The Apache Software Foundation Blog

Friday October 30, 2020

The Apache News Round-up: week ending 30 October 2020

Farewell, October --we're wrapping up the month with another great week. Here are the latest updates on the Apache community's activities:

ASF Board – management and oversight of the business affairs of the corporation in accordance with the Foundation's bylaws.
- The Apache Software Foundation Operations Summary: Q1 FY2021 (May - July 2020) https://s.apache.org/2mefr
- Next Board Meeting: 18 November 2020. Board calendar and minutes https://apache.org/foundation/board/calendar.html

ApacheCon™ – the ASF's official global conference series, bringing Tomorrow's Technology Today since 1998.
- ApacheCon@Home was a success https://s.apache.org/d3stb All sessions now online at https://www.youtube.com/c/TheApacheFoundation/

ASF Infrastructure – our distributed team on three continents keeps the ASF's infrastructure running around the clock.
- 7M+ weekly checks yield uptime at 100%. Performance checks across 50 different service components spread over more than 250 machines in data centers around the world. http://www.apache.org/uptime/

Apache Code Snapshot – Over the past week, 391 Apache Committers changed 3,264,512 lines of code over 3,468 commits. Top 5 contributors, in order, are: Robert Scholte, Andrea Cosentino, Gary Gregory, Mykola Bodnar, and Kaxil Naik.

Apache Project Announcements – the latest updates by category.

API --
- Apache APISIX 2.0 released https://apisix.apache.org/

Application Performance Monitor --
- Apache SkyWalking Nginx LUA 0.3.0 released https://skywalking.apache.org/

Blockchain --
- Apache Tuweni (Incubating) 1.2.0 released https://tuweni.apache.org/

Data Management Platform --
- Apache Ignite 2.9.0 released http://ignite.apache.org/

IoT --
- Apache StreamPipes (Incubating) 0.67.0 released https://streampipes.apache.org/

Did You Know?

- Did you know that Oak Ridge National Laboratory uses Apache Spark and Parquet to solve high-performance computing solutions on some of the world's fastest supercomputers? https://youtu.be/b5fpiDzScRU

- Did you know that Orange's media center is powered by Apache Wicket? http://wicket.apache.org/

- Did you know that "Success at Apache" features the personal and project perspectives on the people and processes behind why Apache "just works"? Contributions accepted by all ASF Committers! https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/category/SuccessAtApache

Apache Community Notices

- Apache Month In Review: September 2020 https://s.apache.org/Sep2020

- ASF FY2020 Annual Report https://s.apache.org/FY2020AnnualReport

- "Trillions and Trillions Served" documentary on the ASF: 1) full feature https://s.apache.org/Trillions-Feature 2) "Apache Everywhere" https://s.apache.org/ApacheEverywhere 3) "Why Apache" https://s.apache.org/ASF-Trillions 4) “Apache Innovation” https://s.apache.org/ApacheInnovation

- The Apache Software Foundation Statement on the COVID-19 Coronavirus Outbreak https://s.apache.org/COVID-19

- The Apache Software Foundation Celebrates 21 Years of Open Source Leadership https://s.apache.org/21stAnniversary

- Apache in 2019 - By The Digits https://s.apache.org/Apache2019Digits

- The Apache Way to Sustainable Open Source Success https://s.apache.org/GhnI

- Foundation Reports and Statements http://www.apache.org/foundation/reports.html

- "Success at Apache" focuses on the people and processes behind why the ASF "just works". https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/category/SuccessAtApache

- Inside Infra: the new interview series with members of the ASF infrastructure team --meet
Chris Thistlethwaite https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Chris
Drew Foulks https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Drew
Greg Stein Part I https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Greg
...Part II https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Greg2 and Part III https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Greg3
Daniel Gruno Part I https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Daniel1 and Part II https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Daniel2

- Please follow/like/re-tweet the ASF on social media: @TheASF on Twitter (https://twitter.com/TheASF) and on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-apache-software-foundation

- Do friend and follow us on the Apache Community Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/ApacheSoftwareFoundation/ and Twitter account https://twitter.com/ApacheCommunity

- Are your software solutions Powered by Apache? Download & use our "Powered By" logos http://www.apache.org/foundation/press/kit/#poweredby

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For real-time updates, sign up for Apache-related news by sending mail to announce-subscribe@apache.org and follow @TheASF on Twitter. For a broader spectrum from the Apache community, https://twitter.com/PlanetApache provides an aggregate of Project activities as well as the personal blogs and tweets of select ASF Committers.

Posted at 10:39AM Oct 30, 2020 by Swapnil M Mane in Newsletter | |

Friday October 23, 2020

The Apache News Round-up: week ending 23 October 2020

And it's Friday! Let's take a look at what the Apache community has been up to over the past week:

ASF Board – management and oversight of the business affairs of the corporation in accordance with the Foundation's bylaws.
- The Apache Software Foundation Operations Summary: Q1 FY2021 (May - July 2020) https://s.apache.org/2mefr
- Next Board Meeting: 18 November 2020. Board calendar and minutes https://apache.org/foundation/board/calendar.html

ApacheCon™ – the ASF's official global conference series, bringing Tomorrow's Technology Today since 1998.
- All sessions, including Plenaries and Keynotes from ApacheCon@Home are available https://www.youtube.com/c/TheApacheFoundation/

ASF Infrastructure – our distributed team on three continents keeps the ASF's infrastructure running around the clock.
- 7M+ weekly checks yield uptime at 99.86%. Performance checks across 50 different service components spread over more than 250 machines in data centers around the world. http://www.apache.org/uptime/

Apache Code Snapshot – Over the past week, 380 Apache Committers changed 2,506,459 lines of code over 3,325 commits. Top 5 contributors, in order, are: Andrea Cosentino, Claus Ibsen, Andi Huber, Łukasz Dywicki, and Mark Miller.

Apache Project Announcements – the latest updates by category.

Big Data --
- Apache Druid 0.20.0 released https://druid.apache.org/
- Apache Kylin 3.1.1 released https://kylin.apache.org/
- Apache Arrow 2.0.0 released https://arrow.apache.org/
- Apache NiFi Registry 0.8.0 released https://nifi.apache.org/registry.html
- Apache BookKeeper 4.11.1 released http://bookkeeper.apache.org
- Apache Hadoop CVE-2018-11764 Privilege escalation in web endpoint https://s.apache.org/jjdpq

Blockchain --
- Apache Tuweni (Incubating) 1.2.0 released https://tuweni.apache.org/

Content --
- Apache Jackrabbit 2.21.4 released https://jackrabbit.apache.org/

Integration --
- Apache Camel 3.6.0 released https://camel.apache.org/

Library --
- Apache XMLBeans 4.0.0 released https://xmlbeans.apache.org/
- Apache Commons Net 3.7.2 released https://commons.apache.org/proper/commons-net/

Messaging --
- Apache Qpid Broker J 7.1.10 and J 8.0.2 released https://qpid.apache.org/

Did You Know?

- Did you know that the ASF Infrastructure team have added more self-serve features to .asf.yaml? https://blogs.apache.org/infra/entry/even-more-github-features-added

- Did you know that Salesforce uses Apache Druid as their real-time analytical database to store application performance metrics extracted from billions to trillions of log lines per day? http://druid.apache.org/

- Did you know that the Apache OFBiz community is deliberating deployment on AWS production environments? http://s.apache.org/yvu54

Apache Community Notices

- Apache Month In Review: September 2020 https://s.apache.org/Sep2020

- ASF FY2020 Annual Report https://s.apache.org/FY2020AnnualReport

- "Trillions and Trillions Served" documentary on the ASF: 1) full feature https://s.apache.org/Trillions-Feature 2) "Apache Everywhere" https://s.apache.org/ApacheEverywhere 3) "Why Apache" https://s.apache.org/ASF-Trillions 4) “Apache Innovation” https://s.apache.org/ApacheInnovation

- The Apache Software Foundation Statement on the COVID-19 Coronavirus Outbreak https://s.apache.org/COVID-19

- The Apache Software Foundation Celebrates 21 Years of Open Source Leadership https://s.apache.org/21stAnniversary

- Apache in 2019 - By The Digits https://s.apache.org/Apache2019Digits

- The Apache Way to Sustainable Open Source Success https://s.apache.org/GhnI

- Foundation Reports and Statements http://www.apache.org/foundation/reports.html

- "Success at Apache" focuses on the people and processes behind why the ASF "just works". https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/category/SuccessAtApache

- Inside Infra: the new interview series with members of the ASF infrastructure team --meet
Chris Thistlethwaite https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Chris
Drew Foulks https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Drew
Greg Stein Part I https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Greg
...Part II https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Greg2 and Part III https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Greg3
Daniel Gruno Part I https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Daniel1 and Part II https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Daniel2

- Please follow/like/re-tweet the ASF on social media: @TheASF on Twitter (https://twitter.com/TheASF) and on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-apache-software-foundation

- Do friend and follow us on the Apache Community Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/ApacheSoftwareFoundation/ and Twitter account https://twitter.com/ApacheCommunity

- Are your software solutions Powered by Apache? Download & use our "Powered By" logos http://www.apache.org/foundation/press/kit/#poweredby

= = =

For real-time updates, sign up for Apache-related news by sending mail to announce-subscribe@apache.org and follow @TheASF on Twitter. For a broader spectrum from the Apache community, https://twitter.com/PlanetApache provides an aggregate of Project activities as well as the personal blogs and tweets of select ASF Committers.

Posted at 06:04AM Oct 23, 2020 by Swapnil M Mane in Newsletter | |

Friday October 16, 2020

The Apache News Round-up: week ending 16 October 2020

Happy Friday! Let's take a look at what the Apache community has been up to over the past week:

Inside Infra – the interview series featuring members of the ASF Infrastructure team.
- Meet Daniel Gruno --Part II https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Daniel2

ASF Board – management and oversight of the business affairs of the corporation in accordance with the Foundation's bylaws.
- The Apache Software Foundation Operations Summary: Q1 FY2021 (May - July 2020) https://s.apache.org/2mefr
- Next Board Meeting: 21 October 2020. Board calendar and minutes https://apache.org/foundation/board/calendar.html

ApacheCon™ – the ASF's official global conference series, bringing Tomorrow's Technology Today since 1998.
- Our first online event was a huge success https://blogs.apache.org/conferences/entry/apachecon-home-2020-was-a
- Plenaries, Keynotes, and dozens of sessions are now available at https://www.youtube.com/c/TheApacheFoundation/

ASF Infrastructure – our distributed team on three continents keeps the ASF's infrastructure running around the clock.
- 7M+ weekly checks yield uptime at 99.93%. Performance checks across 50 different service components spread over more than 250 machines in data centers around the world. http://www.apache.org/uptime/

Apache Code Snapshot – Over the past week, 396 Apache Committers changed 3,610,614 lines of code over 3,602 commits. Top 5 contributors, in order, are: Andrea Cosentino, Cedric Champeau, Mark Thomas, Claus Ibsen, and Jarek Potiuk.

Apache Project Announcements – the latest updates by category.

Application Performance Monitor --
- Apache SkyWalking CLI 0.4.0 released https://skywalking.apache.org/

Computing --
- Apache Teaclave (incubating) 0.1.0 released https://teaclave.apache.org/

Content --
- The Apache Software Foundation Celebrates 20 Years of OpenOffice® https://s.apache.org/86lex
- Apache Jackrabbit Oak 1.22.5 released https://jackrabbit.apache.org/

Machine Learning --
- Apache TVM (Incubating) 0.7.0 released https://tvm.apache.org/

Search --
- Apache Solr CVE-2020-13957 The checks added to unauthenticated configset uploads in Apache Solr can be circumvented https://s.apache.org/9nmgo

Servers --
- Apache Tomcat 8.5.59, 9.0.39, 10.0.0-M9 released https://tomcat.apache.org/
- Apache Tomcat CVE-2020-13943 HTTP/2 Request mix-up https://s.apache.org/9rw62

Web Frameworks --
- Apache Wicket 9.1.0 released https://wicket.apache.org/

Did You Know?

- Did you know that Apache Roadshow China will be held online 24-25 October, alongside COSCon 2020? https://programmersought.com/article/65545569898/

- Did you know that members of the Apache community will be presenting at All Things Open, being held online 19-20 October? https://2020.allthingsopen.org/

- Did you know that members of the Apache Ignite community will be presenting at the In-Memory Computing Virtual Conference 2020, being held 28-29 October? https://www.imcsummit.org/2020/virtual/

- Did you know that members of the Apache Pulsar community will be presenting at Pulsar Summit, being held online 28-29 November? https://pulsar-summit.org/en/event/asia-2020

Apache Community Notices

- Apache Month In Review: September 2020 https://s.apache.org/Sep2020

- ASF FY2020 Annual Report https://s.apache.org/FY2020AnnualReport

- "Trillions and Trillions Served" documentary on the ASF: 1) full feature https://s.apache.org/Trillions-Feature 2) "Apache Everywhere" https://s.apache.org/ApacheEverywhere 3) "Why Apache" https://s.apache.org/ASF-Trillions 4) “Apache Innovation” https://s.apache.org/ApacheInnovation

- The Apache Software Foundation Statement on the COVID-19 Coronavirus Outbreak https://s.apache.org/COVID-19

- The Apache Software Foundation Celebrates 21 Years of Open Source Leadership https://s.apache.org/21stAnniversary

- Apache in 2019 - By The Digits https://s.apache.org/Apache2019Digits

- The Apache Way to Sustainable Open Source Success https://s.apache.org/GhnI

- Foundation Reports and Statements http://www.apache.org/foundation/reports.html

- "Success at Apache" focuses on the people and processes behind why the ASF "just works". https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/category/SuccessAtApache

- Inside Infra: the new interview series with members of the ASF infrastructure team --meet Christ Thistlethwaite https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Chris | Drew Foulks https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Drew | Greg Stein Part I https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Greg , Part II https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Greg2 and Part III https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Greg3 | Daniel Gruno --Part I https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Daniel1 and Part II https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Daniel2

- Please follow/like/re-tweet the ASF on social media: @TheASF on Twitter (https://twitter.com/TheASF) and on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-apache-software-foundation

- Do friend and follow us on the Apache Community Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/ApacheSoftwareFoundation/ and Twitter account https://twitter.com/ApacheCommunity

- Are your software solutions Powered by Apache? Download & use our "Powered By" logos http://www.apache.org/foundation/press/kit/#poweredby

= = =

For real-time updates, sign up for Apache-related news by sending mail to announce-subscribe@apache.org and follow @TheASF on Twitter. For a broader spectrum from the Apache community, https://twitter.com/PlanetApache provides an aggregate of Project activities as well as the personal blogs and tweets of select ASF Committers.

Posted at 12:54PM Oct 16, 2020 by Sally in Newsletter | |

Wednesday October 14, 2020

The Apache Software Foundation Celebrates 20 Years of OpenOffice®

Leading Open Source office application and personal productivity suite under development as a community-led Apache® Project for the past 8 years

Wakefield, MA —14 October 2020— The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today the twenty-year anniversary of OpenOffice^®, the last eight of which as an Apache^® Top-Level Project.

