CoreDeveloperApplication

Revision 3 as of 2021-08-19 14:30:28

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I, William 'jawn-smith' Wilson, apply for core-dev.

Name

William Wilson

Launchpad Page

https://launchpad.net/~jawn-smith

Wiki Page

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/jawn-smith

I am applying because:

  • I joined the Foundations team in January 2021.
  • I'd like to eliminate delays in getting my work sponsored.
  • I'd like to reduce the burden on my sponsors.
  • I'd like the ability to contribute to Ubuntu more meaningfully.
  • As the Foundations team continues to hire this year, I'd like to be able to sponsor changes for the new employees.

Who I am

My name is William Wilson. I'm a member of the Ubuntu Foundations team currently living in Dallas, TX. I'm passionate about Linux, SBCs, and RISC-V. Before working for Canonical I was using Ubuntu to develop software for pharmaceutical companies, and developing Linux operating systems for use by the United States government. I'm the creator of the https://github.com/GlenPickle/Chimera and have contributed to https://github.com/qmk/qmk_firmware.

My Ubuntu story

I first used Ubuntu 14.04 while working on a research project with a professor during my undergraduate studies. I immediately found that using Ubuntu just made sense to me and I quickly fell in love with FOSS. I tried a few other Linux distributions, but always found my way back to Ubuntu, and have been using it on all of my workstations ever since. After University, I accepted a job at a company called CMI. Their company laptops came with Windows installed, so before I accepted their job offer I made sure I would be allowed to use my own laptop with Ubuntu instead. While at CMI I realized I wanted more OS development experience, so I got a job at a company called Forcepoint building Linux operating systems to be used by the US government. While at Forcepoint my desire to work on open source projects and give back to the open source community grew, so I applied to Canonical and have been given the opportunity to do just that on the Foundations team.

My involvement

Examples of my work / Things I'm proud of

* My greatest contribution to Ubuntu so far is my work on ubuntu-image. By rewriting it in Go I was able to greatly reduce the amount of code needed to build images by reducing duplication with snapd. I am proud to say this project currently has a 100% go report-card score and 100% test coverage.

As for things that aren't direct contributions to packages but I am proud of:

Areas of work

While on the Foundations team I have had the opportunity to work on:

  • Rewriting ubuntu-image in Go. I will be taking over maintenance of this package along with sil2100
  • Supporting RISC-V development and getting u-boot working on the Unmatched for 20.04.3
  • Raspberry Pi firmware updates
  • Many proposed migration tasks for foundations packages
  • Migrating universe packages while on +1 maintenance. I like to use my Go experience to help target those packages.
  • Some cross-team work adding new metrics for hwcap to ubuntu-report and making a PR in snapd to help integration with ubuntu-image.

Things I could do better

I could improve my attention to detail on steps like remembering to run "update-maintainer" when appropriate, and updating status of Launchpad bugs. I feel I have gained a good understanding of Ubuntu packaging, but I'm sure there is more I could learn.

Plans for the future

General

  • Continue to improve ubuntu-image
  • Continue to work with RISC-V and Raspberry Pi when appropriate
  • Gain some toolchain experience, specifically with Go if possible

What I like least in Ubuntu

Documentation can exist in many different places. We have Discourse, the Ubuntu Wiki, the Canonical wiki, man pages, and personal blogs. I try to address this by duplicating documentation in multiple places. See My Blog and Discourse for one example. Certain other things (like priming a gadget snap for building classic images) aren't documented well at all, which I plan to help fix by writing more documentation.


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@.


Endorsements

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


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:
##  https://udd.debian.org/cgi-bin/ubuntu-sponsorships.cgi
=== Areas of Improvement ===


CategoryCoreDevApplication