This is a part of the FESCo Elections Interviews series. Voting is open to all Fedora contributors. The voting period starts on Tuesday, July 19 and closes promptly at 23:59:59 UTC on Monday, July 25th. Please read the responses from candidates and make your choices carefully. Feel free to ask questions to the candidates here (preferred) or elsewhere!

Interview with Haïkel Guémar (hguemar / number80)

• Fedora Account: hguemar
• IRC: number80 (usually in #fedora-devel, #fedora-cloud, #rdo and #openstack-rpm-packaging)
• Fedora User Wiki Page

What is your background in engineering?

I’m a software engineer focusing on Unix-based systems and infrastructure. For a living, I’m working at Red Hat as RDO stable releases wrangler for two years. I also drive the OpenStack effort within the CentOS Cloud SIG and the OpenStack RPM packaging project.

I’ve been a Fedora Contributor for now ten years (finally, got the “Adult Frog” badge!). I mostly focused in packaging Python, C++ software, and general Fedora and FOSS advocacy. In the past, I’ve been part of the late Fedora Board, and Cloud SIG.

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

I see containers changing the landscape of how we ship packages and how we build distributions too. Though classic distributions are not going anywhere soon, integrating upcoming changes will be a challenge: Atomic Hosts, flatpak.
As someone who has seen cloud computing technologies from their early days to now, I could bring that experience to use within FESCo.

Modularity is also a topic I keep an eye on, after focusing on “Fedora as a Product”, we need now to address “Fedora as a Platform”. How to empower the community to build their own products on top of Fedora? Solving that question will bring significant growth to the project.

What are three personal qualities that you feel would benefit FESCo if you are elected?

Persistence, Pragmatism, Passion but I believe these are qualities you can find in all the candidates.

The main difference would rather lie in the fact that I bring a fresh perspective to FESCo, though I’m long-time contributor, I have been sitting in FESCo for only one year.

Why do you want to be a member of FESCo?

Continuing the work done this past year, I took part of positive changes serving FESCo. So far, I enjoyed interacting with my peers and help them achieving their goals.

Currently, how do you contribute to Fedora? How does that contribution benefit the community?

Mentoring new packagers, collaborate with other maintainers to keep Fedora in a healthy shape as a provenpackager. My current pet project is helping the python3 migration in rawhide, this is an important task not only for Fedora but for the wider Python community (you should help!)

I’m also part of the CentOS Cloud SIG, and wearing that hat, I try to bridge Fedora/CentOS, and keep them consistent together.