"It’s inspiring to see so many dedicated people from around the world volunteer their time to mentor, contribute code, test issues, moderate mailing lists, help on forums, translations, marketing and more to keep making this great product better and available for millions of users," said Carl Marcum, Vice President of Apache OpenOffice. "OpenOffice is more than just software. It’s a great community that I’m glad to be a part of."

With more than 300 million downloads, Apache OpenOffice is used by countless individuals, organizations, and institutions around the world who are seeking a reliable, robust, and freely-available Open Source office document productivity suite. Apache OpenOffice features the following applications for Windows, macOS and Linux:

"Writer" word processor;
"Calc" spreadsheet tool;
"Impress" presentation editor;
"Draw" vector graphics editor;
"Math" mathematical formula editor; and
"Base" database management program.

Apache OpenOffice supports more than 120 languages, 41 of which are officially maintained and released by the Project. Apache OpenOffice is the productivity suite of choice for governments seeking to meet mandates for using ISO/IEC standard Open Document Format (ODF) files.

Originally created as "StarOffice" in 1985 by StarDivision, who was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 1999. The project was open-sourced under the name "OpenOffice.org", and continued development after Oracle Corporation acquired Sun Microsystems in 2010. OpenOffice entered the Apache Incubator in 2011 and graduated as an Apache Top-level Project in October 2012.

"At Apache OpenOffice we are very excited about 20 years of OpenOffice," said Marcus Lange, ASF Member and Apache OpenOffice Committer since the project first arrived at the ASF. "Countless users, developers and friends have made it possible that we can today celebrate this incredible anniversary. Their commitment makes me believe that we will see many more years of this great Open Source productivity suite."

"The need and, in fact, the demand, for a permissively licensed Open Source office suite, available to the masses and not just the privileged few fortunate enough to have the latest hardware and software, has never been greater within the last two decades," said Jim Jagielski, ASF co-Founder and Apache OpenOffice incubating mentor. "Apache OpenOffice exists to provide essential functionality, with as few licensing restrictions as possible, to the world at large. It is truly a noble mission, and I am honored to be a small part of it."

"As a long-term user, I joined the project in 2016 to give something back," said Matthias Seidel, Committer and member of the Apache OpenOffice Project Management Committee. "After a steep learning curve, I am proud to be part of the community that provides this great software for the public good and benefits millions worldwide."

Apache OpenOffice is available as a free download to all users at 100% no cost, charge, or fees of any kind. OpenOffice source code is readily available for anyone who wishes to enhance the applications. The Project welcomes contributions back to the project, its code, and its community. Those interested in participating with Apache OpenOffice can find out more at https://openoffice.apache.org/get-involved.html .

Availability and Oversight
As with all Apache projects, OpenOffice software is released under the Apache License v2.0 and is overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project's day-to-day operations, including community development and product releases. For project data, documentation, and more information on Apache OpenOffice, visit https://openoffice.apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/ApacheOO .

12 releases have been made under the auspices of the ASF. The project strongly recommends that users download OpenOffice only from the official site https://www.openoffice.org/download/ to ensure that they receive the original software in the correct and most recent version.

About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)
Established in 1999, The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is the world’s largest Open Source foundation, stewarding 227M+ lines of code and providing more than $20B+ worth of software to the public at 100% no cost. The ASF’s all-volunteer community grew from 21 original founders overseeing the Apache HTTP Server to 813 individual Members and 206 Project Management Committees who successfully lead 350+ Apache projects and initiatives in collaboration with 7,900+ Committers through the ASF’s meritocratic process known as "The Apache Way". Apache software is integral to nearly every end user computing device, from laptops to tablets to mobile devices across enterprises and mission-critical applications. Apache projects power most of the Internet, manage exabytes of data, execute teraflops of operations, and store billions of objects in virtually every industry. The commercially-friendly and permissive Apache License v2 is an Open Source industry standard, helping launch billion dollar corporations and benefiting countless users worldwide. The ASF is a US 501(c)(3) not-for-profit charitable organization funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including Aetna, Alibaba Cloud Computing, Amazon Web Services, Anonymous, Baidu, Bloomberg, Budget Direct, Capital One, Cerner, Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Handshake, Huawei, IBM, Inspur, Pineapple Fund, Red Hat, Target, Tencent, Union Investment, Verizon Media, and Workday. For more information, visit http://apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/TheASF

© The Apache Software Foundation. "Apache", "OpenOffice", "OpenOffice.org", "Apache OpenOffice", and "ApacheCon" are registered trademarks or trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation in the United States and/or other countries. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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Posted at 11:00AM Oct 14, 2020 by Sally in General | |

Monday October 12, 2020

The Apache Software Foundation Operations Summary: 1 May - 31 July 2020

FOUNDATION OPERATIONS SUMMARY

First Quarter, Fiscal Year 2021 (May - July 2020)

"This Foundation has survived more than two decades of change in the software industry and is stronger now than ever before."
—Roy Fielding, ASF co-Founder and Chairman

> Conferences and Events http://apachecon.com/

During the report period, the Conferences team has been working hard on ApacheCon @Home 2020, which will be the 33rd ApacheCon. Apachecon @Home will feature content from 27 different Apache project communities, including Big Data, Machine Learning, Royale, Pulsar, Tomcat, Geospatial, Community, Camel, and many others. We will also be featuring content in Asia-centric timezones, and, for the first time ever, content in Mandarin, German, and Spanish language.

ApacheCon @Home 2020 will feature keynotes by Thomas Huang (NASA), Camille Fournier (Author) and Edmon Begoli and Josh Arnold (Oak Ridge National Labs).

This event will be our first 100% online edition of ApacheCon, which makes it available for people in every time zone, many of whom have never been able to travel to ApacheCon before. We expect to have more than 2000 attendees, making it the largest ApacheCon ever.

You can learn more about Apachecon (and register!) at https://apachecon.com/acah2020

> Community Development http://community.apache.org/

Throughout this quarter we have been adapting our approach to help mitigate the impact of Covid-19 on our activities. With the changeover of ApacheCon to an online conference (ApacheCon@Home) we have been busy working with the conference team to ensure a good transition. As usual we participated in the ApacheCon@Home CFP and had attracted a lot of submissions. We had enough proposals to plan a 3 day Community track running over two timezones. To help support our global audience it will also the first time that we will be presenting content in languages other than English.

We are also planning to have an online booth available at the event and are currently deciding on the type of activities that we can do remotely that will still generate the feeling of community.

During this quarter we have also kickstarted our podcast platform Feathercast again as a tool for promoting Apache projects. Our objective is to have a podcast created for every Apache project. An initial request was sent out for people to be interviewed about their project. There has been a lot of interest and feedback has been very positive. Currently 12 interviews have been completed and featured on Feathercast. We hope that this will continue to increase.

The Apache Local Community (ALC) initiative is still growing and thanks to Kenneth Paskett from the Central Services team, we now have branding for the ALC chapters that can be customised for each location. The branding helps strengthen the Apache brand locally. ALC Beijing held their first meetup and ALC Indore have held two webinars and will be presenting a range of talks in Hindi for ApacheCon@Home.

Our GSoC student evaluations were completed on schedule and our mentors contine to work with their selected students.

Our mailing list has seen a decrease in traffic compared to the previous quarter, probably due to the holiday season. We do expect to see increased activity levels as we build up to ApacheCon@Home in September.

> Committers and Contributions http://apache.org/licenses/contributor-agreements.html

Over the past quarter, 1,252 contributors committed 41,706 changes that amount to 13,946,950 lines of code across Apache projects. The top 5 contributors, in order, were: Andrea Cosentino (1,013 commits), Gary Gregory (817 commits), Jean-Baptiste Onofré (715 commits), Sebb (614 commits), and Xiaoxiang Yu (537 commits).

All individuals who are granted write access to the Apache repositories must submit an Individual Contributor License Agreement (ICLA). Corporations that have assigned employees to work on Apache projects as part of an employment agreement may sign a Corporate CLA (CCLA) for contributing intellectual property via the corporation. Individuals or corporations donating a body of existing software or documentation to one of the Apache projects need to execute a formal Software Grant Agreement (SGA) with the ASF.

During Q1 FY2021, the ASF Secretary processed 171 ICLAs, 7 CCLAs, and 1 Software Grant. History of Apache committer growth can be seen at https://projects.apache.org/timelines.html

> Brand Management http://apache.org/foundation/marks/

Operations —the work of the Brand Management team falls broadly into one of three categories:

- trademark transfers and registrations
- granting permission to use our marks
- addressing potential infringements of our marks

The volume of work has remained steady this quarter. Registrations and transfers are lengthy processes but the tracking system we have put in place remains up to the task.

This quarter has seen the usual collection of requests to use Apache marks for user groups, events, merchandise and publications with nearly all requests being granted, subject to our Trademark Usage Policy.

The impact of COVID-19 has seen many events move on-line. Those events that had previously requested to use our marks have been updating their requests to reflect the new event format and often changes in timing. As with in-person events we work with the organisers and the ASF Conferences team to minimise scheduling conflicts.

Registrations —this quarter was a busy one for completing registrations where we saw five registrations complete including the registration of APACHE in the EU.

One registration was up for renewal this quarter and, after reviewing it with the relevant PMC we opted not to renew it.

Some registrations, particularly those outside the US, tend to be more complex. This quarter some of our registrations in China have continued to require additional work to help them progress.

Infringements —Potential infringements are brought to our attention from both internal and external sources. The majority of infringements we see are accidental and our project communities are able to resolve these quickly and informally with occasional input from the Brand Management team. A small number of issues take longer to resolve. We made progress on some of these this quarter and hope that that progress will continue next quarter.

This quarter a number of issues were reported to us relating to products using our marks being sold through various online stores. We have started to engage with the stores in question to resolve the issues.

And finally…

The Brand Management team welcomes your comments and suggestions as well as any questions you might have. Please see https://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/contact for our contact details.

> Security http://apache.org/security/

We continued to work on handling incoming security issues, keeping projects reminded of their outstanding issues, allocation of CVE names, and other general oversight and advice.

For Q1 we tracked 132 new vulnerability reports across 57 projects. (Q1 last year for comparison was 92 reports). Those reports led to 40 published CVE vulnerabilities.

> Privacy http://apache.org/foundation/policies/privacy.html

No other issues have been raised till the last report.

The issue with the Apache Status page https://status.apache.org/ remains unresolved.

Due to the new ruling Schrems-II (as reported recently) the use of Google Analytics may be problematic. Instead, Apache Infra offers log analytics which may fit most projects. We will provide some docs on the available logs and will try to find a way to communicate this to our PMCs.

Also, Privacy needs to check Apache Whimsy for privacy concerns.

> Infrastructure http://apache.org/dev/infrastructure.html

This quarter has been quite normal for Infrastructure, despite the pandemic affecting our world. Since the Foundation does not have a central office, our staff works entirely from home and were able to remain safe and healthy. We do not sell any products, so there has been no economic-based reduction in what Infrastructure provides: services for our many communities. The team has continued its work at our regular breakneck speed and low-cost posture. Our planned meetup at ApacheCon North America was impacted, however, so we hope that 2021 will provide an opportunity for our team to gather together again.

Our Jenkins installation has seen a lot of work this quarter, as have migrated communities over to our CloudBees Operation Center installation. In particular, we now have multiple Jenkins Master instances to help those communities manage their donated Jenkins nodes (eg. the nodes donated to Apache Hadoop, or Apache Beam). One Jenkins cluster will continue as a shared resource for the Foundation as a whole.

The latest and greatest new feature for our communities is a tool we call "asf.yaml", enabling projects to self-manage many facets of their project: website publishing, Jira integration, mailing list notifications for different types of events, and GitHub metadata. These features used to require projects to file work tickets for simple, routine tweaks of their workflows.

A fun thing for our team as been Marketing and Public Relations' new "Inside Infra" blog series. We have been supporting that effort to provide an inside and a "human face" on our otherwise-opaque set of activities on the team.

Our regular activities continue with improving our release archive service, migrating to newer Ubuntu and puppet systems, hardening our GitHub integration, and getting our email system migrated to newer and more manageable servers.

> Treasury and Financial Statement --map against https://s.apache.org/FY2019AnnualReport

The Foundation is in excellent fiscal shape with all tax and compliance forms filed on time. Latest public filings can be found at http://www.apache.org/foundation/records/ . I have advised that officers minimize expenses until there is more certainty in global economic outlooks. Officers have done so by delaying new investments. This combined with a reduction in travel costs from conferences has made it possible for us to significantly reduce costs without reducing our service level to our projects.

In the last quarter we also completed our transition to accounts payable approvals via bill.com. This has vastly improved the accuracy and auditability of our vendor payments and reduced the level of expertise required of the volunteers and staff who manage vendor payments.

The majority of our cash remains in a CDARS account at Boston Private which provides FDIC insurance for the full amount. See below for income and expenses:

	Income and Expenses for Q1 FY 2021
			Apache Software Foundation
				Q1 FY 21

		Income Summary:
			Public Donations	$ 9,405
			Sponsorship Program	$ 262,048
			Interest Income	$ 351
		Total Income		$ 271,804

		Expense Summary
			Infrastructure	$ 195,414
			Programs Expense	$ 90
			Publicity	$ 133,185
			Brand Management	$ 29,468
			Conferences	$ 29,757
			Travel Assistance Committee	$ -
			Fundraising	$ 49,095
			Privacy	$ -
			Treasury Services	$ 10,321
			General & Administrative	$ 1,413
			Diversity and Inclusion	$ -
		Total Expense		$ 448,743
Net Income				$ (176,939)

> Fundraising http://apache.org/foundation/contributing.html

Although we find ourselves in unprecedented times, we are happy to report that Fundraising for the foundation continues operating well. We have seen only a few changes in sponsorships with a Platinum sponsor renewing at the Gold level, a Gold sponsor renewing to the Platinum level, a Silver sponsor renewing at the Gold level, and two Silver sponsors unable to renew. Despite the trying times of this pandemic, we are again humbled and honored by our Sponsors' continued support!

This quarter we finished a long-running effort to normalize all sponsorship links on our Thanks page with the rel="sponsored" tag. This is in support of popular webmaster best-practices announced last year which we broadcast as our go-forward model in November of last year.

Fundraising support for ApacheCon @Home launched this quarter with excellent interest. At the close of the quarter, we were pleased to not only see several returning sponsors, but several new sponsors for the ApacheCon events.

In addition to the generous support of our corporate sponsors, we were honored to have received more than $4,000 USD through individual giving to the foundation. Part of this was driven by participation in the #GivingTuesdayNOW COVID-focused giving campaign. We were also awarded a distribution from the UPLIFT! initiative led by FOSS Responders.

