Inside Infra: Chris Thistlethwaite

[Sally Khudairi]

[this post is available online at https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Chris ]

"Inside Infra" is a new interview series with members of the ASF Infrastructure 
team. The series opens with an interview with Chris Thistlethwaite, who shares 
his experience with Sally Khudairi, ASF VP Marketing & Publicity.

- - -
"I get very attached to the technology that I'm working with and the 
communities that I'm working with, so if a server goes down or a site's acting 
wonky, I take that very personally. That reflects on how I do my job.”
- - -

- Let’s start with you telling us your name --how is it pronounced?

It’s “Chris Thistle-wait” --I don’t correct people who say “thistle-th-wait”-- 
that’s also correct, but our branch of the family doesn’t pronounce the second 
“th”.

- What’s your handle if people are trying to find you? I know you’re "christ" 
(pronounced "Chris T") on the internal ASF Slack channel.

Yeah --anything ASF-related is all under "christ".

- Do people call you "Christ"?

They do! I first started in IT around Christmastime and was doing desktop 
support and office-type IT. When people started putting in tickets, and my 
username  was "christ" there, they were asking "why was Christ logging into my 
computer right now?" and it became a thing. When I was hired at the ASF I told 
Greg (Stein; ASF Infrastructure Administrator) about that story, he said "you 
gotta go with that for your Apache username."

- When and how did you get involved with the ASF?

A long time ago I started getting into Linux and Open Source, and naturally 
progressed to httpd (Apache HTTP Server). Truth be told, that’s where it 
started and stopped, but I’ve always been interested in Open Source and working 
with projects and within communities. Three years ago I was looking for a new 
job and stumbled across the infra blog post for a job opening. I fired up an 
email, sent it off to VP infra and that’s how everything started. The ramp up 
of the job was diving deep into everything there is with the ASF and Open 
Source --which I am still diving. I don't think I found the bottom yet with the 
ASF.

- How long have you been a member of the Infrastructure team?

This November will be my fourth year.

- What are you responsible for in ASF Infrastructure?

Infrastructure has a whole bunch of different services that are used by both 
Apache projects as well as the Foundation itself: the Infrastructure team 
builds, monitors, supports, and keeps all those things running. Anything from 
Jenkins to mailing lists to Git, SVN repositories and on the back end of things 
we keep everything working for the Foundation itself within, say, SVN or 
mailing lists, keeping archives of those things, keeping your standard security 
and permissions set up and split out. Anyone you ask on the Infra team will 
say: "I do everything!" It's too hard to explain --it's quite possibly a little 
bit of everything that has anything to do with technology --as broad as it can 
possibly be.

- So you really have to be a jack-of-all-trades. Do you have a specialty, or 
does everybody literally do everything?

Everyone on the team generally does everything --for the most part any one of 
us can jump into the role of anyone else on the team. Everyone has a deep 
knowledge of a particular or a handful of services that they’ll take care of 
--like, Gavin (McDonald; ASF Infrastructure team member) knows more about 
Jenkins and the buildbot and build services than most people on the team. At 
any one given point we’re on call and need to be able to fix something or take 
a look at something, so everyone needs to be versed enough in how to 
troubleshoot Jenkins. That can also be said for not just services that we 
offer, but also parts of technology, like MySQL or Postgres or our mail system 
or DNS: we do have actual physical hardware in some places, and we have VMs 
everywhere too, so sometimes we’re troubleshooting a bad backplane on a server 
or why a VM is acting the way it is. There's a very broad knowledge base that 
all of us have but there are specifics that some people know more about than 
others.

- How does ASF Infrastructure differ from other organizations?

There are a lot of similarities but a ton of differences. A big part of how 
Infra is different is, to use a "Sally-ism": if you look at it on paper, it 
wouldn't work --I've heard you describe the ASF that way. If you explained the 
way things work at the Foundation to somebody, they would literally think that 
you're making it up and there's no way that it would possibly be working the 
way that it does. There's a lot of that with the Infrastructure team too: many 
people that I keep in contact with that I've worked with over the years, from 
my first job where we would buy servers, unbox them, rack them, wire them up, 
set them up, and run them from the office next door to us --I'd be impressed 
whenever I had 25 servers running in our little "data center" at that job, and 
now I talk to these guys

[ANNOUNCE] Apache Jackrabbit Oak 1.0 retired

[Julian Reschke]

Dear users of Apache Jackrabbit,

the Apache Jackrabbit Team has decided to drop support and deprecate the 
1.0 branch of Apache Jackrabbit Oak. Branch, tags and releases will 
still be available for future references, but will not show up on the 
download page anymore. Users are encouraged to upgrade to the latest 
stable versions (1.26.0 for Java 8, 1.6.20 for Java 7, 1.2.31 for Java 6 
(*)).


See , 
 and 
 for further information.


Best regards, Julian

(*) But note that 1.2 is planned to be retired in May as well.