I, Eric Desrochers, apply for MOTU.

Who I am

I joined Canonical in August 2014 as a Technical Account Manager within Canonical's STS team. As a result of hard work and effort, I earned respect from my peers. Since then, I got promoted into the Sustaining Engineering team where some of my responsibilities are : driving customer and community bugs into resolution by troubleshooting, fixing bugs, providing guidance & workarounds, for different areas of expertise which may cover areas such as: kernel, drivers, virtualization, network, cloud, storage setups, ... and physical/virtual environment orchestration. Also working with other members within Canonical Ubuntu Engineering, Cloud Development Operations Team, Ubuntu User and Developers Community, Upstream Communities, ...

My Ubuntu story

I officially started to used Ubuntu in 2006 for my personal computers. In the same time, in my professional life, I was also deploying a few hundreds OpenVZ (Virtuozzo) containers running Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Dapper Drake).

Ten years later, I am still running Ubuntu on my personal computers and now have the chance to work for Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu. I've been a Technical Account Manager for 2 years and now I'm in the sustaining engineering team.

My involvement

Examples of my work / Things I'm proud of

I'm proud to be part of the support team and being responsible to fix userspace, kernel ,... for the Ubuntu community and Canonical customers.

Most of my userland contributions can be found here :

http://ubuntu-dev.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/ubuntu-sponsorships.cgi?render=html&sponsor=&sponsor_search=name&sponsoree=Eric+Desrochers&sponsoree_search=name

Kernel contributions :

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1546320

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1581169

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-lts-xenial/+bug/1572630

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1512815

...

Upstream contributions:

https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/issues/4680

Areas of work

I've been mostly involved in fixing userland and kernel bugs for Canonical's UA customers. Working on various packaging aspects including hotfix/testfix, SRUs, backports, patches, debian patch, upstream patch, ...

At the time I'm writing this MOTU application, I'm mostly involve in the zfsonlinux project... contributing upstream, in debian and of course Ubuntu.

Things I could do better

Build and consistently sustain my network by attending more local networking events in my area.

Plans for the future

General

I wish one day I can become a core developper and I also hope to have the chance to give back by mentoring someone the same way I've been mentored.

What I like least in Ubuntu

In general, documentation is good but unfortunately not maintained nor updated, which have the effect to turn out-to-date very quickly.

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@.

I've worked a lot with Eric for the past two years. He is always ready and capable to solve any issues we encounter and pays attention to details. He would be a great asset for any project he works on. alexmoldovan

I've known Eric for many years and worked with him at different companies. I keep getting impressed by his drive and desire to push himself. This is someone who knows how to get things done. davecore

Endorsements

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

cyphermox

General feedback

The packages I've sponsored and other updates I've seen were high quality, and showed a good attention to detail and general willingness to ask questions when usure of what to do; just what I'd expect from someone wanting to get MOTU. Eric is quick to learn how things work and showed a great thought process in the preseed change I sponsored, coming up with a solid solution I hadn't thought of, and corner cases that had to be dealt with.

Specific Experiences of working together

I sponsored a preseed and d-i update (netcfg related); and regularly field questions from Eric about things relating to packaging and the Ubuntu processes, such as how the -dbgsym packages work, how d-i builds happen and the testing that goes with them.

Areas of Improvement

I would like to see more uploads and involvement in merges, syncs, etc.

mdeslaur

General feedback

While I have only sponsored a single package for Eric, my interactions with him have demonstrated his desire to do things right and his willingness to accept comments and make things better. I think he would make a great MOTU.

Specific Experiences of working together

I sponsored an NTP SRU. The debdiff was nicely done, and I only had a couple of minor nit picks about them. He understands the principles of debian packaging and the SRU process.

Areas of Improvement

I would like to see Eric contribute more to the dev release, and one area I'd like to see improvement in is slightly better formatted changelogs.

louis-bouchard

General feedback

I have sponsored five package uploads for Eric so far. I also interact with him on a daily basis since we are working in the same team. His dedication to getting things fixed is notable and he is always eager to learn new things. He has spent an extensive amount of time in teaching himself about the kernel and is interested in all areas of Ubuntu.

Specific Experiences of working together

He dedicated a sensible amount of efforts in dealing with the ZFS issue, working with both the Ubuntu community and upstream to bring a solution to this problem. When asked for clarifications, we was ready to answer and bring comments and context.

Areas of Improvement

As outlined by others, Eric should start to get in involved with merges and syncs and participate with the development release.

-- louis-bouchard 2024-04-23 19:45:22

happyaron

General feedback

I have been working with him on zfs related packages, though our co-work experience is not really long, I'd say his updates are of high quality and he is a really nice person to work with. -- happyaron 2024-04-23 19:45:22

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 ===