As always, we are immensely thankful to our sponsors, who make it possible for our communities to build world-changing software

PLATINUM: Amazon Web Services, Comcast, Facebook, Google, LeaseWeb, Pineapple Fund, Verizon Media, Tencent

GOLD: Anonymous, ARM, Bloomberg, Cloudera, Handshake, Huawei, IBM, Indeed, Union Investment, Workday

SILVER: Aetna, Alibaba Cloud Computing, Baidu, Budget Direct, Capital One, Cerner, Inspur, Red Hat, Target

BRONZE: Airport Rentals, The Blog Starter, Bookmakers, Cash Store, Bestecasinobonussen.nl, CarGurus, Casino2k, Cloudsoft, The Economic Secretariat, Emerio, Footprints Recruiting, Gundry MD, HostChecka.com, Host Advice, HostingAdvice.com, Journal Review, LeoVegas Indian Online Casino, Mutuo Kredit AG, Online Holland Casino, ProPrivacy, PureVPN, RX-M, SCAMS.info, Site Builder Report, Start a Blog by Ryan Robinson, Talend, The Best VPN, Top10VPN, Twitter, Web Hosting Secret Revealed, Xplenty

TARGETED PLATINUM: CloudBees, DLA Piper, JetBrains, Microsoft, OSU Open Source Labs, Sonatype, Verizon Media

TARGETED GOLD: Atlassian, The CrytpoFund, Datadog, PhoenixNAP, Quenda

TARGETED SILVER: Amazon Web Services, HotWax Systems, Rackspace

TARGETED BRONZE: Bintray, Education Networks of America, Google, Hopsie, No-IP, PagerDuty, Peregrine Computer Consultants Corporation, Sonic.net, SURFnet, Virtru

Going into the second quarter of our fiscal year, we remain energized and cautiously optimistic that we will weather the current storm.

To sponsor The Apache Software Foundation, visit http://apache.org/foundation/sponsorship.html . To make a one-time or monthly recurring donation, please visit https://donate.apache.org/

= = =

Report prepared by Sally Khudairi, Vice President Marketing & Publicity, with contributions by Rich Bowen, Vice President Conferences; Mark Cox, Vice President Security; Sharan Foga, Vice President Community Development; Christian Grobmeier, Vice President Data Privacy; Myrle Krantz, Treasurer; David Nalley, Vice President Infrastructure; Tom Pappas, Vice President Finance; Daniel Ruggeri, Vice President Fundraising; Greg Stein, ASF Infrastructure Administrator; and Mark Thomas, Vice President Brand Management.

For more information, subscribe to the announce@apache.org mailing list and visit http://www.apache.org/, the ASF Blog at http://blogs.apache.org/, the @TheASF on Twitter, and https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-apache-software-foundation.

(c) The Apache Software Foundation 2020.

# # #

Posted at 08:12PM Oct 12, 2020 by Sally in General | |

Inside Infra: Daniel Gruno --Part II

The "Inside Infra" series with members of the ASF Infrastructure team continues with Part II of the interview with Daniel Gruno, who shares his experience with Sally Khudairi, ASF VP Marketing & Publicity.

"...it speaks of how tenaciously the Foundation guards its core values, one of which really is provenance, because it's the Apache seal of approval, means this has been thoroughly vetted. We know where every single piece of code comes from. And we know that it works."

What about "user demand" --what does it take for you collectively to decide, "OK, we'll support Kubernetes," as you mentioned it earlier, or whatever? Are there strategic technologies that you want to work with or plan to support, or is it all coming from the projects themselves? How does that process work? You're creating projects out of some kind of pain point or some kind of vision. So for you, is it a longer-term thing? Do you have an influence on this? What drives the growth of services delivered? It's a mix. It's a mix of, first of all, the Infrastructure team is paid by The Apache Software Foundation and it's paid by The Apache Software Foundation to help the projects. So what we do must first and foremost be something that helps the projects and not something that just helps Infra. I mean, of course, we can make tools and have services that will assist us in our work, but the ultimate goal must be supporting the projects. First and foremost, we listen for projects that come and tell us, "We would really like this or we would really like that." Having said that, we do not always say yes. We have costs to consider. We have maintainability to consider. So as a general rule of thumb we will say, "Okay, project A wants to use service foo. Does anyone else want to use service foo right now?" On occasion, you get, "Nope. No one else wants to use service foo." And then we go back to project A and say, "It doesn't seem like this is feasible for us economically to maintain if it's just you." But you can also have a situation where 10 projects suddenly say, "Yep, we really, really want to use this." Once you have a trend for something, we are usually not proactive, but reactive to these trends. So a project will come and tell us, "We really want you to use this." We will go out and see if anyone else wants to use this, and they will say, "Yes, please." That's when we'll add that feature or service. We also have ideas of our own that are, by and large, a result of either existing services not doing what they're supposed to, or they're being... Let's say you have... For example, there is Google and there are mail archives that we had in the olden days. At some point we wondered, "Why don't we combine it so you can search for emails in the archive?" That's how lists.apache.org came to be. So we have both things that projects come and say, "We really want this," and we also have this crystal ball where we look at problems we're having with existing services, where we look at possible combinations between existing services and other existing services or new services that are emerging in the Web. Or we just have someone say, "Hey, wouldn't it be wonderful if something like this existed?" So it's really a mix of projects asking us and trends emerging and just blue skying, "Wouldn't it be cool if...?" Have you guys been in the situation where you found yourselves caught where there was this magical trend that everyone wanted, and it just didn't serve the Foundation, it failed? Were you guys in that situation where you had to back pedal? Or is that not part of your experience? I would say the most prominent or obvious feature or service would probably be GitHub where we started in 2010 with mirrors of our local Subversion and Git repositories. They would be mirrored to GitHub. That was actually a bit later, but around that time, they started mirroring stuff to get up, but you couldn't write to GitHub. We were adamantly against it. Because provenance, provenance, provenance: that is that thing that if you know Apache, you know that provenance is one of our key features. We like to be able to say, "Oh this came from that. This came from this. This came from that." We had concerns at Infra that we were not able to have the exact --emphasis on exact-- same provenance as we had on our own servers, and we got a lot of pushback for that. In the end, we figured that maybe we don't need this kind of providence that we had. Because we had very verbose logging going on for our own service that we couldn't get from GitHub because GitHub is a third party provider. They're not going to fork over sensitive data about their customers to us. So a) we were willing, at some point, to compromise, because it turned out that the data that we had been collecting was maybe not so important after all, and b) we came up with this linking utility that would actually allow us to go in and see who that person committing was on the ASF side. That is, if someone commits with a GitHub account, we can go in and see, "Oh, this is actually this specific ASF Committer," because we have this internal mapping going on with GitBox. And so with that, and then the realization that we didn't need all of this verbose logging, we finally decided that we're going to allow write access, but that was probably... It could have happened a year earlier. A year sooner. But I wouldn't say that it's a failing, of us, as Infrastructure. I think it's more it speaks of how tenaciously the Foundation guards its core values, one of which really is provenance, because it's the Apache seal of approval, means this has been thoroughly vetted. We know where every single piece of code comes from. And we know that it works. If you're suddenly letting go, even if it's not really the case, but if you're seemingly letting go of some of those core values, you are going to get pushback because we all, I want to say, love and cherish the Foundation. We all believe so powerfully in its mission that for a moment, we forget reason sometimes and we just push these core values without interpreting them, which is sometimes the right thing to do. If we have a core value that says, "We need to be able to see where the code comes from." That doesn't necessarily mean we need these five specific points of data from every single user. It just means we need to know where the code comes from. And if that means these four we know, plus this one new one, then that's just as good. That was a bit grandiose, sorry. No, no, no. There's a lot to it. And I love the angle that you're providing with your answers. That's very different from the other guys' perspectives and that's super helpful. It's important, because that's demonstrative of the diversity of the Foundation. We're people, we're not just machines. And so it's very cool to hear this. Moving on specifically with our growth, like how do you close your skills gap? Do you do that? Do you rely on the team? How do you cope with stuff that way? Oh that's a good question. I rely on mentors that I have. I'm not a bookworm, for example. I can't sit to read a book. I can barely watch a movie because I have a very low attention span. So what I'll do is I'll make some mistakes and I'll have some mentors that I have come in and tell me, "You're doing it wrong." And then I'll fix it or try to fix it and they'll say, "You're doing it wrong again." Eventually, well in a loving way, eventually they'll say that this is right. I love to learn by example. I have a lot of mirror neurons in my brain. I like to copy styles. I like to mishmash styles together. And I love to fall in love with new ways of --this is going to sound very nerdy-- I love to fall in love with new styles of programming. I recently discovered something called MyPy, which is a typing checker for Python. At first I was like, "Oh this is boring," and then I realized, "Oh, I can actually use this for checking whether what I write is going to always work." Then it changes into, "This is awesome. I love it." Which then changes into, "Everything I've ever written must now be written using this typing hint." And then suddenly I have Greg Stein yelling at me saying, "Yes, this is technically valid, but I really don't need this." Another mentor I have introduced me to this typing hint. And so I progress by observing other people doing their things and where they and I differ, there are basically two scenarios. Either they're worse than you are or they're better than you are. If they're better, or perceived better, I will usually try to study, "What are they doing that's different from what I am doing?" and if I like it, it tends to stick like a rash. Then suddenly, it's in everything I do, because I'm not a trained programmer. I never studied programming. I never studied computer science. I studied social economics and then human resource management which is very far from it. It was always just a hobby thing so I never really learned about unit testing. I never really learned about unit testing. I never really did learn about proper documentation outlines. And I never really learned this is the correct way to program in this language. This is how you style it. It was always just looking at some examples and then picking the parts that I thought was interesting. So what I initially want to start off as a program, what I wrote it, it would work, but it would be very ugly and it would be very error prone. So people would say, this is a cool piece of software, but it's very not pretty. This is what you should do to change it. So I've relied on people not telling me that I am good or bad, but telling me, this is the difference between what you do and what I do, and then having it be up to me to figure out is this something I want to adopt. Greg, for instance, has been a tremendous help in that Python department, not necessarily by saying, “you need to do this, you need to do that,” but by writing some examples. Commenting code on saying, “this could be” --emphasis on “could be”-- “could be this. Or you could use this instead.” Because he's got decades of experience in Python programming, for him to say there's a different, smarter way of doing this, it's not by using words, but by just showing the examples. Because he knows that I pick up on the why pretty easily. I just need to know that the difference exists, then I'll know the “why” eventually, because I'll be very interested in why that difference is. So he just kind of feeds me these little nuggets of this smarter way of doing it. I learned from that and I'm very grateful for that. Tell me how has ASF Infra changed over the years: is it proactive? Reactive? How and why did this come about? Obviously it's changed, but was it an organic thing? What's your take on that? It's changed in a lot of different ways and also it hasn't changed. And also: I don't know. It's changed in that it has become more of an obvious hierarchy now, which is not a bad thing. We have a place where the buck stops now: we have a place where decisions are being made. We have, most importantly for someone like me as a staffer, I have someone that I can defer to that I know will take care of it or will be the one with the final responsibility. That can shield us lowly peons when someone is being a bit too grumpy. That has changed which also means that we, the staffers, are not as abrasive as we used to be. I remember when I joined, the tone was a lot different. This is of course my perception as being this little timid newbie back then, but it was more, every single person had to kind of fend for themselves. Now we've got more of a cohesion. We have yearly gatherings, face-to-face gatherings. We talk about a lot of non-work related items. We have weekly calls that didn't happen before. I guess you can say it's become more of a family now than before because we interact with each other on so many different levels that are not specifically work-related now. It's also made us more friendly. The change was largely planned. Or it wasn't “planned”, but was planned as a reaction to events that happened --sometimes you come across some things when you're in any given company. We were like, “we need a change”. And this was one of changes that happened a few years back. Well quite a few years back. Actually, I think this was in Cambridge, not Cambridge, Massachusetts, but Cambridge in England. We had a meetup with our new, at that point, our new Vice President of Infrastructure, David Nalley, and the existing infrastructure team. This was the first event in my lifetime, if you will, of the team. The first face-to-face meeting we had, that was all about “what are we going to do in the future as a team”, where we worked out a lot of policies and work methods that we still use to this day. I'll not go into too much detail about why, but it was planned as a reaction to us being perceived as not the most welcoming group of people. If you go back 10 years, it was in my personal experience, a lot more daunting asking Infra for something. Do you think that's because people were just rude? Or was it a matter of them being overwhelmed? Or there was no process? What do you think was behind that? I think there was not a sense of structure in the team that we have today. People were self-led. We are, let me emphasize that, we are still very much self managing in the team, but we also have a boss and a boss's boss that let us know what they would like us to focus on for the long term processes. We didn't really have that before. It was more fend-for-yourself, figure-out-something-to-do. And if you can't, then that's just “why not”? We have a lot more structure after the Cambridge meeting. And after David started as VP Infra. Because we had gone from being --I don't know if you know this saying in the US, but there is some difference between a United States and American NATO Secretary General, and a Dutch NATO Secretary General. And that is that one is a secretary and one is a leader. One is a boss and one is a leader. We had a change in the style of management at that point. It's not that (former ASF President and VP Infrastructure) Sam (Ruby) wasn't doing his job. It's that David added something to the job that wasn't there, hadn't been there before. Sam was doing what every single VP before him had been doing. Which was fine. David came in and saw that there were things that he wanted to improve upon and he improved upon it. One of the outcomes was that, in my view, that the team also became more friendly towards people coming in with issues. But it's also a different environment that we are in now as a team. Apache in the old days, it was strictly volunteers spending their hobby time, doing what they love. It has slowly pivoted into being people that are paid. They still contribute as individuals, but they are being paid to make those contributions. They are also part of larger teams, often at big companies that have a lot of resources. The expectations and demands of the Apache infrastructure has also increased exponentially as we have become a large organization. So what we are tasked with today is also more demanding. I don't think that the infrastructure to staff 10 years ago would have the same interactions and the same good terms. You want to be on the same good terms with the contributors as we are today. So in that sense, I think David was gearing us up for what was to come. David has also a unique perspective because he had come on Board in 2012 as part of the Apache CloudStack project. So he came in as an incoming project that also needed support from infrastructure. So he has experience on both sides of the fence, so to speak. You know, Sam has a much “older” experience in terms of him being with the Foundation from a much earlier time period. So it's very interesting to see how the evolution has come about. A lot of us who've been here from the beginning see things a certain way, and don't realize that from an outsider's perspective, that experience might be completely different. It's very interesting to be able to have that balance and have someone come in and kind of make the team more cohesive based on what their perceived needs were and being able to project what projects will be needing in future. It really is. Yeah. Also, he has a very special way of --let's say he's very “godfather”-like. I don't mean that he kills people! He has a very persuasive non-intrusive way of asking you for a favor that a) I find very endearing, and b) I know why he using it: because it's very effective. That I don't think a lot of people would get away with. So what that means is we do a lot of things that David asks us because it's David, because he's built up goodwill. It's easier for him to shape the team and to what he wants it to be as to someone that was just there as a secretary and didn't really do anything. If you're not engaging with the team as a boss, and then you suddenly come in and say, do this, there will be pushback. But if you're engaging, if you're there, if you're have a presence in the daily routines and the daily water cooler chat, and then you say, "Hey, by the way, what do you think about this idea?" Then you're much more likely to get a positive response back. I think that's one of the things that David brought is a more relatable and more ... let's say he's brought in a closer bond between boss and workers. Leader and workers. And now we have Greg as well. So now we have two of them. That’s progress in the right direction. What areas are you, meaning Infra, experiencing your biggest growth? At the moment, that would be continuous integration, which is building software basically. Testing that something builds. Testing that something compiles properly, that it passes these tests. We have six or seven different platforms for that at the moment, and it is using hundreds of machines. And it's never enough! We know we have a demand and we know what the trends are, and we're also kind of blue-skying a bit on how do we solve what's ahead of us. A lot of this is throwing more money at it because that always helps. A lot of it is, again, going back to developing smarter tools that enable us to utilize the resources that we have, because we are not like a big whale. We don't have a cash whale: we don't have that much money. So we’ve got to make sure that the resources that we buy or lease or rent or whatever, are being utilized to their maximum potential. So that, again, comes back to figuring out how do we go in and monitor. Is it being utilized? What can we do if it's not? What do we do with over utilized? Can we figure out where it is bottlenecking? And a lot of other things. Builds, continuous integration, continuous delivery, I think it's called. That's the place where it's the most growth at the moment. With regard to CI, what is the most popular platform that you guys are using or what service has the biggest demand? The most used one is still Jenkins. I think we have 30-40 Travis machines building there, and that's practically nonstop. With Jenkins, we have, I think it's 150-200 machines or something that are building practically nonstop. That's by far the largest platform we have. We are using a lot of Travis and Buildbot. We can always use more of that. You’ll be talking to Gavin (ASF Infrastructure team member Gavin McDonald), who has been working a lot on splitting Jenkins into smaller components. So that major software categories, for example, get their own platform and bigger projects can get their own platform. This is because we don't want a monolith. We're splitting that up to actually save us some costs and not have so much downtime on the time. He can tell you much more about that. One of the things we did was graph out how much are we actually using and how much have we been using. Which projects are using the most of these resources? And if there's a specific project that sticks out like a sore thumb with, I don't know, 50% of all the computers or the machines are going towards that project, then we'll reach out to them and say, are you maybe doing something that's a bit too intensive? Can we scale this back a bit? Or do we need to look for a specific targeted sponsor for you or what? We're not constantly, but on more occasions than not are looking at these resource usages and seeing where can we optimize things so as to not use too much money and also not use too little money. Just the right amount. So many companies, as you know, are really struggling with their teams working from home in response to COVID lockdowns and stay at home orders. From day one, ASF has been virtual. I understand that you were stuck in another country when the pandemic lockdowns happened. How did you cope with that? Did anything change with your operations, your work? How were you impacted by that? Work-wise I was not impacted at all, which is wonderful. We are able to work from pretty much wherever we are. And this was not my first trip abroad, believe it or not. This was in Canada, by the way, I was stuck for 105 days. In the few places that I go to more than just once, I have it set up so that I can work from there in a reliable and comfortable way. By that I mean, I don't like laptops: they're a wonderful invention, but I don't like them. I don't like sitting hunched over a tiny, tiny keyboard without a mouse and looking down instead of straight ahead at the screen. Luckily I have a laptop and I travel with it all the time, but I plug it into a KVM switch which is a keyboard, video, and mouse adaptor. I have a monitor and a good old sturdy keyboard set up in the places where I frequent often. So I was able to work from there as I would with my stationary machine back home, just using my travel laptop. The only difference was the time zone difference. But we do most of our work, asynchronously. And whatever firefighting there is that always just happens at random hours. So it doesn't really matter what time zone you're in. You're going to be screwed one way or the other What do you think people would be surprised to learn about ASF infra? Surprised? I mean, probably that it's only six people. I'm sure, I remember Drew saying this and Chris and so on, but people are often surprised that it's only those five-slash-six people that are doing all the work. I know you all, and I'm astonished by it. I'm perpetually amazed by that. It is a seriously huge feat. You want to know what surprises me from the inside? That we actually manage it. It surprises us as well. It's not that “oh yeah we're just that great”. There is something about the coalition and the project that we can't really explain, and it's not explained by the individual parts. It really is the sum of the whole, that somehow… Huge, huge, huge undertaking. It's massive. And the fact that you guys do it is incredible. And yeah, you know it would take five, six times the number of people to do it elsewhere. So it's very special. I think we also have a lot more on flexibility from up above. From both our boss and his boss and his bosses. They trust that we know what we're doing in a sense that you might not find at a typical company. And I think that is part of the reason why we're able to do the things that we do so efficiently. Because we've been given this trust and we've been giving the benefit of a doubt if you will, when we choose to... They trust that we know how to manage our hours and get things done. Like it's not a strict requirement that you be here, nine to five, Monday through Friday. You can be here, I don't know, three hours one day, and then 12 hours next day. Or maybe you want to work on Sunday instead. As long as the job gets done and nothing falls through the cracks, they basically let us get our job done. And I, again, I think this is a win-win situation because it allows for us to kind of cool down when we've burned out a bit, but it also gives them the added benefit of when I feel like I will put in the extra hours because kind of as a “thank you for you let me decide my hours”. So I'm going to put in some more time here and then I'll relax when it's quiet. Because we do get quiet days. So you all have to carry the load, which is good. There's no favoritism. Everyone has the same shared responsibility --you all have to be on call, for example. Yeah. It's still quite a flat structure. I don't consider myself senior in a managerial wage to any of my coworkers. And so if I were to, or if someone else, if Gavin or Chris or Chris or Drew. If anyone were to say, "I'm not going to be on call," that would create a rift between us. I mean, there are staff members who wish they didn't have to participate in it, but we all are on call on a rotating basis. And so I think we're fortunate that we're all in a position where we're okay with it. We were able to manage it because there are legit situations where someone is not able to be on call. I think we all have them from time to time or someone else has had to cover our shift so to speak. All five of us are fortunate that we don't have things going on in our lives where you can't be on call, because those things, they can happen.

