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OpenStack Community Contributor Awards recognize unsung heroes

A lot of behind-the-scenes work goes on in the community–the first edition of these awards put a medal on it.

April 29, 2016
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AUSTIN, Texas– On the last day of the Austin Summit, the Community Contributor Awards gave a special tip of the hat to those who might not be aware that they are valued.

These awards are a little informal and quirky but still recognize the extremely valuable work that everyone does to make OpenStack excel. These behind-the-scenes heroes were nominated by other community members.

There were three main categories: those who might not be aware that they are valued, those who are the active glue that binds the community together and those who share their knowledge with others.
OpenStack community manager Tom Fifield handed out the honors after the Summit feedback session.

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You are our heroes! Shiny, shiny OpenStack Contributor medals.

The Infinite Rebase Shield

This trophy goes to individuals who, working on what’s necessary, rather than what’s necessarily cool, put in monumental amounts of effort. Always doing right by the community process – gaining consensus, then completing the technical work.

Winner: Victor Stinner
"In the face of endless rebases, Stinner has tirelessly pushed OpenStack toward Python 3.
I get the impression that it has been hard at times to get the necessary reviews for his Python 3 porting work; especially for the projects he’s not well known on, and I hate to see him discouraged. We’re lucky to have such a prolific expert leading the Python 3 porting effort for OpenStack, and I’d like him to know that his work is appreciated."

The Duct Tape Medal

Recipients of this medal (and its mandatory accompanying duct tape and MacGyver wig) appear to be able to fix anything, somehow.

Joint Winners: Gauvain Pocentek, Andreas Jaeger, Christian Berendt, Atsushi Sakai, Kato Tomoyuki.

"These few work really, really hard in an area that is seriously needed, but isn’t really high profile or very enjoyable: the tool chain that powers the documentation and its automation. Thanks to them we have complete config option references, consistent templates, CLI references, etc. Tireless, tireless contributions over a long period."

The Don’t Stop Believin’ Cup

Reserved for some of our newest users, who’ve made an impact already, but might benefit from the encouragement of this some-time OpenStack anthem.

Joint Winners: Jaivish Kothari, Pawel Koniszewski, Vikram Choudhary

"Kothari has been an active contributor in OpenStack and is contributing in different projects in the past year and I think he needs some motivation and maybe some appreciation."

"Live migration testing in our continuous integration (CI) system is woefully lacking (non-voting, only tests some basic happy paths with libvirt). Koniszewski discovered and fixed at least three major live migration regressions in Mitaka around release candidate time. Also, Pawel is in UTC+1 so was putting in long hours working with the Nova core review team in the US."

"Choudhary is not a Neutron core. But the second most prolific reviewer in Neutron for the last six months. He reads every single line and often catches issues that other reviewers have not caught. His reviews demonstrate a holistic knowledge about how Neutron works combined with a focus on detail that rivals anyone’s. I and others have joked that our code isn’t ready until it passes the ‘Vikram test’ – that +1 is in my experience the most difficult to reach, the most satisfying to achieve, and the most important indicator that my code is really ready. I am sure there are many who find his ability to find issues frustrating, but I find that I have learned more from his -1s that anyone else’s, and I have grown more as a coder because of them."

The Simple-to-Implement Prize

For the person who has gone above-and-beyond to reduce complexity.

Winner: Dean Troyer
"Troyer has solved one of the most cited problems of OpenStack, inconsistency in the user experience by creating the OpenStack Client. It presents an easy-to-use, consistent, and powerful interface to replace the soup of models and options presented by the other clients. He worked against odds and popular opinion, took a long-term view of a problem and delivered a tool that will impact nearly every OpenStack user in a positive way. Every person I’ve spoken to about the OpenStack Client feels the same way, and is grateful for his efforts."

The Nathanial Perez Prize for Behind-the-Scenes efforts

Is their hair blue, or pink? We don’t know exactly, but they work in the shadows fixing problems we didn’t even know existed.

Joint Winners: Tony Breeds, Tristan de Cacqueray, Rocky Grober, Carol Barrett

"Even the most cursory of glances at openstack-dev will show that Breeds consistently volunteers for just about anything that needs doing. Perhaps a little euphemistically I’ve heard him described as being willing to be thrown under any bus the community might require of him. He is equally adept at wrangling deep OpenStack code as he is wrestling with gate issues or engaging in discussions about the community’s well-being."

"De Cacqueray works behind the scenes to keep all OpenStack users secure, by leading the Vulnerability Management Team. It is a lot of coordination work, and by its very nature it is very invisible. As if it wasn’t enough, he is also involved in organizing our governance elections. This is also a thankless job — nobody congratulates you when everything works but everyone jumps the gun if there are any glitches in the process."

"Grober’s been accurately described as a Swiss-army knife – technical but community-oriented, she’s active in DefCore, Refstack, the Product Work Group, Logging Work Group, Women of OpenStack, Diversity Work Group etc. She’s able to talk bare metal and fast cars with the same ease and always on point, always friendly and a great connector in the community."

