Open Stack

Hi all,

I am thrilled to nominate myself as a candidate for ironic PTL for Pike cycle.
Most of you should know me by now — I’m Jay Faulkner, aka “JayF” on freenode
IRC. I have been in the tech industry for 10 years, starting as a systems
administrator and working my way up the ladder. Since 2014, my primary focus
has been working on bare metal clouds, culminating in my position today as a
full-time ironic developer.

Many PTL nominees post an agenda with their nomination email — I won’t do that
here. The project has been run very well, as evidenced by us achieving almost
75% of our stated goals by the end of the last two cycles (newton and ocata).
If elected PTL, I would try to maintain the productive environment we've
built, and work as a facilitator, organizer, and servant, working towards the
goals the community will set for Pike.

My experience with ironic has been varied, starting with my work on Rackspace
OnMetal, the first public cloud offering including ironic, a short stint as
manager of that development team, and now as full-time upstream developer.
These perspectives have provided me with the communication skills and
technical context needed to be PTL. Ironic lives on the border between
software and hardware, which allows me to use my operational experience toward
designing new features. Some tangible examples of this include the introduction
of both cleaning and the initial agent deploy driver were introduced.
Furthermore, I learned how to empathize with businesses trying to integrate
with OpenStack during my tenure as a manager.

One of the reasons I wanted to run for PTL is to keep as many ironic
contributors doing what they do best: writing code. In my time on the project,
I've found I can contribute best by taking care of issues that can get in the
way of progress such as fixing gate breakages, working to help and mentor new
contributors, triaging bugs, and reviewing code. Another example of my
initiative on these types of issues is my work on cross-project items, such as
my work as documentation liason, and working on our CI jobs. By taking on these
items and more as PTL, I hope to act as a force multiplier for my
ironic colleagues.

Working full time on OpenStack Ironic, and open source in general, has been
one of the most rewarding times of my career. The community around ironic has
always been friendly, and I view my fellow contributors as co-workers and
friends. I cherish the time I’ve had collaborating with you all, and hope to
be given the opportunity to continue to work with everyone as PTL during Pike.
Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,
Jay Faulkner