Welcome to Fedora Infrastructure,
I will put my reactions inline, see bellow.
Michal
On 9/2/25 22:37, Michael Winters via infrastructure wrote:
Hey y'all. Unemployed SRE here, looking to join the ranks.
@mwinters:fedora.im and hoping to see you in this Thursday's meeting
(September 4). I'm currently in US Central time.
Onboarding is always the hardest part, and it's why I hadn't joined
previously -- it's too difficult to build the necessary context across
small slices of time. But I'm hoping to do that now as quickly as I
can with my current excess of spare time, because that will
(hopefully) enable me to make ongoing contributions even after I'm
employed again.
We have a ticket for that
https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/issue/12727 and some folks who
already trying to work on that.
So, apologies that I'll be pretty noisy for a bit. I'm going to try
real hard to pay back your investment.
Here are the vitals:
- Skills
- SRE
- I've been using "other people's computers" since before they
became weather formations. Sometimes lots of them.
I see, a veteran of many wars :-)
- Historical focus on reliable and scalable app architectures, but
reliability is also QA, CI/CD, PM, Finops, etc etc. So I've done some
of all of that.
- I feel I'm obligated to say "Kubernetes" here. I'm
OpenShift-curious but the licensing prohibits curiosity.
- Some leadership stuff like spearheading SLO adoption.
- Recently started exploring kernel internals and eBPF.
- I know my ARP from my ARPA. (Not a networking expert but no
stranger to RFCs.)
- Programming
- Basically any common language except .NET, most recently Go
and Rust. Never found a good reason to use a functional language but
always wanted to.
- Mostly backends and systems-level stuff (e.g. tooling), but
I can commit web UI war crimes if ordered.
- Lots of OSS contributions but never to a distro.
- People
- I feel strongly that technology *is* people. I see the
strength of that symbiosis as core to the outcomes, so I'm often
focused on smoothing out the bumps for others when my boss would
rather I be shipping features. (Have I mentioned that I'm
unemployed?) Docs, sweeping the floors, etc.
- I love to teach. I've been told that I'm good at it.
- I was briefly the wrong kind of journalist, and then an
editor. So maybe some Magazine contributions eventually? Or at least
some pedantry on tap.
- Infosec
- A lifelong interest but never a career focus. I did get a
CISSP though, so I can tell you all about Bell-Lapadula. And I've had
to operate in some highly-regulated environments and work through some
audits. "Security-minded"?
- Familiar enough with OAuth, OIDC, LDAP, etc. but no Active
Directory. Might still be able to install Netware 4.11.
- Goals
- My only real goal right now is to learn the ropes as quickly as
possible and make at least one actual contribution ASAP. Sort of a
"new contributor smoke test." That said, I've found a lot of bumps
along the way so far in onboarding, and I think some of those fall
under infra so I'll likely start there.
- I'm curious about the Zabbix migration since I've had to do a
lot of observability in the past. This is also a great opportunity to
understand where things are and why they are that way. (The full
answer to "Why Zabbix?" is probably "see also: our entire infra
history".)
- Initial Questions
- I have so many, I think I'm exceeding the capacity of folks in
Matrix. So I'm planning to start dumping those Q's here on the list
or into Discourse where they might be treated more like a queue. My
actual question here: is that the recommended approach? (Aside from
RTFM'ing as hard as I can?)
You can definitely try that if there is a lot of questions. But feel
free to join the infra weekly meeting on Thursday and ask there, we have
a section for newcomers in the meeting.
- A number of the onboarding bumps that I want to smooth out are
in the infra docs, and those docs say that I need to be an apprentice
to make a PR to the docs ... is that correct? If so, how can we
proceed since I'm the newest noob around?
Maybe it was in past, but everybody with FAS account can open PR to
https://pagure.io/infra-docs-fpo. Feel free to open any.
Thanks for reading all of this, and looking forward to working with
you all! Feel free to email me or DM on Matrix if you want to connect.
Michael Winters
--
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