Ubuntu Wiki

About Me

My name is Chris J Arges and I am a member of the Canonical Technical Services Engineering Platform Team. I help fix kernel, userspace, and desktop bugs filed by Ubuntu Advantage customers. In practice this results in many stable fixes for the entire Ubuntu community. Most bugs I fix are via SRUs to stable releases but I always run a laptop with the latest development release to file bug reports (and fix them) as I can. I've also helped with FTBFS/NBS issues, tested ISOs on hardware, fixed upstream issues, completed some Debian merges and contributed numerous bug reports. I've done some work using launchpadlib to help our team better prioritize and fix bugs and track statistics. I've had some experience using Juju to charm our internal django website for our team. Finally, I develop tools and help partners with their Debian packaging when possible. My focus is not only fixing bugs, but also helping to maintain a high quality Linux distribution through data, tools and communication.

Contributions

You can see my uploads for Ubuntu here: https://launchpad.net/~arges/+uploaded-packages

In addition please search the ubuntu.com kernel mailing list and LKML for various submitted and accepted patches.

Related projects in Launchpad can be found here: https://launchpad.net/~arges/+related-projects

Other projects I've worked on can be found here: https://github.com/arges

This project was part of my masters report about data-mining Ubuntu bugs: http://chrisarges.net/papers.html

Future Goals

I plan on continuing to improve the quality of Ubuntu by fixing bugs, and contributing wherever I can. I plan on continuing to submit patches to Debian when I can, and sending patches upstream to their respective projects. I would also like to improve the tools used to debug (systemtap/crash/kdump) as well as the tools used to triage and analyze defects.

Testimonials

Ezio de Mauro

Working with Chris is a pleasure. He has the patience to explain to less skilled people what needs to be done in order for Chris to successfully reproduce and fix bugs and he teaches them as well. Besides the great technical expertise (I've seen him touching code which goes from the kernel to userland) he has also very insightful when it comes to topics like bugs workflow, triage, statistics, etc. He gave a great lightning talk at UDS-Q and it was good to see he raised a lot of interest in finding better ways to triage bugs for example. Great Core-Dev application in my opinion.

Adam Stokes

Chris is a vital asset to the community. His continued contributions to the kernel, patching during plus-one maintenance, and SRU shows his commitment and technical knowledge towards the continued growth of Ubuntu. In addition to the many kernel subsystems he interfaces with Chris is also able to dive into userspace with little to no guidance and apply his skills with making sure the foundation of Ubuntu is well maintained. He is an astute developer and I have never witnessed a problem he was not able to resolve.

Matt Rae

I've enjoyed working with and learning from Chris. He has in depth knowledge into the kernel and a strong helper on our team. He's written tools to improve our processes in support such as a dashboard to help us visualize our case load.

David Chiluk (chiluk)

Chris is a brilliant man, with the persistence of pauper, competence of a hermit, and social grace of a pretty little girl. Chris has been my mentor for navigating the Ubuntu development process for roughly the last year. He has a tenacious desire to improve Ubuntu, as well as the ability to deliver on that desire. He has extensive expertise in debugging kernel as well as user-space problems, as well as the drive to follow through. He's exceedingly competent in python, C, as well as numerous other languages. He plays nice with others, is rational, respectful, and careful. There is no doubt in my mind that Chris would be a highly valuable addition to the core-dev team.

Bryan Quigley

Chris is great to work with. He's always very responsive and responsible. Every time I've asked for anything, he's always been very courteous. I've escalated a number of customer cases to him from all over the stack (QEMU, ifupdown, iptables). The ifupdown bug stands out for me because the initial fix caused a regression (in dev release). Within a very short amount of time (I believe it was 2-3 hours, but couldn't find exact time) he had completed everything necessary to file a new SRU and got the regression fixed in saucy. He also triages and assigns a lot of the engineering cases that we escalate from customers, which means he is keeping track of everyone's load and expertise. That may sound time consuming, but Chris has pioneered a dashboard that makes the load part of that equation easy. Definitely approve for core-dev.

Mark Russell (marrusl)

First, let me just echo the technical kudos from everyone above. I'm in the fun position of sending a lot of bugs his way, often bugs from really big customers who themselves have armies of really smart developers and experienced, savvy operations teams. When teams like that are stumped or blocked, it's never a trivial issue. To such cases, Chris brings a logically sound and highly effective triaging style that has earned the respect of the most demanding customers.

That said, in Chris's role there's really a dual mandate that has to be constantly juggled: manage work based on customer needs, and do the right thing for the platform and wider community. These things can seem to be opposed at times, but they really aren't in the long run. Chris truly gets both parts of the job and sometimes that means not telling the customer exactly what they want to hear. In those cases, he always gives me a clear explanation of why things need to be done correctly and why it benefits everyone. If the temperature is rising on something, or I'm failing to convince a customer why something needs to be done in a certain way, he'll often volunteer to join status calls and engage directly with customer-side engineering to back-up our reasoning.

To sum up: incredibly smart, motivated, reliable, methodical, understands both the technical and process/policy side of Ubuntu development, very stong triager -- oh, and from what I can tell, he's really rather good with this kernel thing too!