Sure, that makes sense. So what's your favorite part of the job? This is going to sound weird for a lot of people, but my favorite part is the weekly meetings. Why does it sound weird? People aren't social? I don't know. It might sound weird to normal people who don't like meetings, that I liked meetings. There's something about meetings... Even though they are very informal meetings, I like the little shred of formality that there are about them. And so that's, I think, my favorite part. And also I get to prepare for them. All right. So you must like preparing for the Board meetings too. Yes. You should read my Apache Web Server reports. What was your biggest challenge when you came into the role at Infra? There were two major challenges. The first one was learning the ropes. This is, as both I have said and a lot of people before me, it's such a complex system at ASF. There are so many things to know and it doesn't just take a year: it takes years to learn enough to get by without someone else's help. So that was, by far, the biggest ... Well, no, that was the second biggest challenge. The biggest challenge was believing in myself and not being scared of doing things unsupervised. Because again, what I can do and what my other colleagues can do with their keyboards is very, very ... We wield a lot of power over a Foundation that is responsible for so much in the world. Not being afraid of typing a command takes a long time when you know what a title can do on a machine. You know, “did you just delete this file or did you delete the entire hard drive”? And especially at the very beginning of getting into the job, I would double, triple, quadruple check everything I typed. I would wait for sometimes minutes before I hit enter just to be sure, I would look up that am I doing the right thing. Just to be sure that I'm not messing things up now. And as you to do it once, twice, three times, 10 times, a 100 times, you become more confident and you also relax more. Your first thought isn't “what if this goes wrong?” First thought is “let's see what happens next”. Or you're thinking ahead to the next debugging step or the next problem solving step instead of being stuck on what if this goes wrong? Which also means unless something goes wrong, you work a lot more efficiently. Because you're not fearing the Enter button. What are you most proud of in your Infra career to date? Let's see. I'm well, probably most proud of ... That's a very difficult question. That's why I ask it. If you don't want to answer, that’s okay. Oh, no, no, no. It's just that I've made so gosh, darn many things. What I'm most proud of is probably ... I would say that lists.apache.org is a thing that's playing out of an Infra job I was doing that. Yeah. I'd say that's probably the thing I'm most proud of. lists.apache.org is very powerful. We all use it every day. So that's yours? With the help of a few friends, yes. It was a brainchild of mine during some tests we had at Infra. And again, it's one of those situations where you have something that's not working and you're like, "Maybe I'll just rewrite it completely and it'll work. And then you start writing and then you find a good idea, a better way of doing some things and some things don't work. And then sometimes eventually you end up with a product that sticks. It's one of the most long lived projects I've had and that's still used today. Well, it's super useful. There's no doubting its efficacy and necessity. I mean, how many mailing lists do we have now? 1,700? It's some crazy number. I think we're nearing 2,500 if you count the private lists. And that's like 25 million emails, so ... That's insane. That's very cool. Very cool. All right, next question. This is the one that everyone kind of laughs at. How would your coworkers describe you? I'll have to think about that. They would probably describe me as the one that suddenly says something completely out of context. (Laughing) Okay. I thought I was supposed to be laughing, not you. That is funny. What happens is when I asked the question, Chris, Drew, and Greg, all laughed. Then they give me their answer and I always laugh. So it's classic. Tell me what you think are the biggest threats that infrastructure teams need to watch out for? I think the biggest threats are relying on tried and tested methods, but forgetting the change and expectations of the user in terms of user experience. I've seen a big change in what a user expects from Infrastructure in terms of user experience. I don't mean they just want it more easy, but I mean people want it more feature complete, they want it to look more intuitive, they want it to tie in together with what they are already using. They want to tie it together with whatever is the next new hot thing. If you stick with what might be good and try it and test it and it's stable, you might end up losing everyone because while it might be that, it might also not be what people are using tomorrow. If it's not what people are using today and tomorrow, then no matter how good it is, people are going to move away from it. Not necessarily outdated in the sense of technology, but more in the sense of trends. What is trendy. Yeah. I mean, it used to be Vine. Now it's TikTok and tomorrow it's going to be something else. If you don't keep up with the fashion of IT, then you're going to find yourself not wanted. That timing out happens more quickly these days, it seems. Okay, what would be advice to aspiring sysadmins or Infrastructure team members? My greatest piece of advice is basically don't be afraid because this ties back into the daunting task of having to push the Enter button after you type something in the command line. Don't be afraid because you'll lose so much time just being afraid that you could have spent fixing things or learning new things or making yourself more at ease. Just jump in with both feet and you'll be fine: you're awesome. Yeah, that's good advice. If you had a magic wand, what would you see happen with ASF Infra? Oh, interesting. I would like to see us having some magic, unified CI system that could be used across the different repository and types we had and didn't require any machines that would just build instantaneously. And yeah, be free of us needing to manage yet and pay for it. And also, if GitBox version two was suddenly a thing tomorrow and I didn't have to actually write it, which I still have to do. Okay. What else do we need to know that I have not asked yet? Gosh, I don't know. I don't know. One thing I'm really good at or one thing I'm really bad at is when you ask me an open question like that, because I don't know where to go with that. I am very good at analyzing a question and coming up with a specific response, which is why when people say, "How are you doing?" I get confused or I say, "I'm okay." And get nervous and forget to ask them how they are doing, because I don't get the dynamics that are happening there." The reason why I ask this question is sometimes people come in thinking, "Okay, this is my area of focus." They might want to talk about the “blue switch” or something specific like that, then we talk about all sorts of other things. We may derail. I may be driving the interview in a certain direction, and they have this pain in their gut because they never got to talk about the blue switch that they wanted to. The only thing I could think of would be something called pip-service, which is a new thing we're making, which is kind of like a package manager for all of our infrastructure services. Again, it's us working smarter instead of harder. And we were defining a way to easily install or run a service on any given machines and set them up without actually having to install and run then set them up. It would require a lot more time to explain in detail, but it's really nifty. Is it coming soon or is it available now? It's in production. And it's really helped us a lot. I love the efficiency of Infra, how you guys are having these new directions ... Like when you and I were dealing with the selfserve.apache.org the other day for the CMS (content management system), when I was getting the Annual Report up. For 21 years, I haven't been able to deal with the ASF CMS and then you walked me through it in literally three minutes on Slack and boom: it was done. I was amazed and shocked --because I'm not a technologist. To me that was phenomenal. You guys are really helping so many different kinds of people with different profiles and different skill sets. It's very cool. I think some of that ties into, again, the CMS was cool 10 years or 15 years ago, but it's not really been able to keep up with what's going on at the moment. No one knows how to use it because it's not very intuitive… Or it's not what we do today. Right. As we’re halfway through the Infra team, who do you think I should be interviewing next? I think you should be interviewing Gavin because he knows a lot about the CI platforms that I have been on, off raving about here. Gavin's not planning to talk to me until October... Oh, well then you should talk to Chris Lambertus, because he doesn't want to talk to anyone. (laughing) Chris can talk a lot about the upgrade of our email infrastructure. We have a lot of very tough work ahead of us in that we're upgrading an infrastructure that again, it works, but it's kind of like upgrading from an IBM mainframe to a modern computer: not that much of a upgrade, but we are having to modernize heavily on our Infra email infrastructure. I understand that's a huge, huge project. It's a very big project, yeah. That's a little advice for sysadmins there. = = =

Daniel is based in Copenhagen on UTC +2 (currently on CEST). His favorite thing to drink during the workday is lukewarm, weak coffee.

Posted at 06:26PM Oct 12, 2020 by Sally in SuccessAtApache | |

Friday October 09, 2020

The Apache News Round-up: week ending 9 October 2020

Hurrah for Friday! We've had a great week within the Apache community. Here's what happened:

ASF Board – management and oversight of the business affairs of the corporation in accordance with the Foundation's bylaws.
- Next Board Meeting: 21 October 2020. Board calendar and minutes https://apache.org/foundation/board/calendar.html

ApacheCon™ – the ASF's official global conference series, bringing Tomorrow's Technology Today since 1998.
- ApacheCon@Home 2020 was a huge success https://blogs.apache.org/conferences/entry/apachecon-home-2020-was-a
- Select session recordings will be posted in the coming weeks to https://www.youtube.com/c/TheApacheFoundation/

ASF Infrastructure – our distributed team on three continents keeps the ASF's infrastructure running around the clock.
- 7M+ weekly checks yield uptime at 99.92%. Performance checks across 50 different service components spread over more than 250 machines in data centers around the world. http://www.apache.org/uptime/

Apache Code Snapshot – Over the past week, 384 Apache Committers changed 1,331,935 lines of code over 3,179 commits. Top 5 contributors, in order, are: Andrea Cosentino, Claus Ibsen, Mark Thomas, Mark Miller, and Sebastian Bazley.

Apache Project Announcements – the latest updates by category.

