All posts by Paul

Musician, Linux geek, hubby & dad, and all-around super guy.
Band, Literature, Music, Tips

The Blue Collar Bass Player.

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This post is mainly aimed at my bass playing friends but also other types of musicians might enjoy it. I just got through reading the latest revision of Ted Gould‘s book and felt compelled to share this review.

With his new book (iTunes link), Ted skillfully bridges the gap between the living room and the global stage. In between these two extremes is where most working bassists live and learn — often the hard way — the important lessons of making a good impression, doing homework, getting and keeping gigs, and much more.

Unlike a lot of professional or self-help books, this one isn’t “fluffed up” with vague, useless concepts that up the page count but waste your time. Instead, Ted packs it with value, pulling zero punches with dead-on advice to help bassists avoid common pitfalls and bring their best to their job as musicians. Whether you’re trying to get from basement to bar, from local venues to regional or beyond, or simply expand your work to other types of gigs, “The Blue Collar Bass Player” is the book for you.

No joke, this book is packed with practical, awesome information. Definitely worth a read if you want to up your game!

General

Holiday Break 2017.

My work with the Fedora Engineering team has been a whirlwind this year. Of course, with lots going on in the releases and infrastructure, between modularity, continuous integration, Atomic, and more, there has been plenty for everyone to do. With both new and departing folks on our team there’s also been people-related change as well. I can easily see and feel the incredible effort going on in so many parts of Fedora these days.

I now contribute in a few areas, such as the Workstation working group. My own biggest personal contribution to the project this year, though (outside people management), has been to the Fedora Magazine. Ryan Lerch was responsible several years ago for resuscitating the Magazine into a vibrant, useful resource for our users worldwide, and I was happy to jump in and help when I found out about the great work he was doing. This year we were also fortunate to have Justin Flory serving for a while as editor in chief.

Now Ryan and I are happily keeping things chugging along, though. This year we set a goal for three million page views. And as of yesterday, we hit it! That’s not just an accomplishment for the Magazine folks, though. It means that Fedora news and information is reaching more and more people worldwide every month. In light of reaching this goal, it’s nice to sit back and take a breath to enjoy the scenery.

And that of course brings me to my annual reminder about what the holidays mean for Fedora team availability. Once again, I’m going to crib from an earlier post:

My good friend John Poelstra is fond of saying, “It’s OK to disappoint people, but it’s not OK to surprise them.” That wisdom is a big reason why I like to set expectations over the holidays.

Working at Red Hat is a fast paced and demanding job. Working full time in Fedora is itself demanding on top of that. These demands can make downtime at the holiday important for our team. At Red Hat, there’s a general company shutdown between Christmas and the New Year. This lets the whole organization relax and step away from the keyboard without guilt or fear.

Of course, vital functions are always staffed. Red Hat’s customers will always find us there to support them. Similarly, our Fedora infrastructure team will monitor over the holidays to ensure our services are working nominally, and jump in to fix them if not.

Some people like to spend time over the holidays hacking on projects. Others prefer to spend the time with family and friends. I’ve encouraged our team to use the Fedora vacation calendar to mark their expected “down time.” I encourage other community members to use the calendar, too, especially if they carry some expectations or regular responsibilities around the project.

I’m personally taking the next two weeks off around the holiday, mainly to take a break from work, but also to get buried in my creative pursuits as a musician, songwriter, and music engineer/producer. I hope each of you has a wonderful end of year season and that the holidays you enjoy are peaceful and bountiful.

Fedora, Linux, Red Hat, Tech Tips, Tips

Better Pagure email filters for Gmail

I get quite a bit of email notification from Pagure, the free (as in freedom!), Python-based git forge. I have and participate in several repos there. Pagure sends me email when there’s a new or updated issue, pull request, or commit to a repo I monitor.

Previously, all that email for me has gone into a “Pagure” folder. But Pagure offers a special header, X-pagure-project, which indicates the specific project that triggered the email. Unfortunately, Gmail’s filters notoriously lack the ability to parse arbitrary headers. This is actually a limitation of the Gmail API. Why there’s no getHeaders() call, I have no idea — but maybe it has something to do with worries about arbitrary content there.

Now, I could probably set up filters to look for mail From: pagure@pagure.io and then look in the subject line for [Project-name]. But this means I have to make a new filter for every project manually. YUCK!

Enter Google Apps Script

So I wrote my very first Google Apps Script (this script is MIT licensed).

Here’s the link, which will stay up to date.

How to use the script

To use it, you first need to connect Google Apps Scripts to your Google Drive. (Use New –> More in Google Drive, if this isn’t already done.) Then save this as a new script in your Drive.

Adjust the parentlabel value if needed. Then set a timer trigger to run the processInbox function every 5 or 10 minutes.

Make sure to remove any existing filter for Pagure notification email, so that your script has a chance to run against notifications in your Inbox.

If you’ve never used Google Apps Scripts before, it’s easy to get started. I’m living proof, since I’m not much of a developer. Here’s a quick start from Google that will help.

Fedora, Linux, Red Hat, Travel

The next big things, 2017 edition.

