Contents

  1. Who I am
  2. My Ubuntu story
    1. My involvement
    2. Examples of my work / Things I'm proud of
    3. Areas of work
    4. Things I could do better
  3. Plans for the future
    1. General
    2. What I like least in Ubuntu
  4. Comments
  5. Endorsements
    1. Robie Basak
    2. Christian Ehrhardt
    3. TEMPLATE

I, Andreas Hasenack, apply for Ubuntu Server Developer

Name

Andreas Hasenack

Launchpad Page

http://launchpad.net/~ahasenack

Wiki Page

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/AndreasHasenack

Who I am

I graduated in Electrical Engineering. Worked for a few years in a company in the aerospace industry, but in the civilian area, in a project about installing "black boxes" in trucks and buses to monitor several driving and engine parameters. I then came in contact with a customer who had a nice "intranet" (that's what it was called back then), with internal web sites and a big database backend (oracle). We had to do some development for them, but didn't have access to Oracle, and someone told me that I should try this thing called "linux", "postgresql" and "apache". I did, then installed it at home, and never looked back.

In 1998 I took a post-grad specialization course in the University (a degree higher than graduation, but below masters) in computer networks and went to work for Conectiva, the Brazilian Linux distribution, later renamed to Mandriva, where I stayed until 2008 doing lots of packaging work (RPM) and consulting for enterprise customers in the server area. My main area of expertise was email, authentication (kerberos, pam) and LDAP, and I also spent about half the time working in Conectiva's security team and doing security updates for the distro.

My Ubuntu story

Tell us how and when you got involved, what you liked working on and what you could probably do better.

My involvement

In 2008 I applied for a job in the Landscape team (https://landscape.canonical.com), and got hired as a QA engineer. I had never done any Debian packaging before, just had some ideas about how it worked, had grabbed a few packages here and there to inspect them, looked at patches, etc. apt-get wasn't a stranger, since Conectiva developed apt-rpm back in the day, and the concept of dependency resolution is the same everywhere.

Landscape has a client component, and that means a Debian package that gets installed on machines. It obviously needs to be QA'ed. So that's how I got exposed to Debian packaging "for real" that time.

In April 2017 I started working in the Ubuntu Server Team. That got me back in touch with my "Linux roots" (no pun intended) and immediately I started looking into my old friends kerberos, ldap, samba, etc and searching for bugs to fix. It is in the Ubuntu Server Team that I got introduced to the Debian Merge process, and how this team is looking into improving that process via the Git Ubuntu tooling.

Examples of my work / Things I'm proud of

My uploads. While I was working in the Landscape team, all my uploads were related to that. A clear change can be seen in May 2017 when I joined the Server Team. There were of course other bugs and fixes I worked on, but they were on the server part of Landscape which is a proprietary product. After that, we can see my tendency to work on authentication and LDAP.

Areas of work

Let us know what you worked on, with which development teams / developers with whom you cooperated and how it worked out.

Things I could do better

Plans for the future

General

What I like least in Ubuntu

Please describe what you like least in Ubuntu and what thoughts do you have about fixing it.

Comments

If you'd like to comment, but are not the applicant or a sponsor, do it here. Don't forget to sign with @SIG@.

Andreas is one of the one engineers with the most dedication to quality and correctness of solutions that I have ever met. He also has an impressive skill for thinking outside the box, both in terms of how to poke holes in a piece of code and in how to troubleshoot things on an Ubuntu system. I'm a little surprised he's not a server dev already! -- tribaal 2017-11-28 14:57:42

I worked with Andreas on severals occassions over the years. He is very meticulous and pay attention to details, even the smallest one. I had the chance to see him in action while reviewing recent uploads for landscape-client. I also recently collaborate with him on the ubuntu-advantage project to enable fips and livepatch features. Andreas uploads are all high-quality and his skills to sponsor others uploads are second to none. He is always willing to help and has a very pleasant attitude. I recommend Andreas at 100%. -- slashd 2017-11-29 12:44:00

Endorsements

As a sponsor, just copy the template below, fill it out and add it to this section.

Robie Basak

General feedback

I sponsored four packages for Andreas in July and August since he joined the Canonical server team in April. Since then, other team members tend to handle his needed sponsorships, but I also generally see his work scroll past. We operate a peer review policy on our team, so he has been doing reviews for existing uploaders also.

I am continually impressed by Andreas' attention to detail and the general comprehensiveness and correctness of his work upon first review. He doesn't just throw a patch at a sponsor to see if it sticks; by the time he requests review, he typically has done far more extensive investigation and testing than I would do before uploading. He mostly asks all necessary questions in public on Freenode before preparing an upload for sponsorship. I've seen him find tangential edge cases and fix those up as well while working a particular bug.

I value Andreas' presence on our team and I'm happy to endorse his application for ~ubuntu-server-dev.

Specific Experiences of working together

Sponsorship miner results: please follow the bug reference through to the MPs to see review comments.

Areas of Improvement

I can't think of anything. Please carry on as you are!

Christian Ehrhardt

General feedback

I sponsored 17 packages of Andreas so far and I'm impressed by his performance and quality. Since in our Team we established a peer review process this goes way beyond the usual ack/nack and instead is a very thorough review and feedback loop. From the early "unsure how to do so" times (he already did great) he evolved quickly into a quality that rarely needs bigger rewrites. I trust in his contributions and they are usually sound and well tested before you get to see them.

Much more you can see his massive improvement and new confidence in the review he provides in our peer review process - he is in that regard an absolutely equal and well qualified member of the server team already, so the application would just complete his ability to contribute.

Specific Experiences of working together

I like that he really loves verify and make things testable in general. No "this looks good in the code, doesn't need test" patches. There always is a good consideration of regressions and test-ability.

Other than that just look at the Sponsorship miner results and the MP reviews.

Also on the SRUs check out the always really well defined SRU templates.

Areas of Improvement

I see him already conquering his subspace of packages and solutions in the server Team where he can excel with his experience and help us most to improve as a Team. So he is already in a great improvement for himself and the Team. I can't think of any cases where I'd recommend that he should do differently.

TEMPLATE

== <SPONSORS NAME> ==
=== General feedback ===
## Please fill us in on your shared experience. (How many packages did you sponsor? How would you judge the quality? How would you describe the improvements? Do you trust the applicant?)

=== Specific Experiences of working together ===
''Please add good examples of your work together, but also cases that could have handled better.''
## Full list of sponsored packages can be generated here:
## http://ubuntu-dev.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/ubuntu-sponsorships.cgi?
=== Areas of Improvement ===

AndreasHasenack/UbuntuServerDevApplication (last edited 2017-12-12 14:03:49 by ahasenack)