On Tue, Sep 02, 2025 at 03:37:37PM -0500, Michael Winters via infrastructure wrote: > Hey y'all. Unemployed SRE here, looking to join the ranks. > @mwinters:fedora.im and hoping to see you in this Thursday's meeting > (September 4). I'm currently in US Central time.
Welcome! > Onboarding is always the hardest part, and it's why I hadn't joined > previously -- it's too difficult to build the necessary context across small > slices of time. But I'm hoping to do that now as quickly as I can with my > current excess of spare time, because that will (hopefully) enable me to > make ongoing contributions even after I'm employed again. > > So, apologies that I'll be pretty noisy for a bit. I'm going to try real > hard to pay back your investment. No problem at all. Just be patient with us all, as folks are always busy. Answering questions and discussing and helping others is all good thought IMHO. :) > Here are the vitals: > > - Skills > - SRE > - I've been using "other people's computers" since before they > became weather formations. Sometimes lots of them. > - Historical focus on reliable and scalable app architectures, but > reliability is also QA, CI/CD, PM, Finops, etc etc. So I've done some of > all of that. > - I feel I'm obligated to say "Kubernetes" here. I'm > OpenShift-curious but the licensing prohibits curiosity. > - Some leadership stuff like spearheading SLO adoption. > - Recently started exploring kernel internals and eBPF. > - I know my ARP from my ARPA. (Not a networking expert but no > stranger to RFCs.) > - Programming > - Basically any common language except .NET, most recently Go and > Rust. Never found a good reason to use a functional language but always > wanted to. > - Mostly backends and systems-level stuff (e.g. tooling), but I can > commit web UI war crimes if ordered. > - Lots of OSS contributions but never to a distro. > - People > - I feel strongly that technology *is* people. I see the strength > of that symbiosis as core to the outcomes, so I'm often focused on smoothing > out the bumps for others when my boss would rather I be shipping features. > (Have I mentioned that I'm unemployed?) Docs, sweeping the floors, etc. > - I love to teach. I've been told that I'm good at it. > - I was briefly the wrong kind of journalist, and then an editor. > So maybe some Magazine contributions eventually? Or at least some pedantry > on tap. > - Infosec > - A lifelong interest but never a career focus. I did get a CISSP > though, so I can tell you all about Bell-Lapadula. And I've had to operate > in some highly-regulated environments and work through some audits. > "Security-minded"? > - Familiar enough with OAuth, OIDC, LDAP, etc. but no Active > Directory. Might still be able to install Netware 4.11. Wow. Thats quite a background. :) If you have time/desire/energy there are also probibly other parts of fedora that might be of interest for you to contribute to as well (application development for our applications, quality / ci stuff?, probibly others. ;) > - Goals > - My only real goal right now is to learn the ropes as quickly as > possible and make at least one actual contribution ASAP. Sort of a "new > contributor smoke test." That said, I've found a lot of bumps along the way > so far in onboarding, and I think some of those fall under infra so I'll > likely start there. yeah, on onboarding is rough. :( We know it and keep wanting to improve things, but it's hard to do that while fighting fires/bigger priorities. > - I'm curious about the Zabbix migration since I've had to do a lot of > observability in the past. This is also a great opportunity to understand > where things are and why they are that way. (The full answer to "Why > Zabbix?" is probably "see also: our entire infra history".) Yeah. > - Initial Questions > - I have so many, I think I'm exceeding the capacity of folks in Matrix. Sorry if I sounded terse on matrix this weekend. Was just trying to stay away from things as much as I could on a long weekend. Questions are always welcome, just be partient for answers. :) > So I'm planning to start dumping those Q's here on the list or into > Discourse where they might be treated more like a queue. My actual question > here: is that the recommended approach? (Aside from RTFM'ing as hard as I > can?) Well, the ideal plan is that we are moving things from lists to discussion, but as you see we still do both. So, I would say prefer discussion, but if you are more comfortable on lists thats fine for now too. > - A number of the onboarding bumps that I want to smooth out are in the > infra docs, and those docs say that I need to be an apprentice to make a PR > to the docs ... is that correct? If so, how can we proceed since I'm the > newest noob around? Anyone can make pr's there: https://pagure.io/infra-docs-fpo/ Fixes very welcome. > Thanks for reading all of this, and looking forward to working with you all! > Feel free to email me or DM on Matrix if you want to connect. > > Michael Winters Welcome again! kevin -- _______________________________________________ infrastructure mailing list -- infrastructure@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to infrastructure-le...@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/infrastructure@lists.fedoraproject.org Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