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Along with several people on the Fedora Engineering team, I recently attended the DevConf.cz 2017 event. The conference has grown into an amazingly successful gathering of open source developers. Most attendees live in Europe but there were some from every continent. The coverage spanned all the big open source buzz-generating technologies. Session topics included containers, PaaS, orchestration and automation, and DevOps.

One of the most frequent topics I heard at and around the conference was CI — continuous integration. The idea of CI isn’t new in and of itself. Many open source projects put it to use already. If you do any work on Github, you’ve already seen it at work. (Also notably, OpenStack features one of the biggest and arguably most successful at-scale efforts.) However, it hasn’t taken strong root in Fedora, yet.

Based on the discussions I had and heard at DevConf.cz, that’s likely to change soon. Why? Well, for one thing, Fedora still breaks too often. This is especially (but not exclusively) true about Rawhide. But in many cases, we can easily understand these breakages. That means we can detect and prevent them before they occur. While update testing in Bodhi helps in the case of stable releases, that’s not a cure-all. That process still depends heavily on manual efforts that aren’t guaranteed. Moreover, those efforts form a gate of several days at a minimum, between building, karma, and tagging. This process no longer scales with new, fast-moving deliverables like Fedora’s edition of the Atomic Host. One size no longer fits all. We need a more flexible, automated approach.

What does that mean? For Fedora, the CI concept means gating on automated tests that guarantee some level of validity to a change. These tests are run prior to introducing changes into a tree, ostree, module, container, etc. That way, we don’t pass breakage on to the consumer.  But we can message that breakage back to the maintainer directly. The maintainer then quickly acts to fix the issues. And they see more immediate results from their fix.

We must do some work in the Fedora infrastructure to make this process work for Fedora contributors (maintainers especially). Some app work is also required to support our packaging and deliverables. We must make sure it’s easy for people to contribute to tests. Maintainers need to easily understand the status of their build requests. And of course the community must be able to continue contributing to higher levels of testing that make for a better Fedora. So CI isn’t the end of the story. It’s just another strong link in a chain of improvements.

Fortunately, we’re well situated to do great work here. For instance, the Fedora Infrastructure team already plans to front our dist-git package control with Pagure. (You probably know Pagure is a full-featured collaborative git forge.) This ensures the Fedora dist-git acts as a source for CI, tested with each new proposed change. But we believe this is unlikely to cause more complexity. Packagers can expect to use tools they already know. Furthermore, they could use the popular, effective pull request model to maintain packages and develop testing. This lowers the bar to contribution while maintaining high quality.

Another point in our favor is the entire Fedora application infrastructure has been running on the fedmsg messaging bus for years. We already can orchestrate and coordinate a huge number of automated activities around events involving our apps. Therefore a higher level of continuous integration and testing is well within our grasp.

Of course, this blog post is light on details. (What else would you expect from a manager?) 😛 Those details are obviously important. As the least technical person in the Fedora Engineering team, though, I’m the last person you’d want to describe them in detail. But the folks in the Infrastructure community team will be launching a series of discussions on the mailing list to explore those details.

We’re all passionate about making Fedora better. So hearing feedback from our contributors and colleagues at DevConf.cz has us very excited and enthusiastic about this next level. I encourage you to get involved and contribute constructively to the discussions!

Fedora, Red Hat

Holiday Break 2016.

It’s sad I don’t get more time to post here these days. Being a manager is a pretty busy job, although I have no complaints! It’s enjoyable, and fortunately I have one of the best teams imaginable to work with, the Fedora Engineering team.

Since we’re coming to the close of another calendar year, I wanted to take a moment to remind people about what the holidays mean to availability. I’m going to crib from an earlier post of mine:

My good friend John Poelstra is fond of saying, “It’s OK to disappoint people, but it’s not OK to surprise them.” That wisdom is a big reason why I like to set expectations over the holidays.

Working at Red Hat is a fast paced and demanding job. Working full time in Fedora is itself demanding on top of that. These demands can make downtime at the holiday important for our team. At Red Hat, there’s a general company shutdown between Christmas and the New Year. This lets the whole organization relax and step away from the keyboard without guilt or fear.

Of course, vital functions are always staffed. Red Hat’s customers will always find us there to support them. Similarly, our Fedora infrastructure team will monitor over the holidays to ensure our services are working nominally, and jump in to fix them if not.

Some people like to spend time over the holidays hacking on projects. Others prefer to spend the time with family and friends. I’ve encouraged our team to use the Fedora vacation calendar to mark their expected “down time.” I encourage other community members to use the calendar, too, especially if they carry some expectations or regular responsibilities around the project.

So all this to say, don’t be surprised if it’s harder to reach some people over the holidays. I’m personally taking several weeks around this holiday shutdown as time off, to relax with my family and recharge for what’s sure to be another busy year. Whatever your plans, I hope the holiday season is full of joy and peace for you and yours.

Fedora, Linux, Red Hat

Wheee, another addition.

