting edge to smaller and smaller target audience. In short, FESCo needs to continue to find the right balance in that regard,and continue to help ensure new features play well within the greater Fedora ecosystem.

What are the areas of the distribution and our processes that, in your opinion, need improvement the most? Do you have any ideas how FESCo would be able to help in those “trouble spots”?

I still feel like there’s a lot of upheaval in the tooling used by Release Engineering to build Fedora. It’s not really FESCo’s job to mandate or operate those tools — but I do think there’s an opportunity for FESCo to help define what they’d like to see (from a developer perspective) in those tools. A relevant example came up in last week’s FESCo meeting, related to batching in Bohdi. FESCo doesn’t run Bohdi, but it does have a role to play in helping define how it would like Bohdi to work with regards to batching of updates.