"Barrett has been involved in the OpenStack working group communities for several years and has been instrumental in helping different needs/segments in the community gain a shared voice. She has given significant contributions to several initiatives including the Enterprise WG, Diversity WG, Product WG.
Joint Winners: Tony Breeds, Tristan de Cacqueray, Rocky Grober, Carol Barrett

The When-do-you-sleep? Trophy

For the person we’re pretty sure sends emails every hour of a twenty-four hour period. Don’t you ever sleep?

Winner: Akihiro Motoki
"Motoki is simultaneously a core reviewer on Neutron and Horizon, and seriously works hard on both. But he also finds time to be a leading figure in the internationalization team, fixing its tooling and translating a lot of OpenStack into Japanese and he contributes actively to the documentation project!"

The Bug Czar Award

For the individual who does the most to deal with the bugs.

Winner: Markus Zoeller
Zoeller has been the Nova bug czar for several months now (at least all of Mitaka). He runs an (under-attended) weekly bug meeting in different time zones, writes tooling for working with Nova bugs (and launchpad in general), has created a dashboard for nova bugs, mentors others (since he’s trying to rotate the triager duty), and has driven positive process change back to the community (he’s working on changing the nova ‘wishlist’ bug / RFE process with the operators community). It should be noted that Nova frequently has over 1,000 unresolved bugs, and people that take on bug czar lead generally burn out quickly (weeks). Markus has shown great commitment in this critical but under-appreciated area. Besides bugs, he’s also driven the effort since Mitaka to cleanup the glut of configuration options in Nova to actually make operators aware of what each option does, how it’s used, what the valid values are and risks/inter-dependencies. This is another mostly thankless job but greatly improves the usability of Nova."

The "Does anyone actually use this?" Trophy

It turns out that not only do people use OpenStack, some of those who do put in effort to assist with the sanity of the collective.

Joint Winners: Kris Lindgren, JJ Asghar, Matt Fischer, Matt Jarvis

"Asghar cares about building communities of invested stakeholders. His efforts in trying to get OSOps off the ground is something that I have not seen any OpenStack Operator ever run with this far or this fast. Hes an asset to the community for sure! Great colleague."

"Lindgren is actively involved in operator discussions and working groups. His input input is valuable in both helping others with problems and with feedback on where features need improved."

"Jarvis is an active contributor to the operators community. He’s also actively involved in testing upcoming features and reporting feedback to both operators and developers. He’s done a great job bringing together not just the OpenStack community across the North West of England (specifically Manchester), but Europe in general by stepping up and helping to organize the first EU Operators Meetup. He’s a fantastic ambassador for OpenStack in general, and a great engineer to boot."

Mentor of Mentors

For serious efforts in sharing knowledge with others.

Winner: Victoria Martinez de la Cruz and Emily Hugenbruch
"Martinez de la Cruz is coordinating the Outreachy program. She put lots of energy into it and she’s very good at it. She knows how to welcome and mentor newcomers, that thanks to her feel at ease. I really think she deserves an award."

"For months, Hugenbruch has been leading community members to build from the ground up the OpenStack Mentoring program. She has been working tirelessly to setup the initially processes for the program, pairing technical mentor/mentees together, as well as setting up events at the Austin summit for people to learn how to give back to the community together."

Bonsai Caretaker

These people keep pressing the button to feed the Tamagochi.

Joint Winners: Vilobh Meshram, Ihar Hrachyshka and Miguel Angel Ajo

Meshram is leading the cross-project quota effort to solve the Quota enforcement challenge. Its a challenge because Quotas are key piece of OpenStack and are poorly implemented in every project who makes use of Quotas. Apart from that Vilobh is working on the DLM (Distributed Lock Manager) effort which got approved in Tokyo summit by introducing Consul driver in Tooz. Vilobh is the first one to introduce Nested Quota in OpenStack. Vilobh is working on many important projects like Utilization Based Scheduling, solving scheduling problems at the scale of Yahoo!, empowering people to contribute Openstack and spread knowledge by giving talks in OS Bug Smash at New York and many more. Vilobh is a core contributor for Magnum. Within his short span of 2 years has contributed, helped the community by providing a new perspective by solving important real world problems across various OpenStack projects like Nova, Cinder, Magnum, Oslo, Keystone, Glance.

"Ajo and Hrachyshka have been the unheralded leaders of the QoS section of the Neutron project. While overall the Neutron project has a high knowledge barrier to entry and can be difficult to start with, they have made sure that the QoS mini-community is very welcoming and encouraging. for programmers new to Openstack. In addition to guiding and encouraging, they have helped ensure success for initiatives in the QoS space, thinking ahead about the dependencies that will be needed long before they are, and setting those supporting initiatives in place in advance. I feel personally indebted to them, and I think they exemplify the ideals of contributors to Openstack."

Stay tuned for news on when the next nominations open!

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