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I’m thrilled to announce that Jeremy Cline has joined the Fedora Engineering team, effective today. Like our other recent immigrant, Randy Barlow, Jeremy was previously a member of Red Hat’s Pulp team. (This is mostly coincidental — the Pulp team’s a great place to work, and people there don’t just move to Fedora automatically.) Jeremy is passionate about and has a long history of open source contribution. We had many excellent applicants for our job opening, and weren’t even able to interview every qualified candidate before we had to make a decision. I’m very pleased with the choice, and I hope the Fedora community joins me in welcoming Jeremy!

Fedora, Linux, Red Hat

Another addition.

I’m extremely happy to announce that Randy Barlow has joined the Fedora Engineering team, effective today. Randy was previously a member of Red Hat’s team working on technologies like Pulp. You can find his fingerprints in many upstream repositories as a frequent contributor. This is fortunate for our team, since Randy will be contributing both to our applications infrastructure and to our release team. His experience with Pulp may come in handy too, since it may play a part in making next-generation Fedora content available to the public. I hope the Fedora community will join me in welcoming Randy!

Fedora, Linux, Red Hat

Fedora Engineering team opening, April 2016.

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My day job, as you probably know, is at Red Hat, where I manage the Fedora Engineering team. Our team provides engineering and design services for the Fedora Project, a collaborative community project which is the upstream source for a number of influential products. Not the least of these is Red Hat Enterprise Linux, of course.

We now have a job opening for a senior engineer in the USA to be part of our team.

About the job

Collaborating with the rest of the team, the community at large, and your colleagues in Red Hat, you’ll:

  • Build tools and web services that will in turn build a more modular next-generation Fedora
  • Do full-stack development, with a hand in everything from working with designers, to architecting and writing code, to deploying in test/stage/production, to maintenance and enhancement
  • Automate, automate, automate all the things
  • Co-create and develop our next community engagement system, Fedora Hubs
  • Stay tuned into exciting work going on throughout Red Hat related to platform and other technologies
  • As with all Fedora Engineering jobs, communicate openly and continually with the whole community, and build community around everything you do using open source best practices

About the Fedora Engineering team

Our team uses a lot of Python (flask and sqlalchemy currently rank highly), and we’ll be expanding outward in the future where it makes sense. We create code upstream that is widely consumable beyond just Fedora, and we deploy our work on both Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora.

We do that work openly: collaboration via git repositories, rapid and constant communication via IRC, frequent discussion through our mailing lists, and gathering and building community around our work. Simply put, we love open.

Who we’re looking for

The right candidate is a team player, positive and constructive, fully engaged and passionately committed to delivering results with their colleagues, wherever they might be. This is a senior position, so we’re looking for someone who’s a proactive, detail-oriented self-starter, and has the ability to lead from the side on a few projects. We want you to be really good at Python and being Pythonic, and hopefully have some similar high-level language experience like Ruby or Java where you can help us grow, too.

Not interested in working in a Red Hat office? No sweat. We’re a distributed team, and this job is perfect for an experienced remote candidate. Remote doesn’t mean aloof, though. You need to be somewhat of a people person to crush this job, because good open source means collaboration. We meet up at least once a year as a team for Flock, but we work together constantly online.

I would be remiss in not pointing out this position back-fills some mighty big shoes. That’s why I’ve outlined some ideas for who we’re looking for in this post. That being said, you’ll also be working for a manager who’s a super guy. Just check the sidebar of this blog for proof. In all seriousness though, we all care about our teammates’ success, so you’re never on your own when you need a hand.

And don’t forget, Red Hat is consistently rated one of the best and most innovative places to work.

Enough already, where do I apply?

Does this job sound interesting to you? Make sure you read the full description of the job, and then apply online.

Fedora, FredLUG, Linux

Contributing to Pagure made easy.

I don’t get as much of a chance these days to do things like patches or other technical contribution. But I had some time free the other day and used it to stick my hands directly into a cool project, Pagure (pronounced roughly “pag-yOOR,” or listen here). You may have read about Pagure in this Fedora Magazine article a few months back.

It was tremendously easy to get Pagure, fix a bug, test the fix, and contribute it back (see my pull request here). I specifically looked for “easyfix” bugs, since I knew I didn’t have a lot of time to spend to help. So I decided to work on this issue, a button showing up when it shouldn’t.

First I forked the repo in Pagure. Then I cloned my new fork, and set it up as documented in the README. In the clone, I checked out a new branch using the issue number as a name, issue839.

To track down the fix, I ran the app locally and duplicated the error. I looked at the CSS style containers for the button and some of the surrounding elements. Using that information, I did a text search on the code to find the file that was generating the button. Then I simply applied some logic to find the fix for the problem, even though I wasn’t really familiar with the code involved.

Thankfully Pagure has a test suite, so I could also check that my fix didn’t break any of the tests. Then I committed and pushed my changes, and made a pull request using the button in Pagure’s web page.

I also learned something useful. Since I forked the repo to do my fix and make a pull request, if I force-pushed changes using git to my branch from which I made the pull request, the pull request was automatically updated with the changes! This is probably expected by people who do this all the time, but since I’m new at it, I was excited.

Bugs like this are something that just about anyone with a small amount of beginning programming skill could fix. Pagure even has other bugs like this waiting for people to handle. Maybe one of them is waiting for you! 😉