Who I am
My name is James Falcon. I’m a software engineer at Canonical and have been working with Python for the past 10 years. Prior to working on cloud-init, I have written software professionally for avionics, telecommunications, and distributed databases. I have also made meaningful contributions to a number of open source projects.
How I came to work on cloud-init
I came to work on cloud-init through employment at Canonical. I have been working on cloud-init for the past 6 months.
My involvement
Examples of my work / Things I’m proud of
My list of commits can be seen here:
https://github.com/canonical/cloud-init/commits?author=TheRealFalcon
Since starting on the project, I have contributed 16 commits and performed 64 reviews (as of Nov 10).
Some PRs that stand out include:
-
https://github.com/canonical/cloud-init/pull/367 :
My first “real” PR which addressed and launched discussions around failing silently and feature flags. -
https://github.com/canonical/cloud-init/pull/528 :
Supporting Oracle’s IMDSv2 API -
https://github.com/canonical/cloud-init/pull/581 :
The initial implementation of the integration testing framework -
https://github.com/canonical/cloud-init/pull/547 :
The 20.3 release. The commit itself isn’t all that noteworthy, but I shepherded this release and corresponding SRU through the release process.
I also presented the integration testing framework at the 2020 cloud-init summit.
Areas of work
My two main areas of focus thus far have been Oracle IMDSv2 and integration testing. I have worked primarily alongside the cloud-init core committers on these efforts.
Things I could do better
There is still much of the cloud-init codebase that I haven’t yet had the opportunity to work with. I will learn more as I go, but in the mean time I know to ask for help when I need it. Additionally, I would like to be more involved in the #cloud-init freenode channel, though I often feel the other participants there are still better able to answer questions.
Plans for the future
I plan on continuing to learn and contribute to cloud-init. I would like to make additional progress in adding integration tests in addition to contributing to anything else on the broader project roadmap.
General
What I like least in cloud-init
It takes a lot of time to SRU and manually verify a release. Hopefully the integration testing goes a long way towards solving that. I also dislike the number of bash scripts and bash calls that the project relies on. That’s something that could change over the long term, though I also generally prefer not to port working code.
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