Steve Rude
Tue, 12/25/2007 - 19:51 — slantview
What is your motivation for being a member of the Drupal Association?:
To help with the gifts and skills that I have to help Drupal grow. As someone who has been doing full time (50+ hours per week) Drupal development for 1.5 years, I plan to (and currently do) use my experience in development and server infrastructure to help grow the project.
What are the primary goals you would like to work on?:
Infrastructure, performance, optimization, caching, and scalability. My primary goal is to help Drupal maintain world wide availability. I would like to work with the infrastructure team to scale out as we continue to grow with each new release. I will use my experience with performance tuning and Linux / network engineering to create 100% availability for Drupal developers and users.
What strategy will you employ in order to accomplish said goals?:
I have several projects that I maintain personally while I am not on the clock. I would use my experience from my 10 year history as a Unix System Administrator (working on RHCE program), Network Engineer (Cisco CCNA/CCNP certified) and professional Web Developer to avoid any pitfalls that I have seen in my experience. I would also love to help develop automated stress testing and unit tests to make sure we can take the hit of new releases and increased load of new users.
What yearly budget would you need in order to accomplish said goals?:
The budget is negotiable and something we can work out later. There seems to already be a dedicated budget to scaling the infrastructure and we can continue to evolve this as needed.
What strengths/experience you have to help you accomplish the goals?:
I have 10 years experience in Development, Deployment and Scaling of large web applications. I have worked on some very large web applications during the dot-com boom (Alta Vista, CollegeClub.com, Ancestry.com). I worked at the second largest ISP during the late 90s / early 2000's (Netcom), and I was responsible for architecting the largest fixed broadband wireless network in California in early 2002/2003. My experience with such large deployments has taught me a lot of lessons on how to scale at various levels. I feel like this experience will help Drupal as I help guide and direct the focus and fulfill the needs of the project.
How long have you been using Drupal, and how'd you get your start?:
I have been using Drupal since June 2006. I started out working on lime.com when I was hired by Achieve Internet, and have worked on some high profile sites since (lifetimetv.com, incbiznet.com, fastcompany.com, sony bmg sites, gospelmusicchannel.com)
Have you made existing community contributions, and if so, what?:
Modules: apc, am, xcache, memcache. Multitude of patches and posts and involvement with Drupalcon in Barcelona as well as several DrupalCamps.
How much time can you invest in your Drupal Association work?:
16-20 hours/month
Apply for Board of Directors membership:
Apply for Board of Directors membership
Statutes:
I have read and understood the Statutes of the Drupal Association. I am prepared to participate by following those statutes.
Comments
Indeed... code is out of scope...
... but it would be great if your tremendous skill-set could be put to use on the infrastructure team to help enable the Drupal community to focus on these goals. Dries's org chart wishlist (http://buytaert.net/drupal-association-organization-chart-2008-wishlist) outlines a couple of specific infrastructure management posts: server infrastructure and web infrastructure manager. Would either of these positions grab you?
infrastructure
I would absolutely consider the infrastructure position. I have spoken with Kieran in the past about this. Should I update the application here or how would I need to apply for that position. I would love to help out however it best suits the project with my experience. I would love to continue to help scale the Drupal.org site and specifically to make sure that the site continues to grow and stay available during the traffic spike that will likely be coming with the impending Drupal 6 release.
Have we considering working with the types of mirrors that mirror the Apache and Linux distros for our Drupal 6 release? That might be an interesting project to help with world wide distribution so the OSUOSL servers don't get as slammed during that release cycle.
Should I update the
Should I update the application here or how would I need to apply for that position.
You are welcome (and encouraged) to massage your application based on questions and feedback. :)
updated
I updated the application. I see a small gap that I would be excited to fill. I live for doing scalability as you can tell by the type of modules that I have been involved with, and would love to work with the infrastructure team and help make availability of Drupal my primary concern for the 6.0 release.
Supporting the Drupal project
Hi Steve, thanks for writing your application.
Your application like many of the others appears to cross the line between the Drupal software project and the Drupal association.
The Drupal association can not, and should not be involved in setting the direction of the Drupal software project. That's up to the community and the core contributors. e.g. the Association should never tell the Drupal core developers that Drupal has to be fast out of the box. That's up to the Drupal community and the core contributors.
However, the association can and should provide infrastructure and support to achieve the goals that the Drupal core developers set for the project. If you'd like to help create infrastructure for the developers to achieve those goals, that's inline with the association.
I do think you could be the Drupal association ambassador for "Very Large Web Applications" and promote Drupal to that particular constituency. I'll leave it up to you to figure out how you can do that. I am confident that you will make an excellent ambassador.
Cheers,
Kieran