Big Data --
- Apache Calcite 1.26.0 released https://calcite.apache.org/
- Apache Calcite CVE-2020-13955 Disabled HTTPS Hostname Verification https://s.apache.org/m9xta

Content --
- Apache Any23 2.4 released http://any23.apache.org/

Libraries --
- Apache Commons Net 3.7.1 released https://commons.apache.org/proper/commons-net/

Programming Languages --
- Apache Groovy 4.0.0-alpha-1 released https://groovy.apache.org/

Search --
- Apache Lucene 8.6.3 and Solr 8.6.3 released http://lucene.apache.org/

Servers --
- Apache HttpComponents Client 4.5.13 GA and 5.0.3 GA released https://hc.apache.org/
- Apache HttpComponents Client CVE-2020-13956 Incorrect handling of malformed URI authority component https://s.apache.org/lpvrx

Web Frameworks --
- Apache Wicket 8.10.0 released https://wicket.apache.org/

Did You Know?

- Did you know that the following projects are celebrating anniversaries this month? Many happy returns to the Apache Incubator (18 years); Xalan and XML Graphics (16 years); PDFBox (11 years); Thrift (10 years); JMeter (9 years); Cordova, Isis, and OpenOffice (8 years); jclouds (7 years); Calcite (5 years); Juneau and Kibble (3 years); Joshua and ServiceComb (2 years); SINGA and Submarine (1 year) https://projects.apache.org/committees.html?date

- Did you know that Apache Airflow, Arrow, Druid, and Superset (incubating) were awarded InfoWorld's Bossies for the Most Innovative Open Source Projects & Next Generation Tools? Go Apache! https://www.idg.com/news/infoworld-announces-2020-bossie-award-winners-for-the-most-innovative-open-source-projects-and-next-generation-tools/

- Did you know that Pinterest's real-time analytics platform is powered by Apache Druid? http://druid.apache.org/

Apache Community Notices

- Apache Month In Review: September 2020 https://s.apache.org/Sep2020

- ASF FY2020 Annual Report https://s.apache.org/FY2020AnnualReport

- "Trillions and Trillions Served" documentary on the ASF: 1) full feature https://s.apache.org/Trillions-Feature 2) "Apache Everywhere" https://s.apache.org/ApacheEverywhere 3) "Why Apache" https://s.apache.org/ASF-Trillions 4) “Apache Innovation” https://s.apache.org/ApacheInnovation

- The Apache Software Foundation Statement on the COVID-19 Coronavirus Outbreak https://s.apache.org/COVID-19

- The Apache Software Foundation Celebrates 21 Years of Open Source Leadership https://s.apache.org/21stAnniversary

- Apache in 2019 - By The Digits https://s.apache.org/Apache2019Digits

- The Apache Way to Sustainable Open Source Success https://s.apache.org/GhnI

- Foundation Reports and Statements http://www.apache.org/foundation/reports.html

- "Success at Apache" focuses on the people and processes behind why the ASF "just works". https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/category/SuccessAtApache

- Inside Infra: the new interview series with members of the ASF infrastructure team --meet Christ Thistlethwaite https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Chris | Drew Foulks https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Drew | Greg Stein Part I https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Greg , Part II https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Greg2 and Part III https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Greg3 | Daniel Gruno --Part I https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Daniel1

- Please follow/like/re-tweet the ASF on social media: @TheASF on Twitter (https://twitter.com/TheASF) and on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-apache-software-foundation

- Do friend and follow us on the Apache Community Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/ApacheSoftwareFoundation/ and Twitter account https://twitter.com/ApacheCommunity

- Are your software solutions Powered by Apache? Download & use our "Powered By" logos http://www.apache.org/foundation/press/kit/#poweredby

= = =

For real-time updates, sign up for Apache-related news by sending mail to announce-subscribe@apache.org and follow @TheASF on Twitter. For a broader spectrum from the Apache community, https://twitter.com/PlanetApache provides an aggregate of Project activities as well as the personal blogs and tweets of select ASF Committers.

Posted at 02:20PM Oct 09, 2020 by Swapnil M Mane in Newsletter | |

Friday October 02, 2020

The Apache News Round-up: week ending 2 October 2020

Hello, October --we've had a super-busy week, with ApacheCon drawing thousands of online participants as well as a slew of activities from the Apache community:

ASF Board – management and oversight of the business affairs of the corporation in accordance with the Foundation's bylaws.
- Next Board Meeting: 21 October 2020. Board calendar and minutes https://apache.org/foundation/board/calendar.html

ApacheCon™ – the ASF's official global conference series, bringing Tomorrow's Technology Today since 1998.
- It's a wrap! ApacheCon@Home recordings will be posted in the coming weeks (send email to announce-subscribe@apachecon.com to receive updates and future conference notifications). Thank you to event sponsors Apple, AWS, DataStax, IBM, Imply, Instaclustr, MuseDev, OpenLogic/Perforce, Red Hat, RX-M, and VMWare.

ASF Infrastructure – our distributed team on three continents keeps the ASF's infrastructure running around the clock.
- 7M+ weekly checks yield uptime at 99.97%. Performance checks across 50 different service components spread over more than 250 machines in data centers around the world. http://www.apache.org/uptime/

Apache Code Snapshot – Over the past week, 306 Apache Committers changed 748,827 lines of code over 2,445 commits. Top 5 contributors, in order, are: Jean-Baptiste Onofré, Andrea Cosentino, Mark Thomas, Duo Zhang, and Claus Ibsen.

Apache Project Announcements – the latest updates by category.

Big Data --
- Apache HBase 2.3.2 released https://hbase.apache.org/
- Apache Flink Stateful Functions 2.2.0 released https://flink.apache.org/
- Apache NiFi 1.12.1 released http://nifi.apache.org/
- Apache NiFi CVE-2020-9486, CVE-2020-9487, CVE-2020-9491, CVE-2020-13940 https://s.apache.org/hlh3t

Build Management --
- Apache Ant 1.10.9 released https://ant.apache.org/
- Apache Ant CVE-2020-11979 insecure temporary file vulnerability https://s.apache.org/rnaf4

Integration --
- Apache Camel 3.4.4 released https://camel.apache.org/

Libraries --
- Apache Commons DBCP 2.8.0 released http://commons.apache.org/dbcp/
- Apache Commons Pool 2.9.0 released https://commons.apache.org/proper/commons-pool/

Messaging --
- Apache Pulsar Manager 0.2.0 released https://pulsar.apache.org/

Programming Languages --
- Apache Groovy 3.0.6 released http://groovy.apache.org/

Servers --
- Apache HttpComponents Client 5.0.2 GA released https://hc.apache.org/

Web Conferencing --
- Apache OpenMeetings CVE-2020-13951 DoS via public web service https://s.apache.org/1ugzb

Web Frameworks --
- Apache Struts 2.5.25 released https://struts.apache.org/

Did You Know?

- Did you know that dozens of Apache project and community presentations are available at the ASF's official YouTube channel? https://www.youtube.com/c/TheApacheFoundation

- Did you know that Apache Druid powers real-time analytics for Airbnb, Alibaba, British Telecom, Cisco, Didi Chuxing, eBay, Hulu, Lyft, Netflix, and many more? http://druid.apache.org/

- Did you know that members of the Apache community will be presenting at All Things Open, taking place online in a few weeks? Registration is open https://2020.allthingsopen.org/

Apache Community Notices

- Apache Month In Review: September 2020 https://s.apache.org/Sep2020

- ASF FY2020 Annual Report https://s.apache.org/FY2020AnnualReport

- "Trillions and Trillions Served" documentary on the ASF: 1) full feature https://s.apache.org/Trillions-Feature 2) "Apache Everywhere" https://s.apache.org/ApacheEverywhere 3) "Why Apache" https://s.apache.org/ASF-Trillions 4) “Apache Innovation” https://s.apache.org/ApacheInnovation

- The Apache Software Foundation Statement on the COVID-19 Coronavirus Outbreak https://s.apache.org/COVID-19

- The Apache Software Foundation Celebrates 21 Years of Open Source Leadership https://s.apache.org/21stAnniversary

- Apache in 2019 - By The Digits https://s.apache.org/Apache2019Digits

- The Apache Way to Sustainable Open Source Success https://s.apache.org/GhnI

- Foundation Reports and Statements http://www.apache.org/foundation/reports.html

- "Success at Apache" focuses on the people and processes behind why the ASF "just works". https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/category/SuccessAtApache

- Inside Infra: the new interview series with members of the ASF infrastructure team --meet Christ Thistlethwaite https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Chris | Drew Foulks https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Drew | Greg Stein Part I https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Greg , Part II https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Greg2 and Part III https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Greg3 | Daniel Gruno --Part I https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Daniel1

- Please follow/like/re-tweet the ASF on social media: @TheASF on Twitter (https://twitter.com/TheASF) and on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-apache-software-foundation

- Do friend and follow us on the Apache Community Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/ApacheSoftwareFoundation/ and Twitter account https://twitter.com/ApacheCommunity

- Are your software solutions Powered by Apache? Download & use our "Powered By" logos http://www.apache.org/foundation/press/kit/#poweredby

= = =

For real-time updates, sign up for Apache-related news by sending mail to announce-subscribe@apache.org and follow @TheASF on Twitter. For a broader spectrum from the Apache community, https://twitter.com/PlanetApache provides an aggregate of Project activities as well as the personal blogs and tweets of select ASF Committers.

Posted at 12:14PM Oct 02, 2020 by Swapnil M Mane in Newsletter | |

Thursday October 01, 2020

Apache Month in Review: September 2020

Welcome to the latest monthly overview of events from the Apache community. Here's a summary of what happened in September:

New this month --

- ApacheCon™ – the ASF's official global conference series, bringing Tomorrow's Technology Today since 1998.
-- ApacheCon @Home 2020: all 2020 events have been combined and held online (free of charge!) 29 September - 1 October 2020 https://apachecon.com/acah2020
-- The Apache® Software Foundation Welcomes its Global Community Online at ApacheCon@Home https://s.apache.org/74zbx
-- ApacheCon 2020 features Natural Language Processing for Electronic Medical Records in dedicated track on Apache cTAKES https://s.apache.org/x1051

- "Inside Infra" – a new interview series with members of the ASF Infrastructure team
-- Meet Daniel Gruno --Part I https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Daniel1

- Apache Month in Review: August 2020 https://s.apache.org/Aug2020

Important Dates --

- Next Board Meeting: 21 October 2020. Board calendar and minutes http://apache.org/foundation/board/calendar.html

- ApacheCon @Home 29 September - 1 October 2020 https://apachecon.com/acah2020

Infrastructure --

Our seven-member Infrastructure team on three continents oversees our highly-reliable, distributed network under the leadership of VP Infrastructure David Nalley and Infrastructure Administrator Greg Stein. ASF Infrastructure supports 300+ Apache projects and their communities across ~200 individual machines, 1,400+ repositories, 5-6PB in traffic annually, ~75M downloads per month, and 2-3M daily emails on 2,000+ lists. ASF Infra performs 7M+ weekly checks to ensure services are available around the clock. The average uptime in September was 100%. http://www.apache.org/uptime/

Committer Activity --

In September, 808 Apache Committers changed 10,547,457 lines of code over 15,444 commits. The Committers with the top 5 highest contributions, in order, were: Andrea Cosentino, Mark Miller, Mark Thomas, Claus Ibsen, and Jean-Baptiste Onofré.

Project Releases and Updates --

New releases from Apache Accumulo (Big Data); Beam (Big Data); Commons Codec (Libraries); Commons Daemon (Libraries); Commons IO (Libraries); CouchDB (Big Data); Fineract (FinTech); Flink (Big Data); Geode (Database); HttpComponents Core (Servers); IoTDB (IoT); Jackrabbit (Content); Kudu (Big Data); Kylin (Big Data); Libcloud (Cloud Computing); Lucene (Search); MyFaces (Web Frameworks); NetBeans (Integrated Development Environment); Oak (Content); OpenMeetings (Web Conferencing); OpenJPA (Libraries); OpenWebBeans (Libraries);Proton (Messaging); Ranger (Big Data); Qpid Dispatch (Messaging); Qpid Broker (Messaging); Solr (Search); Syncope (Identity Management); Tomcat (Servers); ZooKeeper (Databases).

The Apache Incubator is the primary entry path for projects we invite you to review the many projects currently in development in the Apache Incubator http://incubator.apache.org/ . New releases from incubating podlings include: Apache MXNet (Incubating; Libraries). Congratulations to Apache IoTDB™, which graduated as a Top-Level Project this month https://s.apache.org/3xv3c

# # #

To see our Weekly News Round-ups, visit https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/ and click on the calendar in the upper-right side (published every Friday) or hop directly to https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/category/Newsletter . For real-time updates, sign up for Apache-related news by sending mail to announce-subscribe@apache.org and follow @TheASF on Twitter. We appreciate your support!

Posted at 05:45PM Oct 01, 2020 by Swapnil M Mane in Newsletter | |

Friday September 25, 2020

The Apache News Round-up: week ending 25 September 2020

Farewell, September --we're wrapping up the month with another great week. Here are the latest updates on the Apache community's activities:

ASF Board – management and oversight of the business affairs of the corporation in accordance with the Foundation's bylaws.
- Next Board Meeting: 21 October 2020. Board calendar and minutes https://apache.org/foundation/board/calendar.html

ApacheCon™ – the ASF's official global conference series, bringing Tomorrow's Technology Today since 1998.
- Registration is open (and free) for ApacheCon@Home 29 September - 1 October https://www.apachecon.com/acna2020/
- Sponsorships available for ApacheCon@Home https://www.apachecon.com/acna2020/sponsors.html
- The Apache® Software Foundation Welcomes its Global Community Online at ApacheCon@Home https://s.apache.org/74zbx
- ApacheCon 2020 features Natural Language Processing for Electronic Medical Records in dedicated track on Apache cTAKES https://s.apache.org/x1051

ASF Infrastructure – our distributed team on three continents keeps the ASF's infrastructure running around the clock.
- 7M+ weekly checks yield uptime at 100%. Performance checks across 50 different service components spread over more than 250 machines in data centers around the world. http://www.apache.org/uptime/

Apache Code Snapshot – Over the past week, 397 Apache Committers changed 2,254,525 lines of code over 3,335 commits. Top 5 contributors, in order, are: Andrea Cosentino, Gary Gregory, Andi Huber, Claus Ibsen, and Duo Zhang.

Apache Project Announcements – the latest updates by category.

Big Data --
- Apache CouchDB 3.1.1 released https://couchdb.apache.org/
- Apache Flink 1.10.2 released https://flink.apache.org/
- Apache Beam 2.24.0 released https://beam.apache.org/
- Apache Kudu 1.13.0 released https://kudu.apache.org/

Cloud Computing --
- Apache Libcloud 3.2.0 released http://libcloud.apache.org/

FinTech --
- Apache Fineract 1.4.0 released http://fineract.apache.org/

IoT --
- The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache® IoTDB™ as a Top-Level Project https://s.apache.org/3xv3c

Messaging --
- Apache Qpid Broker J 7.1.9 and J 8.0.1 released https://qpid.apache.org/

Servers --
- Apache HttpComponents Core 5.1 BETA1 released https://hc.apache.org/
- Apache Tomcat 7.0.106 released https://tomcat.apache.org/

Web Conferencing --
- Apache OpenMeetings 5.0.1 released https://openmeetings.apache.org/

Did You Know?

