On Tue, 2 Sept 2025 at 16:38, Michael Winters via infrastructure <infrastructure@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 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.
So, apologies that I'll be pretty noisy for a bit. I'm going to try
real hard to pay back your investment.
Welcome. When I was in Fedora Infrastructure, the biggest thing I never had energy to do was updating the onboarding documentation. It would be useful that it and the other documentation got a viewpoint of an SRE because you have a better knowledge of "what I know I don't know" about a new place. It might be useful still to get that from someone who is fresh.
What are you looking for that would help you understand how the Infrastructure is run
What are the general tools (aka ticket list versus Jira or monitoring versus Nagios) you were looking for to get a better idea of the infrastructure and how hard was it to find those. If it was hard, what would have made it more intuitive?
The questions you have below would all probably be answered with "See our entire infrastructure history" which may also be needed to be written somewhere.
Here are the vitals:
- Skills
- SRE
- I've been using "other people's computers" since before they
became weather formations. Sometimes lots of them.
- 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?)
- 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?
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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