CoreDeveloperApplication

I, Danilo Egea Gondolfo, apply for core-dev.

Name

Danilo Egea Gondolfo

Launchpad Page

https://launchpad.net/~danilogondolfo

Wiki Page

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/danilogondolfo

I am applying because:

  • I'd like to eliminate delays in getting my work sponsored.
  • I'd like to reduce the burden on my sponsors.
  • I'd like to increase my involvement with Ubuntu development.

  • That's the kind of thing I like to do Smile :)

Who I am

My name is Danilo, I'm a software developer at Canonical and member of the Foundations team. I'm also a FreeBSD developer since 2013 working in the Ports tree (packaging). When I'm not seating in front of computer screens I like seat in front of books, my PS5 and every now and then I like to see the sun light (when Ireland allows me).

My Ubuntu story

My first contact with Ubuntu was back in 2005 when I started in college. Back then my main OS was a pretty cool Brazilian Linux distribution called Kurumin, which I was running since 2003. Ubuntu was this new distro the few Linux users in college were talking about. I was working as an IT technician at that time and when we found out about Ubuntu it became the default OS in the company's PC used by the technicians. In 2006 I believe, Canonical was shipping boxes of CDs with Ubuntu for free. We ordered a box with some forty something CDs for i386, amd64 and powerPC and distributed it around to friends. The first 64-bit Desktop we sold (to a friend of mine) was shipped with Ubuntu. In these almost 20 years I've been constantly in contact with Ubuntu in many different places and now I'm having a lot of fun helping with the development of Ubuntu itself, how cool is that!?

My involvement

As a member of the Foundations team I'm directly involved with package maintenance. As a member of the Netplan development team, part of my job consists in help keeping the netplan.io source package updated in all the supported releases of Ubuntu (and eventually in Debian) and it sometimes involves helping with other related packages such as network-manager.

Examples of my work / Things I'm proud of

Areas of work

As a member of the Foundations team, I work on many different packages that need attention. Doing merges, fixing builds and investigating migration excuses for example. As a member of the Netplan development team, most of my time is mainly focused on Netplan development. As Netplan is an important part of Ubuntu, I eventually work with other teams. Due to the integration between Netplan and Network Manager, I worked with the Desktop team (the current maintainers of network-manager) to get our patches and bug fixes integrated. I recently worked with the Openstack team on improvements for the support of SR-IOV interfaces. Also recently I worked with the UX team on the user interface for the new netplan diff feature I developed.

Things I could do better

Paying more attention on details when writing changelogs would be a good start. I also feel like I could be more involved with the development of Ubuntu in general.

Plans for the future

General

I want to get more involved with Ubuntu development in general. I also want to use my upload rights to be more efficient when working on +1, merges and migration excuses.

What I like least in Ubuntu

As a developer working on Ubuntu development, I had some hard time getting started. The processes are not well standardised and people will do things in different ways. When I reached out for help, different people would tell me to do things differently or to use a different tool. Luckily there are people working to improve it, for example: standardising merges according to the git-ubuntu guide, there are developers working on a packaging guide for Ubuntu, which is really great.

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.

Lukas 'slyon' Märdian

General feedback

I have been Danilo’s mentor since he joined the Ubuntu Foundations team late 2022. Due to his prior experience as a FreeBSD ports maintainer, Danilo was quick to pick up our approach to distro work and cooperated with the developer community on #ubuntu-devel transparently! He showed a great learning ability too as he got into the Netplan codebase quickly, producing loads of quality pull requests, adding new features, improving our CI test infrastructure and contributing plenty of ideas for future developments (incl. prototypes).

Danilo always kept an eye out for bug reports for Netplan (and related projects) and showed great attention to details when working on those bugs. He was especially careful when working on the big "Netplan everywhere" integration where we moved NetworkManager to a Netplan backend in Ubuntu 23.10, rolling this long-standing change out to our users globally. Danilo is super careful and doesn't hesitate to ask any questions to the relevant people if in doubt.

I sponsored several packages for Danilo, which can be seen from the list below. Mostly related to Netplan, but also a few others. Additionally, he prepared merge request on Debian Salsa, e.g. for preparing new Netplan patch-releases.

  • netlan.io: SRUs, that follow a special test procedure and backporting policy
  • bogl: a merge
  • libcap2: a proposed-migration fix
  • network-manager: an emergency bugfix related to security confinement

sponsored by slyon:

Danilo worked his way through several "+1 Maintenance" shifts, keeping the archive in good shape and learning about all the relationships between packages and the processes involved. He drove the python-rich MIR that we introduced as a new dependency to Netplan (and transitive dependencies). I trust in his skills and decision-making in the best interest of the Ubuntu community.

I fully endorse his Ubuntu Core-Dev application.

Specific Experiences of working together

Besides supporting Danilo’s distro work (as described above) I’ve primarily worked with him as part of the upstream Netplan project. He pushed plenty of PRs to GitHub, all of which have been of very high quality. He always reacted quickly and open-minded to any comments made during review and resolved any issues to everybody’s satisfaction. He helped triage bug reports on a regular cadence and came up with relevant fixes quickly thereafter. Furthermore, he also jumped in to do reviews for other community members and for myself and stepped up as a Netplan co-maintainer, managing stable release branches.

Areas of Improvement

There are always new things to learn in Ubuntu. With new powers comes new responsibilities, so Danilo should learn about dput[-ng] and additional helpers, such as https://git.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-server/+git/ubuntu-helpers/tree/cpaelzer/.dput.d/. Furthermore, he should keep an eye out for looming deadlines, making sure changes land in time for some additional QA checks.

Sergio Durigan Junior

General feedback

I sponsored several packages for Danilo, as can be seen here, and I believe Danilo is ready to become an Ubuntu Core Developer right now.

Danilo's packaging skills improved significantly over the period we worked together in the packages above, and his experience with FreeBSD has helped him quite a bit in understanding the idiosyncrasies of a Debian/Ubuntu package. His +1 maintenance reports were also helpful and insightful, which is always a good thing to have when you are the next person to start the shift.

Specific Experiences of working together

I worked with Danilo on distro stuff only, but he has always been very responsive whenever I had questions/comments about his proposed uploads, and keen to learn from his mistakes. The changes he proposed to the packages I sponsored were always sensible and well described. When he made mistakes, those were more related to forgetting to mention something in d/changelog than to actually a breaking change in the package.

Areas of Improvement

slyon already made some great suggestions above. I honestly don't have much more to say here, so I would like to paraphrase Danilo himself and suggest that he continues improving his attention to detail when dealing with "paperwork stuff" (e.g., writing d/changelog entries).

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 ===

CategoryCoreDevApplication

danilogondolfo/CoreDeveloperApplication (last edited 2024-04-25 14:37:34 by sergiodj)