- Did you know that select ApacheCon@Home sessions will be presented in German, Hindi, Mandarin, and Spanish? https://www.apachecon.com/acah2020/tracks/

- Did you know that you can download and use a variety of ASF Templates and Badges for personal, project, and corporate promotions? http://apache.org/foundation/press/kit/#template-and-usage

- Did you know that you can help Apache Struts with its vote on v2.5.25? https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/re0ca300288262ab797ec0303c3b61daf2b1c9442222b92987a39ae88%40%3Cdev.struts.apache.org%3E

Apache Community Notices

- Apache Month In Review: August 2020 https://s.apache.org/Aug2020

- ASF FY2020 Annual Report https://s.apache.org/FY2020AnnualReport

- "Trillions and Trillions Served" documentary on the ASF: 1) full feature https://s.apache.org/Trillions-Feature 2) "Apache Everywhere" https://s.apache.org/ApacheEverywhere 3) "Why Apache" https://s.apache.org/ASF-Trillions 4) “Apache Innovation” https://s.apache.org/ApacheInnovation

- The Apache Software Foundation Statement on the COVID-19 Coronavirus Outbreak https://s.apache.org/COVID-19

- The Apache Software Foundation Celebrates 21 Years of Open Source Leadership https://s.apache.org/21stAnniversary

- Apache in 2019 - By The Digits https://s.apache.org/Apache2019Digits

- The Apache Way to Sustainable Open Source Success https://s.apache.org/GhnI

- Foundation Reports and Statements http://www.apache.org/foundation/reports.html

- "Success at Apache" focuses on the people and processes behind why the ASF "just works". https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/category/SuccessAtApache

- Inside Infra: the new interview series with members of the ASF infrastructure team --meet Christ Thistlethwaite https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Chris | Drew Foulks https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Drew | Greg Stein Part I https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Greg , Part II https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Greg2 and Part III https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Greg3 | Daniel Gruno --Part I https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Daniel1

- Please follow/like/re-tweet the ASF on social media: @TheASF on Twitter (https://twitter.com/TheASF) and on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-apache-software-foundation

- Do friend and follow us on the Apache Community Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/ApacheSoftwareFoundation/ and Twitter account https://twitter.com/ApacheCommunity

- Are your software solutions Powered by Apache? Download & use our "Powered By" logos http://www.apache.org/foundation/press/kit/#poweredby

= = =

For real-time updates, sign up for Apache-related news by sending mail to announce-subscribe@apache.org and follow @TheASF on Twitter. For a broader spectrum from the Apache community, https://twitter.com/PlanetApache provides an aggregate of Project activities as well as the personal blogs and tweets of select ASF Committers.

Posted at 02:23PM Sep 25, 2020 by Swapnil M Mane in Newsletter | |

Wednesday September 23, 2020

The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache® IoTDB™ as a Top-Level Project

Open Source Internet of Things-native database integrates with the Apache Big Data ecosystem for high-speed data ingestion, massive data storage, and complex data analysis in the cloud, in the field, and on the edge.

Wakefield, MA —23 September 2020— The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today Apache^® IoTDB™ as a Top-Level Project (TLP).

Apache IoTDB is an Open Source IoT database designed to meet the rigorous data, storage, and analytics requirements of large-scale Internet of Things (IoT) and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) applications. The project was first developed as a research project at Tsinghua University and entered the Apache Incubator in November 2018.

"The Internet of Things, especially Industrial IoT, has swept the globe with unimaginable volumes of data,” said Xiangdong Huang, Vice President of Apache IoTDB. "To date, both Relational and Key Value-based database solutions struggle to meet the demands of IoT data management. Apache IoTDB is the missing link between current IoT data and IoT applications, and is redefining how IoT data is managed, both in the cloud and on the edge. We are proud to graduate as an Apache Top-Level Project, which is an important milestone in our project’s maturity."

Apache IoTDB provides a compact and time series optimized columnar data file, which is able to efficiently store and access time series data. The database engine is specially optimized for time series-oriented operations, such as aggregations query, down-sampling, and time alignment query. Due to its lightweight structure, high performance, and deep integration with Apache Big Data ecosystem projects (such as Flink, Hadoop, and Spark), Apache IoTDB easily meets the requirements of storing massive data sets, ingesting high-speed data, and analyzing complex data, both on the edge and the cloud. Features include:

High-throughput read and write: supports high-speed write access for millions of low-power and intelligently networked devices, and provides lightning-quick read access for retrieving data on billions of data points.
Efficient directory structure: organizes complex metadata structure from IoT devices and large scale time series data, with fuzzy searching strategy for complex directory of time series data.
Rich query semantics: supports time alignment for time series data across devices and sensors, computation in time series field, and abundant aggregation functions in time dimension.
Flexible deployment: supports running on the edge (e.g., running on a Raspberry Pi), as well as forming a cluster in the cloud. It also provides a bridge tool between cloud platforms and data synchronization on premise machines.
Deep integration with Open Source Big Data projects: supports analysis ecosystems, including Apache Flink, Hadoop, PLC4X and Spark, as well as other Open Source applications.
Low hardware cost: reaches a high compression ratio of disk storage.

Apache IoTDB is in use at dozens of organizations that include ArcelorMittal AMERICA, BONC Ltd., the China Meteorological Administration, Datang Xianyi, Goldwind, Haier, Lenovo, NAVINFO, pragmatic industries GMBH, Shanghai Metro, Tsinghua University, Yangtze Optical Fiber and Cable Company, and more.

"IoTDB has attained Apache Top Level project status at a time of confluence of database, IoT and AI technologies in conjunction with a wider adoption of Industry 4.0 and automation approaches to further enable remote work and increased efficiencies," said Prof. C. Mohan, recently retired IBM Fellow, Former Chief Scientist of IBM India, and a member of the US National Academy of Engineering. "I am excited since this is the first Chinese University originated open-source project to reach this status. While I have been associated with the researchers behind IoTDB as a Distinguished Visiting Professor of the School of Software at China's prestigious Tsinghua University, I have seen this project reach maturity and build up a vibrant OSS community around it. It has a bright future ahead of it and I plan to collaborate on it."

"Apache IoTDB is a perfect fit for edge computing," said Dr. Julian Feinauer, CEO at pragmatic industries GmbH. "The high compression helps to use the (limited) amount of memory we have very efficiently. IoTDB is a perfect fit, especially in IIoT use cases, where network and compute capabilities are limited on the edge."

"Apache IoTDB was initially launched by a Chinese University and then incubated successfully in the Apache Community," said Prof. Hong Mei, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. "Following the Apache Way, it has created a healthy and active international open source community. It is a successful practice of open source education and culture advancement in China."

"Apache IoTDB has made many optimizations for different runtime environments, operating systems, and workloads in both the edge and the cloud. As a core infrastructure software in Industrial Internet, it innovates a series of IoT data management and analysis techniques," said Prof. Xiangke Liao, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering. "Through the open source model, Apache IoTDB shares its creative techniques to the world."

"With the continuous growth of intelligent devices, machine-generated data is growing day by day, which poses extraordinary challenges on storing process, query speed, and storage space," said Dawei Liu, architect at AutoAI Inc., a subsidiary of NAVINFO, and member of the Apache IoTDB Project Management Committee. "We tried and tested a variety of solutions and finally chose IoTDB as our core database for its high performance, openness to the enterprise, and its active community. We built our Wecloud platform based on Apache IoTDB, which has served well for BMW, Toyota, and Great Wall Motors, among other auto manufacturers. The project deeply attracted me to become a part of the community. The coolest thing is that I finally became an IoTDB committer and now share our ideas to the community."

"Apache IoTDB is an open source project and software technology innovation developed for the need of AIoT Big Data applications," said Prof. Jianmin Wang, Dean of the Tsinghua University School of Software, who originally decided to donate the project to the ASF. "It is also a very beneficial attempt for training leading talents. There will be a long way to go and the future is promising."

"Apache IoTDB is on its way to becoming a standard IoT data management and analysis solution, and we’re excited to build upon our work thus far," added Huang. "We believe Apache IoTDB will help more users and companies to solve their real problems. The process to achieve the goal is exciting and honorable, and we invite more contributors to join us. Following the Apache Way, let's bring this interesting, meaningful, and powerful software to the whole world."

A published paper on Apache IoTDB written by members of the Apache IoTDB Project Management Committee is available at http://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol13/p2901-wang.pdf . An introduction to Apache IoTDB from ApacheCon Europe 2019 is available on Feathercast https://feathercast.apache.org/2019/09/12/hello-world-introducing-apache-iotdb-a-database-for-the-internet-of-things-xiangdong-huang-julian-feinauer/

Catch Apache IoTDB in action at ApacheCon@Home, 29 September-1 October 2020 https://www.apachecon.com/acah2020/tracks/iot.html

Availability and Oversight
Apache IoTDB software is released under the Apache License v2.0 and is overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project's day-to-day operations, including community development and product releases. For downloads, documentation, and ways to become involved with Apache IoTDB, visit http://iotdb.apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/ApacheIoTDB

About the Apache Incubator
The Apache Incubator is the primary entry path for projects and codebases wishing to become part of the efforts at The Apache Software Foundation. All code donations from external organizations and existing external projects enter the ASF through the Incubator to: 1) ensure all donations are in accordance with the ASF legal standards; and 2) develop new communities that adhere to our guiding principles. Incubation is required of all newly accepted projects until a further review indicates that the infrastructure, communications, and decision making process have stabilized in a manner consistent with other successful ASF projects. While incubation status is not necessarily a reflection of the completeness or stability of the code, it does indicate that the project has yet to be fully endorsed by the ASF. For more information, visit http://incubator.apache.org/

About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)
Established in 1999, The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is the world’s largest Open Source foundation, stewarding 227M+ lines of code and providing more than $20B+ worth of software to the public at 100% no cost. The ASF’s all-volunteer community grew from 21 original founders overseeing the Apache HTTP Server to 813 individual Members and 206 Project Management Committees who successfully lead 350+ Apache projects and initiatives in collaboration with 7,800+ Committers through the ASF’s meritocratic process known as "The Apache Way". Apache software is integral to nearly every end user computing device, from laptops to tablets to mobile devices across enterprises and mission-critical applications. Apache projects power most of the Internet, manage exabytes of data, execute teraflops of operations, and store billions of objects in virtually every industry. The commercially-friendly and permissive Apache License v2 is an Open Source industry standard, helping launch billion dollar corporations and benefiting countless users worldwide. The ASF is a US 501(c)(3) not-for-profit charitable organization funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including Aetna, Alibaba Cloud Computing, Amazon Web Services, Anonymous, Baidu, Bloomberg, Budget Direct, Capital One, Cerner, Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Handshake, Huawei, IBM, Inspur, Pineapple Fund, Red Hat, Target, Tencent, Union Investment, Verizon Media, and Workday. For more information, visit http://apache.org/ and https://twitter.com/TheASF

© The Apache Software Foundation. "Apache", "IoTDB", "Apache IoTDB", "Flink", "Apache Flink", "Hadoop", "Apache Hadoop", "Spark", "Apache Spark", and "ApacheCon" are registered trademarks or trademarks of the Apache Software Foundation in the United States and/or other countries. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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Posted at 11:01AM Sep 23, 2020 by Sally in General | |

Friday September 18, 2020

The Apache News Round-up: week ending 18 September 2020

Greetings everyone --it's time to review the Apache community's activities from the past week:

ASF Board – management and oversight of the business affairs of the corporation in accordance with the Foundation's bylaws.
- Next Board Meeting: 21 October 2020. Board calendar and minutes https://apache.org/foundation/board/calendar.html

ApacheCon™ – the ASF's official global conference series, bringing Tomorrow's Technology Today since 1998.
- Registration is open (and free) for ApacheCon@Home 29 September - 1 October https://www.apachecon.com/acna2020/
- Sponsorships available for ApacheCon@Home https://www.apachecon.com/acna2020/sponsors.html

ASF Infrastructure – our distributed team on three continents keeps the ASF's infrastructure running around the clock.
- 7M+ weekly checks yield uptime at 99.89%. Performance checks across 50 different service components spread over more than 250 machines in data centers around the world. http://www.apache.org/uptime/

Apache Code Snapshot – Over the past week, 382 Apache Committers changed 3,359,513 lines of code over 3,557 commits. Top 5 contributors, in order, are: Mark Thomas, Jarek Potiuk, Andrea Cosentino, Claus Ibsen, and Shad Storhaug.

Apache Project Announcements – the latest updates by category.

Big Data --
- Apache Kylin 4.0.0-alpha released https://kylin.apache.org/

IDE --
- Apache NetBeans 12.1 released http://netbeans.apache.org/

Identity Management --
- Apache Syncope 2.0.16 and 2.1.7 released https://syncope.apache.org/

Libraries --
- Apache MXNet (Incubating) 1.7.0 released http://mxnet.incubator.apache.org
- Apache Commons Daemon 1.2.3 released https://commons.apache.org/proper/commons-daemon/

Messaging --
- Apache Qpid Dispatch 1.14.0 released https://qpid.apache.org/

Servers --
- Apache HttpComponents Core 5.0.2 GA released https://hc.apache.org/
- Apache Tomcat 8.5.58, 9.0.38, 10.0.0-M8 released https://tomcat.apache.org/

Did You Know?

- Did you know that ApacheCon@Home features keynotes by Jonathan Ellis of DataStax, Sam Lightstone of IBM, Gian Merlino of Imply, Anil Inamdar of Instaclustr, Thomas Huang of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Edmon Begoli of Oak Ridge National Labs, Kim Huang of Red Hat, Sheng Wu of Tetrate, Camille Fournier of Two Sigma, and Catherine McGarvey of VMWare? Sign up today https://hopin.to/events/apachecon-home

- Did you know that Solr is de-coupling from Apache Lucene to be an independent Apache project? Learn more from Atri Sharma, as interviewed by Rich Bowen, exclusively on Feathercast https://feathercast.apache.org/2020/09/01/apache-solr-and-lucene-atri-sharma/

- Did you know that recent entries into the Apache Incubator include BlueMarlin (Data Streaming), Liminal (Machine Learning), Pegasus (Big Data), and Sedona (Geospatial)? http://incubator.apache.org/

Apache Community Notices

- Apache Month In Review: August 2020 https://s.apache.org/Aug2020

- ASF FY2020 Annual Report https://s.apache.org/FY2020AnnualReport

- "Trillions and Trillions Served" documentary on the ASF: 1) full feature https://s.apache.org/Trillions-Feature 2) "Apache Everywhere" https://s.apache.org/ApacheEverywhere 3) "Why Apache" https://s.apache.org/ASF-Trillions 4) “Apache Innovation” https://s.apache.org/ApacheInnovation

- The Apache Software Foundation Statement on the COVID-19 Coronavirus Outbreak https://s.apache.org/COVID-19

- The Apache Software Foundation Celebrates 21 Years of Open Source Leadership https://s.apache.org/21stAnniversary

- Apache in 2019 - By The Digits https://s.apache.org/Apache2019Digits

- The Apache Way to Sustainable Open Source Success https://s.apache.org/GhnI

- Foundation Reports and Statements http://www.apache.org/foundation/reports.html

- "Success at Apache" focuses on the people and processes behind why the ASF "just works". https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/category/SuccessAtApache

- Inside Infra: the new interview series with members of the ASF infrastructure team --meet Christ Thistlethwaite https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Chris | Drew Foulks https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Drew | Greg Stein Part I https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Greg , Part II https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Greg2 and Part III https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Greg3 | Daniel Gruno --Part I https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Daniel1

- Please follow/like/re-tweet the ASF on social media: @TheASF on Twitter (https://twitter.com/TheASF) and on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-apache-software-foundation

- Do friend and follow us on the Apache Community Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/ApacheSoftwareFoundation/ and Twitter account https://twitter.com/ApacheCommunity

- Are your software solutions Powered by Apache? Download & use our "Powered By" logos http://www.apache.org/foundation/press/kit/#poweredby

= = =

For real-time updates, sign up for Apache-related news by sending mail to announce-subscribe@apache.org and follow @TheASF on Twitter. For a broader spectrum from the Apache community, https://twitter.com/PlanetApache provides an aggregate of Project activities as well as the personal blogs and tweets of select ASF Committers.

