From 19ce4300521295a3bb2080ffa022c9e30363d520 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: John Dickinson Date: Sat, 12 Mar 2016 08:59:24 -0800 Subject: [PATCH] Adding John Dickinson candidacy for Swift Change-Id: I06646fd0d2adf4b4ac4e33564bdb88b5dcb06a79 --- candidates/newton/Swift/John_Dickinson.txt | 88 ++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 88 insertions(+) create mode 100644 candidates/newton/Swift/John_Dickinson.txt diff --git a/candidates/newton/Swift/John_Dickinson.txt b/candidates/newton/Swift/John_Dickinson.txt new file mode 100644 index 00000000..26d45935 --- /dev/null +++ b/candidates/newton/Swift/John_Dickinson.txt @@ -0,0 +1,88 @@ +I am submitting my candidacy for Swift PTL for the Newton cycle. + +### Community growth + +During the Mitaka cycle, we've seen the community grow from about 440 +contributors to 531 today. That's a 20% growth in the last six months. +This growth rate is huge, and I'm really happy to see all the new +people coming into the community. New contributors bring new ideas, +new use cases, and fresh eyes on old problems. This is the hallmark of +a healthy community. + +New contributors reflect the broader picture of what's going on with +Swift, too. When we see new contributors from companies who are +already actively participating in the community, it shows that they +are using Swift more. When new companies join the community for the +first time, it shows new places where Swift is being used to solve +real-world storage problems. Both situations are exciting. Swift is +growing. More people are using it to store more data and solve more +storage problems. + +As I've said many times before, my vision for Swift is that it will be +used by everyone, every day, even if people don't realize it. +Community growth is one way we can see that this is happening today. + +### Tracking the community + +One thing I've been working on over the last year is tracking our +community and finding ways to understand it and help it continue to +grow. You can see some of this work in the graphs below. + +http://d.not.mn/total_contribs.png +http://d.not.mn/active_contribs.png + +I've been working on a few more interesting graphs and metrics too. +I've shared one of these before: visualizing individual contributor +activity over time. You can see the results at +http://d.not.mn/contrib_activity.png. This is a rather large graph, +but it's fairly simple to read. The x-axis is time (from Swift's +initial release to today). Each line on the y-axis is a person's +activity in Swift. Blue boxes are for authoring a patch; green boxes +are for a review. This graph has been invaluable in helping understand +who is contributing to the project and what activity active +contributors are engaged in. One thing I've learned is that there is a +class of contributor who has been involved for a long time, but is +only active infrequently. Most of these people are operators who are +normally running production clusters but occasionally need to submit a +patch or review upstream. + +Another thing I've worked on is a way to find out what the community +as a whole thinks is important. We can start to find a lot of this +info from information we already have. For example, we can get a list +of every patch that every contributor has starred to see if there is +any commonality between them. The patches that are more often starred +are likely to be more important, from the community perspective. + +I've taken that basic idea, along with some further parsing of +information from gerrit, and created a review dashboard. It's going to +keep changing, but you can see its current incarnation at +http://not.mn/swift/swift_community_dashboard.html (and linked in +the #openstack-swift channel topic). So far, I've seen this dashboard +result in a dramatic decrease in the number of unreviewed patches, and +as the dashboard improves, I expect it to lead to a similar +improvement in review times for important patches. + +### Current struggles + +Tracking the community (both with metrics like above and from simply +talking to people) shines a light on common problems in the community. +Two of the most-often raised issues are that of long patch review +times and review prioritization. We've been improving both of these +with several tools in the past, and we're currently in a much better +place than we've been in the past. As PTL, I feel it's my duty to +enable the community to solve these problems. I will continue to +improve the tools we have and create new tools as necessary so that we +know what's going on, what to work on, and make every contributor +effective. + +### Goals for newton + +Looking forward to the Newton cycle, I want to see three things happen. + + 1. Increased contributor growth + 2. Progress on significant code efforts, including crypto, improved + global clusters, and improved performance + 3. Better tools and info for community prioritization and community tracking + +The community is well-positioned to meet these goals, and I will be +honored to continue to serve you as PTL for OpenStack Swift.