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My name is Frank Heimes <frank.heimes@canonical.com> and I'm located in Winterlingen/Germany.
Since 2016 I work in Canonical's Partner Engineering Team (formerly known as Hardware Enablement Team (formerly known as Hyperscale Enablement Team)).
I'm a computer scientist, having worked for Siemens and IBM before.

Who I am

I'm a German electronics and computer guy, grew up in the Rhine/Ruhr area close to Neuss/Düsseldorf (hence I like 'Altbier' ) and later moved to Böblingen - for business reasons (IBM R&D location is there).
A few years after I joined Canonical, I moved with my wife Steffi and Lilo our cat to Winterlingen (at the Swabian Alb, also known as Swabian Jura, between the city of Albstadt and the city of Sigmaringen, or if you will: halfway between Stuttgart and Lake Constance).
I still like spending some time at the computer, like to travel, spending time with our cat (if she wants), doing gardening, as well as watching SciFi and my rattly classic car (becoming soon 35 years old - that's what I call sustainable ;-)).

Early days

My first (home) computer was a Commodore VC64 (enjoying Basic) - also known as 'breadbin'.
At school I came in touch with a Schneider/Amstrad CPC 664, yeah school times were tough ... ;-)
Then I moved on to the Commodore Amiga family (enjoying [Lattice] C and Modula II) - initially an Amiga 1000, later the 2000 (with a Fujitsu 5.1/4" double height 1GB hard disk, that I bought on a vacation in the US and took back home - it was as expensive as the computer itself and also had a Motorola 68k chip on the board again like the Amiga 2000 itself =) ).
At some point in time someone donated his old XT to me (with original Borland Turbo C), but with just 4.7 MHz (or so) it was horribly slow.
Then I got my first (really) usable PC, it was an AMD 386DX-40 and 8MB of RAM (people called me crazy for having 8MB of RAM). I started of course using DOS and Windows 3.x, but got soon bored - and a friend of mine gave me a bunch of 5.1/4 floppy disks with a relatively new open source operating system on it - it was a copy of Slackware -- the first time I got in touch with Linux! I think it was Slackware 2.1 - but I also remember having used a kernel 0.99.<something>, so I could be a bit wrong with the version ...
As 'graphic card' (I think the term GPU was not invented yet) I had a fantastic Tseng Labs ET4000! I of course had to write my entire XFree86 config file by hand (incl. figuring out the mode-lines) and was very proud when I saw my first X-Windows screen!
I tried out some more Linux distros, like SLS, DLD and SUSE (yeah, the last two were inevitable for a German these days ) and later Gentoo.
With the age of 17 I started to learn a profession (electronics), where I still used Linux, but also commercial UNIXes, like SINIX (System-V from Siemens-Nixdorf), SunOS and Solaris - especially later when I studied computer science.

My way to Ubuntu

After my time at Siemens, I joined the IBM R&D lab in Böblingen/Germany (the reason to move ~400km away from where I was born), where I loved to work for almost the entire time in the area of Linux (sw and hw) - but mostly with SLES and RHEL.
At some point in time a volunteer workstation OS project started at big-blue (called Open Client Debian Community, OCDC) where I became involved and maintained 10+ packages (since the other Linux distro that could be used on the workstation sucked).
Even if it was called Open Client Debian Community, most people in that community used 'Ubuntu'.
So I strove Dapper Drake / 6.06 LTS and really started to fell in love with Hardy Heron / 8.04 LTS (on private and business machines - I still like the wallpaper).
And a couple of years later, a company called 'Canonical' was looking for someone to help-out with getting Ubuntu (Server) on big-iron and since I worked at IBM on 'big-irons' at that time and had some Ubuntu experiences due to the volunteer project, I thought that this is the next big thing I really want to do and work on - which led me joining Canonical in early 2016.
I am now part of 'Partner Engineering' (that belongs to 'Devices') and work mainly on IBM Z and LinuxONE (s390x) as well as on IBM POWER (ppc64el).

Collateral

• Launchpad: https://launchpad.net/~fheimes

• Blog: Ubuntu on Big Iron

• Wiki pages:

  • Ubuntu s390x FAQ

  • Ubuntu s390x pressed

  • My unsorted Ubuntu Development FAQ

• Ubuntu Server Guide, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) contributions: https://ubuntu.com/server/docs

• Ubuntu Maintainers Handbook contributions: https://github.com/canonical/ubuntu-maintainers-handbook

• Discourse: Activity - Topics

• BrighTALK:

  • Cloud Native & Confidential Computing on IBM Z & LinuxONE with Ubuntu 20.04

  • How to protect your data, applications, cryptography and OS - 100% of the time

  • MicroK8s on IBM Z — minimal footprint meets zero downtime

• Ubuntu blog posts:

  • IBM LinuxONE 4 Express and Ubuntu Server drive data centre performance and economics

  • IBM LinuxONE Rockhopper 4 brings sustainability and efficiency to the business-class server landscape, fully supported by Ubuntu 22.04

  • IBM LinuxONE Emperor 4: Maximise the value of next generation IBM LinuxONE servers with Ubuntu 22.04.1

  • IBM z16 is here, and Ubuntu 22.04 LTS beta is ready

  • How to protect your data, applications, cryptography and OS – 100% of the time

  • Announcing the new IBM LinuxONE III with Ubuntu

  • Ubuntu available on IBM LinuxOne Rockhopper II

  • Early experiences with PXE (net-)boot of KVM VMs on Ubuntu for s390x

  • Hardware cryptography with Ubuntu Server on IBM Z and LinuxONE