Ubuntu Wiki

About Me

Hello, my name is Adam Israel. I am a long-time user of Linux, both personally and professionally. I'm currently employed by Canonical, Ltd. I'm also a published author of Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror and non-fiction, and a former writer at Ars Technica and founder/co-editor of their now-defunct column, Linux.Ars.

My first experience with Linux dates back to 1995, downloading 30+ 3.5" floppy disk images that comprised Slackware. I bounced from distro to distro for a while, eventually sticking with Debian. Then came along "no-name-yet" Linux, a new distro based on Debian, and I've been hooked on Ubuntu ever since.

I've built scalable web applications, run Ubuntu servers in production, handling more than a billion requests/day. I'm also very good at breaking things. These two things are not unrelated.

Contact Information

Contributions

As part of the Juju Ecosystem Team @ Canonical, I have:

• Worked to improve the Juju developer experience

• Represent Canonical on the OSM, the Open Source NFV Management and Orchestration (MANO) software stack

• Lead charm schools
• Reviewing merge proposals and pull requests against charms and various tools/libraries in the ecosystem

• Authored the charms.benchmark Python library

• Filed bugs on launchpad and github

• Opened pullrequests

I have authored many charms, including:

• asterisk (source)

• netutils (source)

• reddit

• mysql-benchmark

• siege

• plex (source)

I authored and maintain the Python library charm-benchmark

I have worked to make the developer experience faster and easier. This includes updating the Vagrant Workflow, working internally to bring better tools to our published Vagrant images, and developing a workaround for OS X Yosemite users, who could no longer use sshuttle for routing local traffic to their Juju environment running inside a Vagrant virtual machine. This worked around an incompatibility in sshuttle on Yosemite and significantly improved performance of network traffic between the host and virtual machine.

Future Goals

Among my near-term goals are:

• Get involved with a local user group, or start one, where I can promote Ubuntu adoption and help its users
• Writing more tutorials/articles around using the Ubuntu as a desktop or server, Juju, and the virtualization of network functions
• Submit more proposals to speak at conferences to talk about my work with Juju
• Develop and contribute to apps to aid users switching from OS X to Linux:

  • 1pass, a CLI and programmatic interface to the 1password database.

  • 1penguin, a Unity AppIndicator to access a 1password database.

Testimonials

Note: This section is for existing Ubuntu members to leave testimonials. People who aren't Ubuntu members can leave a comment above in favor of the application.

• lazyPower I have worked with Adam under great context in both the NFV field, charming, and community engagement. He works tirelessly to ensure the users of not only Juju, but also Ubuntu find the experience pleasurable. His attention to detail and care with which he conducts himself is top notch. Not only did he keep me honest by taking over the Vagrant build box for our developer friends in the OSX/Win community, but he has also been a stalwart voice of support for community members in IRC; setting an example for all of us. In short, he would be a most welcome member to the Ubuntu community by my own standards. I offer my +1 to his application.

  mbruzek : Adam is a rock solid contributor to both Juju and Ubuntu communities. In my experience he is an advocate for the user and not shy about creating and fixing bugs in the products that he works with. Adam had lead multiple charm schools requiring knowledge of the products, time to prepare curriculum and advocacy for Ubuntu software. He recently explained the NFV industry to me and how many different companies he has encouraged to use Juju. Adam is a friend of Ubuntu users everywhere and works tirelessly to fix things, we would be lucky to have him as an official member of the Ubuntu community. +1 from my end.

  jcastro : I've been working with Adam now for a few years on the Juju Eco team. He pretty much handles representing Ubuntu in the NFV industry. This is a field I knew nothing about, but is important because it includes some of the largest companies in telecommunications, who are embracing this technology at a very rapid pace. When you read things like "If you're in Europe and you make a phone call it's probably going through an Ubuntu machine somewhere", that's because this guy helps them do that.

  arosales : Over the past few years Adam has been committed to enabling users to deploy and manage distributed workloads on Ubuntu. You will commonly find him answering questions in IRC, mailing lists, AskUbuntu, Launchpad, and Github for folks working to get familiar with Juju on Ubuntu. In addition, when a community member submits a review to have their Charm (software describing how to deploy and manage an application on Ubuntu) Adam consistently makes him self available to give through reviews and help community members get their application Charm'ed. Furthermore, once folks have their application Charm'ed for Ubuntu Adam helped develop benchmarking tools so Ubuntu users could compare how thier application ran on public clouds, bare metal, containers, and private cloud. Adam is currently helping define the NFV space and working to ensure Ubuntu is available to help users move the dial forward on NFV.