Posted at 11:17AM Sep 18, 2020 by Swapnil M Mane in Newsletter | |

Friday September 11, 2020

The Apache News Round-up: week ending 11 September 2020

Happy Friday! Let's take a look at what the Apache community has been up to over the past week:

Inside Infra – the interview series featuring members of the ASF Infrastructure team.
- Meet Daniel Gruno --Part I https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Daniel1

ASF Board – management and oversight of the business affairs of the corporation in accordance with the Foundation's bylaws.
- Next Board Meeting: 16 September 2020. Board calendar and minutes https://apache.org/foundation/board/calendar.html

ApacheCon™ – the ASF's official global conference series, bringing Tomorrow's Technology Today since 1998.
- Registration is open (and free) for ApacheCon@Home 29 September - 1 October https://www.apachecon.com/acna2020/
- Sponsorships available for ApacheCon@Home https://www.apachecon.com/acna2020/sponsors.html

ASF Infrastructure – our distributed team on three continents keeps the ASF's infrastructure running around the clock.
- 7M+ weekly checks yield uptime at 99.93%. Performance checks across 50 different service components spread over more than 250 machines in data centers around the world. http://www.apache.org/uptime/

Apache Code Snapshot – Over the past week, 396 Apache Committers changed 2,112,475 lines of code over 3,612 commits. Top 5 contributors, in order, are: Daniel Gruno, Mark Miller, Nick Vatamaniuc, Robert Newson, and Andrea Cosentino.

Apache Project Announcements – the latest updates by category.

Big Data --
- Apache Ranger 2.1.0 released http://ranger.apache.org/
- Apache Accumulo 1.10.0 released http://accumulo.apache.org/

Content --
-Apache Jackrabbit 2.12.11 and Oak 1.34.0 released https://jackrabbit.apache.org/

Database --
- Apache Geode 1.13.0 released http://geode.apache.org/
- Apache ZooKeeper 3.6.2 released https://zookeeper.apache.org/

Libraries --
- Apache OpenJPA 3.1.2 released http://openjpa.apache.org/
- Apache Commons IO 2.8.0 released https://commons.apache.org/proper/commons-io/
- Apache OpenWebBeans-2.0.18 released http://openwebbeans.apache.org/

Servers --
- Apache Tomcat Native 1.2.25 released https://tomcat.apache.org/

Web Conferencing --
- Apache OpenMeetings 4.0.11 released https://openmeetings.apache.org/

Did You Know?

- Did you know that ApacheCon@Home keynoters include
Edmon Begoli, Director of Scalable Protected Data Facilities at Oak Ridge National Laboratory;
Ben Bromhead, CTO and Co-Founder at Instaclustr;
Jonathan Ellis, Co-founder and CTO at DataStax;
Camille Fournier, Head of Platform Engineering at Two Sigma;
Kim Huang, Content Strategist at Red Hat;
Thomas Huang, Technical Group Supervisor and Strategic Lead for Interactive Analytics at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory;
Sam Lightstone, Chief Technology Officer for AI Strategy at IBM; and
Catharine McGarvey, Development Engineering Lead for Tanzu at VMWare? https://www.apachecon.com/acah2020/tracks/keynotes.html

- Did you know that Apache Druid are holding a series of MeetUps in September? http://druid.apache.org/

- Did you know that Apache MXNet (incubating) was listed among the best machine learning and deep learning libraries for building and training machine learning and deep learning models? https://mxnet.apache.org/

Apache Community Notices

- Apache Month In Review: August 2020 https://s.apache.org/Aug2020

- ASF FY2020 Annual Report https://s.apache.org/FY2020AnnualReport

- "Trillions and Trillions Served" documentary on the ASF: 1) full feature https://s.apache.org/Trillions-Feature 2) "Apache Everywhere" https://s.apache.org/ApacheEverywhere 3) "Why Apache" https://s.apache.org/ASF-Trillions 4) “Apache Innovation” https://s.apache.org/ApacheInnovation

- The Apache Software Foundation Statement on the COVID-19 Coronavirus Outbreak https://s.apache.org/COVID-19

- The Apache Software Foundation Celebrates 21 Years of Open Source Leadership https://s.apache.org/21stAnniversary

- Apache in 2019 - By The Digits https://s.apache.org/Apache2019Digits

- The Apache Way to Sustainable Open Source Success https://s.apache.org/GhnI

- Foundation Reports and Statements http://www.apache.org/foundation/reports.html

- "Success at Apache" focuses on the people and processes behind why the ASF "just works". https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/category/SuccessAtApache

- Inside Infra: the new interview series with members of the ASF infrastructure team --meet Christ Thistlethwaite https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Chris | Drew Foulks https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Drew | Greg Stein Part I https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Greg , Part II https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Greg2 and Part III https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Greg3

- Please follow/like/re-tweet the ASF on social media: @TheASF on Twitter (https://twitter.com/TheASF) and on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-apache-software-foundation

- Do friend and follow us on the Apache Community Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/ApacheSoftwareFoundation/ and Twitter account https://twitter.com/ApacheCommunity

- Are your software solutions Powered by Apache? Download & use our "Powered By" logos http://www.apache.org/foundation/press/kit/#poweredby

= = =

For real-time updates, sign up for Apache-related news by sending mail to announce-subscribe@apache.org and follow @TheASF on Twitter. For a broader spectrum from the Apache community, https://twitter.com/PlanetApache provides an aggregate of Project activities as well as the personal blogs and tweets of select ASF Committers.

Posted at 02:54PM Sep 11, 2020 by Swapnil M Mane in Newsletter | |

Monday September 07, 2020

Inside Infra: Daniel Gruno --Part I

The fourth interview in the "Inside Infra" series with members of the ASF Infrastructure team. Meet Daniel Gruno, who shares his experience with Sally Khudairi, ASF VP Marketing & Publicity.

"...companies are not the same as ASF. They don't have 300 different departments that all have their own little tools that they want working in their specific way. And they want this to connect to that, and that's connected to some other thing. We are not afraid to create custom solutions, we're not afraid to get our hands dirty and we're not afraid to make mistakes."

