I, Frank Heimes (fheimes), apply for MOTU (and Ubuntu Contributing Developers).

I am applying because:

• For the packaging I do, I need to bug fellow colleagues for sponsoring and reviews quite often.
• I want to be able to upload fixes to certain packages directly reducing the need for sponsoring.
• I noticed that universe package fixes are usually somewhat lower priority and want to support in that area.

Who I am

I'm a German electronics and computer-'Verrückter' (not to say nerd) that grew up in the Rhine/Ruhr area close to Neuss/Düsseldorf (hence I like 'Altbier' ) and later moved to Böblingen - for business reasons.
I'm still living in Böblingen (in the south-western area of Germany, close to the black-forest) with my wife Steffi and Lilo our cat. I still like spending some time at the computer, even in my spare time, like to travel - cat and garden are other hobbies, as well as watching SciFi and my rattly classic car (becoming soon 32 years old - that's what I call sustainable!).

My Ubuntu story

After my time at Siemens, I joined the IBM R&D lab in Böblingen/Germany (the reason to move ~400km), where I loved to work for almost the entire time in the area of Linux (SW and HW) - but mostly SLES and RHEL.
But at some point in time a volunteer workstation OS project started at big-blue (called Open Client Debian Community, OCDC) and I helped out, became involved and maintained a dozen of packages (since the other Linux distro that could be used on the workstation sucked).
Even if it was called Open Client Debian Community, most people in that community used 'Ubuntu' - what is that (at that time)?!
So I strove Dapper Drake / 6.06 LTS (yepp, the only ".06" ) and really started to fell in love with Hardy Heron / 8.04 LTS (on private and business machines - I still like the wallpaper of the Hardy release).
And a couple of years later, a company called 'Canonical' was looking for someone to help-out with getting Ubuntu (Server) on 'big-iron' and since I worked at IBM on 'big-irons' at that time and had some Ubuntu experiences due to the volunteer project, I thought that this is the next thing I really want to do and work on - which ended in me joining Canonical early in 2016.

My involvement

Things I'm proud of

I am a member of Canonical's Server Commercial Engineering (SCE) team (former Hardware Enablement, HWE) and work mainly on the IBM Z (s390x) project and a bit on the IBM Power project (ppc64el).
I do, coordinate and collaborate with other team on the technical work that is needed for these special architectures. The bug management work is on me too and with that I am in contact with larger parts of Canonical engineering.

• One of my favorite packages - it took quite a while, due to intense partner discussions, but the solution is nice (s390-tools): LP#1892367
  (Well, there is more on s390-tools: LP#1942908, LP#1938947, LP#1908371, LP#1903984, LP#1898935, ...)

• [needs-packaging] The first library that I've packaged (libzpc): LP#1932522 (yet to be uploaded, so far PPA only)

• A common universe bug, the Debian maintainer noticed it, jumped in, applied the patch on Debian and sponsored my Ubuntu SRU, too, since he's also an Ubuntu (Contributing) Developer (qtwebkit): LP#1951470

• Patch and little rules-file change (pcre2): LP#1931857

• NVMe disk support for Ubuntu on s390x: LP#1902179

• [FFe] Well, I'm not sure if I should be proud of that, but it was at least quite some work: LP#1866866

In 2016 I also started started the 'Ubuntu on Big-Iron' blog (https://ubuntu-on-big-iron.blogspot.com), and like to work on documentation, contributed to the Ubuntu Server Guide (mainly the installation chapter), the Ubuntu Release Notes (s390x section), did some BrightTalk webcasts and more (see my Wiki page).

Examples of my work (mostly 2021)

Here some more general package work:

• Another typical but simple universe package fix (scapy): LP#1908280

• That was a pretty complicated bug (opencryptoki): LP#1915517

• Again a simple universe package fix (tigervnc): LP#1929790

• A little endianness bug (elfutils): LP#1908756

• Expanding hardware support (valgrind): LP#1825343

I'm also doing quite a lot kernel SRU/Patch submissions, largely due to the above projects (e.g. Dec, Nov, Oct, Sept, Aug).

For more details see my Related Packages and the https://udd.debian.org/cgi-bin/ubuntu-sponsorships.cgi?render=html&sponsor=&sponsor_search=name&sponsoree=frank.heimes%40canonical.com&sponsoree_search=email.

Areas of work (mostly 2021)

Due to the ubuntu-z-systems (and ubuntu-power-systems) projects I'm involved in, I looked at several 'endianness' bugs (s390x, see above ), organize and triage bugs in these projects, own the 'ubuntu-z-systems' project on Launchpad and touch lot's of areas of the (server) distro (from installer, test to OpenStack).

I'm enjoying working with other teams like Server, Foundations, Kernel, OpenStack and Field Engineering (hope they do too ) - support with, and provide access to, Canonical's IBM Z (s390x) hardware infrastructure.

On top I do contractual, testing, reporting, collateral, enablement and external collaboration work.

Things I could do better

• Have a closer look at Debian

• Give back and help other (since I got a lot of help from many people too...)
• Become more confident in packaging.
• Avoid by-passing Launchpad for bug work.

Plans for the future

General

• Get more familiar with autopkgtests.
• Do more integrative work.

What I like least in Ubuntu

• The fact that different teams (or even people) do the package maintenance in a slightly different way.

• Hence reviewers and sponsors partially have a slightly different opinion and focus

• That it is impossible to address everything that's coming in to Launchpad.
• That we left the community a bit out of the focus.

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@.

Endorsements

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

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:
##  https://udd.debian.org/cgi-bin/ubuntu-sponsorships.cgi
=== Areas of Improvement ===