Ubuntu Membership Application for Mark Mims

About Me

Hi, I'm a software developer and a Physics geek.

I love helping people use software to solve real-world business problems... especially the kind that involve crunching and munching lots of data in the process.

Clouds and Big Data are both rightfully all the rage right now, so I find I spend most of my time working in that dimly-lit space where Dealing with Data (TM) meets Infrastructure Engineering.

I'm really psyched to work on the Ubuntu Server Team for Canonical, the people behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution.

We're building DevOps tools and juju charms to insure Ubuntu remains the clear and easy choice as a Cloud and BigData OS.

Contact Information

Contributions

My largest contributions to Ubuntu have been in Juju. I am a contributor/maintainer/author of the following Juju Charms:

byobu-classroom, cassandra, distcc, django-rainbow, etherpad-lite, drupal, ganglia-nodelp, hadoop, haproxy, hbase, hive , jenkins, loggerhead, mediawiki, rails

All of this code is found on Launchpad or you can just browse around on jujucharms.com.

I am also working on automated testing for charms, which has taken the bulk of my last cycle, the idea is that every Juju charm is tested continually on multiple cloud providers, you can see an example of this work here:

• - https://jenkins.qa.ubuntu.com/view/Charms/view/Charms-Precise/view/ec2/

This will mean that we can keep the charm store's quality up on every single commit.

• I've given many talks about Ubuntu in the past year, running Charm Schools at UDS and at OSCON.

• I led the effort to test 2,000 Hadoop nodes on AWS, all running on Ubuntu: http://markmims.com/cloud/2012/06/04/juju-at-scale.html

• I've given Charm Schools as part of Ubuntu Developer Week.

Future Goals

• Over the next calendar year I plan on attending multiple Rails, Django, and node conferences talking about how I'm helping to make Ubuntu an awesome deployment platform for these application stacks.

Testimonials

If you know me and have something nice to say, please leave a comment here.

Having Mims on the team has been great. Since he's also been a college professor his ability to teach people has been one of his great strengths. He's already been travelling a bunch talking to people about Ubuntu on the Cloud and Juju and as a frequent cospeaker his knowledge of the Ubuntu Values is well understood and he's always willing to bend over backwards to help people. As a future growth area I'd like to see you be involved in LoCo team activities in your area where appropriate! jorge

I have had the pleasure to work closely with Mark for about a year and consider him to be an invaluable member of the Juju/Charms community. Mark can produce not only produce brilliantly coded charms but also the patience and ability to share his knowledge in a way that's clear to the uninitiated but technical and accurate enough for the experience users. Mark would be a great addition to the Ubuntu community as a member! negronjl

Mims is a rock star! He spent an enormous amount of time working with the Community on getting Summit charmed as well as continuing to support us with any sort of issues that may come up. He will sit down and take the time to go over something with you until you understand it. Mark would be a great community member. -- chrisjohnston 2012-12-05 12:37:25

Mims contributions to the Ubuntu Community are outstanding and his help at OSCON was also appreciated. The question we should be asking is not whether he should be a Ubuntu member but why he is not one already. -- bkerensa 2024-04-23 10:05:05

Mark Mims was one of the first people I met in the Juju realm when it was first announced. I was impressed at how patient and clear he was in explaining the concept then helping me and others get started with both using Juju and writing charms. In the time since I've followed his work as he continues to set an example of what being an Ubuntu Community Member is all about. Given all the work he's done in helping grow the Ubuntu project in to the cloud it's surprising he's not already a member! marcoceppi 2012-12-06 17:27:18

Dr. Mims has demonstrated a real commitment to Ubuntu advocacy throughout his career at Canonical. Most recently helping to spread the word about Ubuntu and Juju at the AWS re:Invent conference, this is just one of many examples where Dr. Mims has shown that ubuntu-members would be honored by his presence in the team. He has also worked dilligently to bring his skills up to speed with packaging, submitting a few fixes here and there, and testing packages quite a bit while writing Juju charms. -- clint-fewbar 2012-12-07 19:01:00