Half of 2021 is gone already! I’m back on parental leave, but want to post a quick recap of the past few months.

Parental leave

I’m out from July 15 until the end of October.

I am signed up to some virtual conferences this summer and fall, but do not anticipate really being there except for a few selected talks. Best way to reach me is async via Matrix or email (see links on the main page). Responses to Pagure and Bugzilla issues might be delayed.

Fedora

Fedora 34 shipped, with the changes I mentioned in my last post:

For Fedora 35, given that I’ll still be on parental leave when it is released (per the expected schedule), I’m taking a bit more of a backseat; while I’m assisting in a major Change, switching the Cloud edition to Btrfs, the Change I’m pushing solo is relatively small: making openSUSE’s memory constraints macro available in Fedora. This would simplify the spec for packages that are memory-constrained during the build (Chromium, Ceph, mcrouter), and hopefully we can later iterate on this by working with the RPM and openSUSE developers to get this upstreamed in a future RPM version.

CentOS and EPEL

I gave my CentOS Stream on Desktop talk, “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love LTS”, at the May 2021 edition of CentOS Dojo (video, slides).

Lots of excitement in CentOS’ Hyperscale SIG; see our 2021Q2 update.

The EPEL changes I mentioned in the last post are all live; a collaborator access is now sufficient to request a branch, build a package, and create an update.

I am working on a tool to automate filing branch requests for a package and its missing dependencies, though with the leave, it will probably take some time.

Work update: team switch

After three years on the Client Platform Engineering team, it’s time for a switch, and I’ve joined Facebook’s kernel team to work on… Linux userspace projects! (Yes, the placement is a bit of a contradiction. We’ll probably be spun off into our own team in the future). I’m fond of my time at CPE, and the people there, and grateful for the opportunity to contribute so much Linux open source work, but with a desktop fleet composed mostly of macOS and Windows, there are limits on how impactful Linux work is perceived.

Looking forward to being able to focus on XFN work with community partners in Fedora, CentOS, and beyond; to no longer having to work around Apple’s increasing restrictions in managing macOS; and to no longer having a name collision with Red Hat’s Community Platform Engineering team as well as Common Platform Enumeration! Naming is hard; doubly so when it comes to TLAs.

One of my first tasks during my Facebook bootcamp is for the kernel team, so it feels like things have come full circle :D

This post is day 15 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Visit https://100daystooffload.com to get more info, or to get involved.

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