Grégory Schiano | Membership Application

Community Membership
1

Hello,

My name is Grégory Schiano, and I would like to submit my application to become an Ubuntu Member.

Past and current contributions

  • I’ve been using Linux for over 20 years now, and have been using many distributions including Ubuntu over these years. I’ve been using it professionally and personally over this period and all the projects I’ve been involved in have always been on Linux.
  • When I left my position of CTO at Altissia, I wanted to give more to the community and ensure that this was entirely part of my day-to-day job, that’s why I joined Canonical in October 2022. Since then, as a Software architect, I’ve been involved in many projects that directly impact the Ubuntu community.
  • I’ve been working on the Discourse operator (Juju charm) used to host Ubuntu Discourse (as a reviewer and contributed to a few features: https://github.com/canonical/discourse-k8s-operator/commits/main/?author=gregory-schiano). The work on Discourse involves getting requirements from Aaron Prisk and making sure we deployed updated versions on Discourse along with enabling plugins for the community such as the events plugin, templates, etc.
  • I’ve also been working on the Indico operator (Juju charm) which is the foundation of every Ubuntu Summit since 2022. We put a lot of effort and contributions into improving that platform for the Ubuntu Community (mostly code review: https://github.com/canonical/indico-operator/commits/main/?author=gregory-schiano).
  • In the last 7 months I’ve been very involved (working with Mauro Gaspari and Philip Kewish) in the Ubuntu Matrix server project. I’ve participated in many design decisions and discussions on how to provide the best possible experience to the community. I’ve worked on making sure we can safely and securely enable Federation behind Canonical’s proxy, getting direct feedback from the community when Federation was fully enabled. I also initiated along with Mauro Gaspari a load test in Riga during Canonical’s engineering sprint.
  • For these 3 projects, the operators I worked on provides a great support to the community but also enable any user to deploy Discourse, Indico, or Synapse following best practices and scalability.
  • Before joining Canonical, I’ve been involved in the open source community as much as I wanted, but I participated in a project called jHipster, in Hackathons, being speaker in a meetup (https://youtu.be/hOTjLOPXg48?t=3246), giving presentation jHipster presentations to different private companies (Sopra Steria, Swift), and while I was CTO at Altissia, we created a plugin for jHipster which was also opensource (discontinued due to lack of maintenance).
  • As a speaker I participated in a few conferences aside from the Meetup mentioned previously. A talk on monitoring Kubernetes cluster in collaboration with Instana (https://events.tech.rocks/summit-2019/session/0e73f2a5-25f7-e911-828b-281878d3c781/le-monitoring-de-vos-applications-sur-kubernetes-sans-effort-avec-instana), also participated in a Webinar around gitops organized by Instana (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c78ksrcRY_Y) and lately, I’ve been a speaker in Ubuntu Summit 2023 (Ubuntu Summit 2023 (3-5 November 2023): Operating a Flask application with Juju: The fastpass · Canonical / Ubuntu Events (Indico)).

Future plans These are a few things that I want to do in the near future:

  • I’d like to apply to the Matrix council, I think my input and knowledge of the project could be precious, but also I think that getting closer to the users of Matrix will be very valuable too.
  • Keep on working on the Matrix project, from improving its scalability and ensuring its stability to enabling new features.
  • Participate in the design of a website allowing Ubuntu members to manage their @ubuntu.com email address as long as providing an SMTP relay for their emails.
  • Keep on proposing talks for the Ubuntu events, or talking about the work done to support the Ubuntu community.
  • Continue using Ubuntu whenever I can, talk about Ubuntu whenever I can, and show people that more than a great OS, it’s a great and welcoming community.

Launchpad account

My Launchpad account: Grégory Schiano in Launchpad

8 Likes
2

I have been working with @gschiano for months now.
He has been doing fantastic work on everything related to the Matrix project. He has been very active, friendly and supportive on the many requests we have added to the project, to improve community experience. Delivering an excellent Matrix experience is not easy, but with the great efforts from @gschiano we are really surpassing my expectations.

@gschiano also supported me preparing and delivering a live “Breaking the Matrix” load test in Riga at the engineering sprint, which was useful and fun. He has dedicated many hours of hyper-care support and troubleshooting when we enabled federation on our matrix instance, and is now working with @merkata to test the snapped matrix-appservice-irc bridge we plan to deploy to bridge IRC and Matrix.

On top of that, I want to emphasize that once Matrix is charmed, deploying and maintaining a scalable instance of Matrix, with self hosted Mjolnir and IRC bridge will be easier than ever. And that goes well beyond the project at hand.

@gschiano has also been working with @aaronprisk on Discourse upgrades. If we can enjoy all the new plugins here on the Discourse, it is also thanks to his great work.
Last but not least, I enjoyed his session at the Ubuntu Summit 2023, and I hope to see more talks and workshops from Grégory this year.

I really hope that he can get his membership, having him in the Matrix council would be fantastic!

1 Like
3

I would like to echo much of what @ilvipero said in his testimonial.

Grégory’s work on the Matrix project has been instrumental and will help ensure our community has another excellent platform to communicate on. Building a project of this scope and scale is incredibly difficult and his effort to include the community in all phases of it’s testing and deployment is highly commendable.

The work with Grégory on the Ubuntu Discourse will enable us to greatly expand it’s functionality going forward and will provide us with some excellent community focused tools. Some may hide when the community team comes running with a wish-list of plugins and changes, but he recognized their community value and helped get them approved and deployed. :slight_smile:

2 Likes
4

Congratulations too - another successful application for Ubuntu Membership.
Good works but a prelude to what next comes, we trust.

arrangements made possible by the community
Regards

Bashing-om

2 Likes