What is your name and how is it pronounced? I have my official name and I have my user name and people usually ask about both of them. My name is "Dan-yell Gkhroo-no" or I will accept "Dan-yell Groo-no" which is as you read it in English. It's actually a Dutch name. So you would pronounce it "Hrooy-no" in Dutch, which I'm not even going to try to phoneticize that because, that's, well, Dutch. And my username is "Humbedooh" which is an onomatopoeia that I randomly made up in 2004 for a game called World of Warcraft, where you need a username for this character that you create. And I think I had just listened to "New York, New York", where Frank Sinatra sings "scooby doo bee doo", and I was like, "hum-be-doo-de-doo" and the name just came to me and it stuck ever since. And so for the past 15 years or 16 years, I've been primarily "Hum-beh-doo" online. By the way, Frank Sinatra sings "zoo-bee-doo-bee-doo", not "scooby-doo-bee-doo" in "Strangers in the Night", but I like your version better. Okay. Well today I learned that. When and how did you get involved with the ASF? That goes back to 2010, 2011? Again, this beautifully tied us into World of Warcraft because in that game you can make modules, add ons for the game that will do nifty things, like add ons for a Web browser. And this is written in a programming language called Lua, L-U-A, which is Portuguese for "moon". And so I started writing some programs for this game and I had great fun with it, and programing is not my official trade. I was educated in, or studied, human resource management at university actually. But it was my hobby and I had great fun doing it. And this Lua thing just got stuck in me. And then five years later or so I started writing a program for the Apache Web server called mod_pLua, the best way to describe it as if PHP and Lua had a baby. So it would be the same for people that know PHP. It would be the same structure with the less than equal sign and a question mark, and then the same thing to end it on the other end, but with the Lua language instead of the PHP language. So I wrote this program or interpreter for the Apache Web server. And I didn't really think much of it. Obviously it was mostly for my own edification if you will, and for my own use. But I had put this on a site called SourceForge, which at that time had a community manager named Rich Bowen (also Apache HTTP Server PMC Member) who took a liking to this program or this module for the Web server because the Apache Web server community, which he was a part of at that point, have been doing something similar called mod_lua or at that time mod_wombat. And that had stalled. People have interests and then the interests wane and people would move on to new jobs and the person in charge of this mod _lua had found other interests in life. And so this module was just sitting there and not really being worked on. And Rich said, "Why don't you come take a look at this program and maybe this is a place where we can collaborate." And he also got (ASF co-founder and Apache HTTP Server PMC Member) Jim Jagielski very interested in the work I was doing. And so I slowly started on my path to becoming an ASF Committer initially by fixing what's called 404s, which is basically a reference in a Webpage to a link or another page that doesn't exist. Either it never existed or it doesn't exist anymore. So I started fixing a bunch of those just to get on their good side and hopefully they would take me seriously. And I didn't have high hopes, but I think I was probably the fastest person to get committership at the Apache Web Server Project...perhaps the fastest in the 10 years preceding when I got it probably within a week. They had a vote going and I was voted in and… Within a week? Within a week. Unheard of. I was pretty much on the path to becoming a Committer. I couldn't believe it. Part of me wanted to believe it, because it was a very big validation for me. Because I had been using the Apache Web Server since 1998 and it always been a project that I looked up to and it had been this mythical "Father of the Web” program. And so to actually be a part of it and get your name on the page that says these are the Committers that actually have a say in the project and can commit code to it, that was I was quite a feat for me, especially at that time where I had stopped my studies at university and I didn't know, what am I going to do now? Because as happens with a lot of people that study something, they eventually found out that while, okay, this was interesting, but it's probably not what I want to be doing, if I'm honest. Because what I had fun with was programming. So while it was nice knowing a lot of stuff about statistics and economic models and psychology and so forth, it had started to get a little boring for me. I knew these things, what now? And so to get this validation to get an avenue of sorts where I could use my creativity in a new way that I hadn't studied for, but it naturally just came to me this programming inspiration, that was really nice, to use a very vague word. It was a tremendous opportunity for me. And then that's how I got started with Apache. Fantastic. You’re not only a Member of the ASF and an Infra team member. What other "hats" do you wear at the ASF? I have a couple of hats. I’m also the Vice President of the Apache Web Server Project, which is a great honor. And it's still to this day, three years in, fun to do. People think of it as this is a dictator role or you get to decide, but it's more of a glorified secretary really, where you keep tabs with everything or most of the things that are going on in the project. And you relay that information in a concise way to the Board of directors, whose job it is to look at these reports and say, "Are the projects doing okay? Do they need any help from us? Are they in trouble?" So basically VP is the watchdog --in these COVID days, I guess you can say it's a pulse oximeter of the project. And if you want to know if a project is still healthy and stable and progressing, the VP is the one to ask, because that's basically their job to know. As VP I don't get to decide who gets in or who gets kicked out or what direction we take in the project: I am just the person that ensures that the Board knows that the project is in good health. Do you wear any other hats or is it just the VP of Apache HTTP Server? I'm also VP of Apache STeVe. As I said, I have two VP-ships and STeVe is a whole other beast. Let's say it's very stable in that we have a code base that works and we don't really do much about it, we maintain it. In the Apache Web server, we have around 20 to 30 people actively contributing code every single quarter. And in Apache STeVe, we are basically twiddling our thumbs, waiting for something bad to happen. And it never happens. We have a program that works the way we like it. And we don't see the need for any large changes. And as long as there is sufficient oversight in a project, then the Board doesn't come in and say, "Hey, can you make this cool feature?" Because that's not the Board's job. The Board’s job is just to help us, as projects. And so if the project doesn't have anything that it feels it wants to add, but it's still there and the people are alive and well, then the Board will say, "You got it. We'll see you next quarter." And so two projects are very different and it also makes for very different reports. OK. Let’s drill into Infra, as that’s the focus of our interview series. How long have you been a member of the Infrastructure team? How did you get there? I am not sure. I think I've been a member of the Infrastructure Team since 2012. You can probably figure out when exactly I got my membership in the email archives . It started because the Apache Web server project needed a commenting system. Because we had been eyeballing the PHP project and they had a system where you could, on the documentation pages, you can enter, I have a comment about this documentation bit, or you could add some code snippets or ask a question and get an answer. And the only thing we had was send an email and get a reply and then the next person comes along and doesn't know that that email existed and sends the exact same question and gets the exact same reply and that can get tiresome in the long run. So we wanted someplace inside the documentation itself where you could go in and see, okay, I have an issue with this documentation, have other people encountered the same problem or are there some smart solutions that I can find here. And this type of software doesn't write itself, unfortunately. So I set about in writing that using the mod_lua that I had now invested a great deal of time in because A, we needed a comments system and B this was a good excuse to show off mod_lua in a production system. This could really do something, it's not only fast, but it's got a lot of features and it's got a lot of flexibility to it. And so I asked the Infra Team, which at that point was very daunting for me because they were, let's say our image has improved over time at Apache Infra, it was much more a, well basically an operator from hell vibe you got back in the early 2000s or early 2010s from the Infra Team, especially when you're someone of a more timid nature like I am. So anyway, I asked if I could get a place to set up a machine or borrow a Web server basically and put this commenting system on that I had been writing as a hobby. And they pretty much said "Sure." Which was surprising to me because normally when you go and ask for something at a company and it's very difficult, you can ask for meetings and meetings and meetings, but if you ask for actual resources, you will usually have to file a form J/99-B in triplicates and whatnot. And here they were just: “well it looks like he wants to help the project, just give him what he wants”. And so I got started on this commenting system. And other projects became aware of it and they wanted to use it as well. And then I became the comments guy, basically. And I started maintaining this system for, I think, it was seven different Apache projects at the time using it. And since you can't really maintain anything at the ASF without somehow being an infrastructure person, I was made an infrastructure person...and generally if you're a given something, you get a taste for it and you want more. And so I started volunteering for more and more infrastructure tasks. And then I became what is called infrastructure root. This was about two years later down the road. Which is a point where the Infrastructure Team says we have complete trust in what you do. Here are basically the keys to the kingdom. Do whatever you like, except don't do that. But you could do whatever you wanted to. And that was almost as awesome as becoming a member, which I had become just about a month prior. It needs to be said that at that point you could not become infrastructure root unless you were also an ASF member, because needless to say, when you have root access to an organization as wide and important as to the ASF, you get to be privy to a lot of information that you should keep to yourself. And so the logic at the time was, if you are an ASF member, you will already have access to most of this information because of your membership and so we can allow you to become an infrastructure root person. This has changed since then, we have cast a wider net when looking for new infrastructure people, this also includes a more thorough vetting process that we have now. So we feel more secure and not just requiring you got to be an Apache member before you come and help us. So we are able to look for a broader set of requirements that might not have been found within the, at that time, 400 and something members that were in the Foundation. What are you responsible for in ASF Infrastructure? Oh God. As with most infrastructure members, it's almost easier to see what are you not in charge of, which I usually say “Jenkins” with a big smile because that's things that are, I know this is going to sound silly to a lot of people reading the article, but things that are Java, I tend to shun like a vampire and sunlight. Any particular reason? Yes. I'm not accustomed to the way the output and stack traces and core dumps. And the thing about Java is it's very verbose: you can write 50 lines of code and you'll have a print Hello. And it doesn't appeal to me. So yeah, when things don't appeal to me immediately, this is one of my weaknesses, I try to not really understand it because it's easier not to. Fortunately we have some very talented people at the Infrastructure Team that knows pretty much everything there is about Jenkins and JIRA and Confluence and all the other big Java powered mod lists we have at the Foundation so I can spend my time elsewhere. What I mostly do at the Foundation day to day work aside -- because we all have basic maintenance tasks and disasters that can crop up from time to time -- is product development of the glue that binds The Apache Software Foundation together and its software infrastructure. And I'll tell you about a new thing that we've been doing, which is something called PyPubSub. I can spell it, it's P-Y-P-U-B-S-U-B, so it's a Python publisher subscriber service for the ASF. You can basically think of it as a newspaper where you have a publisher, you have an audience, you have the readers, and then you have topics of interest. Some might want the sports section or the funnies, or someone might want the financial news. And then you have, of course, the writers or journalists that make up the contents in these sections. And at ASF, these sections, they would be Subversion commit or Git commit or a new email being written, or someone got added as a Committer or someone filed a pull request, someone filed a new bug or issue, or some are discussing an issue. And the writers and journalists would be all these systems where you send an email to, or you open up a new ticket or you commit some code to it. The readers will then be either users, or there will be a lot of different software components that rely on these messages in order to operate themselves and do what they're supposed to do. So in essence, PyPubSub is, again, some glue that binds the majority of our services together. And it does so by dispatching events to basically whomever wants to read about them. We actually have something called a Pub/Sub Explorer, in real time shows every single event that happens at the ASF technology wise. So if someone sends an email to us, if someone commits something, if someone opens the poll request, if someone comments on a discussion, it all shows up in this Explorer that will update in real time. And it's very cool. (ASF Infrastructure Administrator) Greg (Stein) was saying that you do things that are uniquely different from other team members. In addition to the PyPubSub, what other things are you working on? Currently, one of the main things we manage is called technical debt, which is basically, the longer you don't maintain and upgrade a system, the more expensive it's going to become once you finally have to do it. And so I'm dealing with some technical debt that is moving the service that we have called GitBox from an old, pretty ancient set up to a brand spanking new 2020 machine and software, which also means moving from Python 2.7 to Python 3.8 for every single component that is in the service called GitBox. And that is a lot of components. GitBox is the ASF side of where a committer would commit code to if a project uses the Git version control system. The other side would then be GitHub, if a project chooses to use GitHub. And GitBox and GitHub, they kind of talk together and figure out, okay, someone pushed to me, I'm going to synchronize this with you. And I'm also going to make sure that everyone gets an email on the mailing list saying "something just happened." It's rather unique in that you can choose to either use a GitHub account, or you can choose to say, "I'm not going to use GitHub. I'll just use my Apache credentials on the Apache server instead.'' Not a lot, very, very few, in fact, organizations have this kind of interconnectivity between GitHub and a locally hosted git server. And what we have done very neatly is, we have managed to link our LDAP directory of all our committers to GitHub. Meaning that, if you go in and say, "This is me on GitHub.'' We automatically figured out, okay, that means you get wide access to this and this and this repository. And that is updated in real time. How did these out-of-the box projects come about? I remember when you first approached me about five years ago with these fantastic stats just before I was going to publish the Annual Report. I’d never seen anything like that at the ASF. It's difficult to explain. It's like asking a painter, ''Where do you get your inspiration from?'' It just happens. A lot of time --I will tell a little secret-- a lot of the time that I spend in my day-to-day work is not spent actually typing code or reading up on new fun things. A lot of it is spent what you would call idling. And by that I mean not particularly engaged in any specific task, but kind of just all over the place casually ... Like how, and I hope not to cause any offense here, but how a standard office worker would spend a lot of time on Facebook catching up on friends and family. I'll just spend mine to see whatever I'm interested in the moment that has to do with programming or mathematics or psychology. And in the back of my mind, there's always, how can I take this information that I'm reading about and apply it in a software world? My mind has a tendency to see structures that may or may not be there. And I think almost exclusively in structures. Whenever I see something I want to understand not just how does it work, but how is it basically designed? And can I replicate that? And so, a lot of my day-to-day work is, I see something cool, it might not be anything that has to do with software, or the internet, or anything. It might just be a cool gadget, or a painting, or a chart in a newspaper. And I'll be like, ''What can I use that for that would benefit the foundation? Or whatever hobby project that I'm working on?'' And then you get these aha moments where you're like, ''This I can actually use this way to fix a problem that we are having, or that problem that we could have.'' Sometimes you just make up problems that will potentially happen in the future, just so you can have an excuse to get started on something. And for some strange reason, these fictitious problems very often tend to be not so fictitious at all. And once you show three or four people, hey, I thought of this thing that's not actually a problem. And I thought of a solution. They'll be like, ''That is actually a problem for us.'' And suddenly you have a solution to a problem that you didn't think existed in real life, but it actually does. So, a lot of the things I do are “for the fun of that”. But there's always a work-related starting point in that, is this something that can be used within the software world? Or within the managerial world of software? Which is where I primarily tend to focus my energy. In terms of your day-to-day work with the Infra team, you said that you’re hands-on, not necessarily coding specific tactical solutions, but solving other problems --do you participate with the firefighting as do the other team members? You often respond to my queries about mailing lists --is that your specialty? Chris and Drew shared that everyone specializes in at least one thing. What do you specialize in? My focus is primarily, and there's this kind of a self-made problem. My focus is all the programs and services that I, unfortunately, created. You create it, you own it. Yes. There are a lot of services at Apache Infrastructure that either I made from scratch, or they have a very big thumbprint of mine on them. And so, when I started at Infrastructure, the Infrastructure team, it was expected that we do our fair bit of firefighting. We do a fair bit of the tasks that every single member of the infrastructure team knows how to complete. And I will go through tickets and I find tickets that I find manageable and complete those. I will participate in firefighting. I will do whatever I feel needs to be done right away. If there's something important, or if there's something where I feel like this should have been dealt with by now, I will do that. But it was also the expectation that I come in and help develop and maintain a lot of new features we were looking at creating for the committers and for the end users of Apache software. Simply to make for a better user experience and an easier workflow for our committers and contributors. So, a lot of what I do is maintaining and assisting with services that I have either initially authored or helped expand upon. Tell us about the structure of the Infra team --how did your work come about in a formal way? You were saying that you're creating these tools and then they just kind of got integrated. But were they looking for your sort of skill set? Or was it more of, “hey, we need another Java guy”? What clicked there? Your background is really different. Your expertise is different. Your insight is different. It's an unusual scenario to have a traditional department embrace someone like you and say, ''Hey, we're going to have a whole new type of services offered based on this one guy's vision.'' That's very unusual. Can you elaborate on that a bit? I don't think they were looking for someone like me. But I think they got someone like me and it was completely happenstance. The Infrastructure team at that point, that was early 2013. They were looking to expand with one more staffing spot. This was a part time job. And this was probably about a year and a half after I started doing things for the Infrastructure team. And they had a very narrow list of candidates at the time, because it was a very closed circle. And kind of still is because when you're a staffer, you get the keys to a very mighty kingdom. And so, they had a few people that they could consider, but I was probably by far the one putting in the most hours. And I will, gladly admit that, at that time, I did not have a job. So, I was able to put in a lot of hours. This was when Sam Ruby was VP infrastructure. When Sam initially took me aside and said, ''Hey, we are looking for this part time opening, are you interested?'' I was like, ''No, this, surely you're not, you can't be serious. There's got to be someone that's actually qualified for this job.'' I didn't consider myself qualified at all. And... But you were doing the work? I was doing the work, I just didn't have any confidence in the work I was doing. You can be creative, you can do a lot of interesting things and still have this incredible imposter syndrome going on at the back of your head saying, ''Someone else is doing this work. It's not you.'' So, I politely turned him down and said, ''Thank you, but I'm not insisted because you'll just find out I'm a fraud.'' It actually took two other Infrastructure at that point, current staffers, two other sector members to yank me aside and say, ''What are you doing? We want you for this job.'' And they had actually pretty much all internally, independently been rooting for me and trying to position me to become this new member of the team, to my great surprise. After, I think it was after a very long talk with (former Infra team member) Joe Schaeffer, I was finally convinced, maybe I should give it a shot. And I'm very glad that he convinced me. I'm very glad that the other people at that time also convinced me because it's now been, to this month, seven years since I started. And it's not been fun every day because there can be such a thing as too much firefighting going on. But it's been interesting every single day. You're never bored and you never think, ''I need to find a new job.'' Because you are respected for what you do. You are rewarded in more ways than money, honestly, and you can probably agree with this, at The Apache Software Foundation you get a very unique sense of loyalty. Not to the Board of Directors, or to the specific projects, or anything else, but to the community as a whole. To the mission that we're doing. So, I am honestly very content being where I am. I'm very happy that these people ganged up on me and, basically, forced me to get a job that was... It was kind of silly in hindsight because it's a well paying job, it's part time. So, you don't have to spend nine hours a day on it. You can work whenever you want to and... There were no setbacks except for this nagging doubt that people are going to find out the real me. Which, as I discovered myself, it turned out the real me was actually kind of awesome at this job. It's interesting because the Apache community tends to not want someone if they're not good. So, it's testament to your skill set, and who you are as a person, you're liked. You're very well liked. Thank you very much. And, you're right. The Apache community seems to be very good at finding talent, and also very good at rewarding it in ways that make that talent stick, and make them interested and continue working within the ASF community. I think that's a thing that you don't see in all software communities. We learned from (Infra team members) Chris (Thistlethwaite), Drew (Foulks), and Greg (Stein) about the scope of the work that Infra does. How is the ASF different from other Open Source foundations from an Infra perspective --are there other people doing what you do, or how our group performs, or the services that our group provides. Is this common in other Open Source foundations? It is not common in other foundations. We are different in that the breadth of the amount of services that we provide for each project. And especially at the budget that we provide it at. I think we did a count back in 2015 and it was something around 52 different distinct unique services that we had, that we were running for all projects to use. And in between these, there are possibly more than 300 machines each running, some of them running the same thing on 10 machines. And then you have another 10 machines that are running 10 different things. This is all handled by what? A team of what, seven people now? Six people actually, five of us and Greg (Stein). Greg is a bit of an übermensch, so yeah. That's amazing, in terms of the workload. It can get hectic, and I will not deny that, but we have a very, very strong cohesion. I don't want to say we finish each other's sentences, but when someone has a problem, the others know when to step in and help, when to back off, and what to do while someone else is doing their thing. We compliment each other really well. And we have a nice set of tools to help us with managing things, making sure that everything is up and running, diagnosing when something goes wrong. We have a lot of, again, by the hand of me, a lot of custom tiny services that you never even hear of or see if you're not within the infrastructure team. But that goes on automatically. Let's say you're abusing someone in a ticket multiple times, or you're spamming, whatever. We have a lot of microprocesses that go in and detect abusive behavior, both in terms of spam, but also what you would call technical hardware abuse, where someone is repeatedly using all of our bandwidth, for example, or causing the CPU to spike. We can go and detect that automatically and pull a systemwide ban on you, which it's very custom, but it saves us a lot of money. I will say that we've saved a lot of money at the Foundation by being smart about what we do and not being afraid of making a few mistakes while we make new things... Because a lot of what we do is custom-based, custom-made. Because there is not, unless you're talking about something big like Kubernetes or something at that scale, it's often very difficult to find the tools that do what we want them to do with the problem that we have. Because other companies, especially companies, are not the same as ASF. They don't have 300 different departments that all have their own little tools that they want working in their specific way. And they want this to connect to that, and that's connected to some other thing. We are not afraid to create custom solutions, we're not afraid to get our hands dirty and we're not afraid to make mistakes. That doesn't mean we make mistakes all the time, or that we're okay with all sorts of risks. How do you interact with the team? How do you stay motivated? I stay motivated by interacting with my team, I would say. Interaction is mostly on Slack, which is, for those that either don't know it or pretend they don't know it, is an instant messaging platform. We have an account for the Foundation; we have our staff channel where everything gets discussed, whether that be, the mail servers are a big backlog, or this prime rib I just sous vide-ed at 105 Fahrenheit four or five hours is awesome. I think one of the tricks or keys to success for teams like us is to really mix up the subjects and not be all business and not be all fun because you don't want it to be too boring, you don't want it to be too relaxed. I think we've somehow managed to hit a pretty good ratio of fun and serious items that we discuss on a day to day basis. So, it's fun talking to your colleagues about real-life stuff that isn't work, but it's also rewarding talking about work and learning from them and their experiences, and you being able to give them some work experiences and wisdom from your many years of being a sysadmin or infrastructure architect. I think we've hit a really good ratio there. It's an interesting perspective with that because everyone I’ve interviewed thus far has given the same answer. Can you describe your typical workday: now, I know some people don't have an exact schedule, some people do. What's a day like in Daniel Gruno's life? My typical workday is very atypical for a worker. I don't have a set schedule. I don't have a set time. I don't have a minimum amount of hours I work. I don't have, unfortunately, a maximum amount of hours I work. It all depends on the day and what happens during that day. As said earlier, a lot of what I do is developing new services for the Foundation. As such, I spend a lot of time getting inspiration, and that's done through various means of... From idling, I can be working at noon and then I'll be like, ''I should watch a movie.'' And then I'll go watch a movie. My significant other will tell you that's a lie, I don't watch movies. But that was just an example. I can't sit through two hours, I get too fidgety. And that's actually the real truth about me. I can't sit still and do something for a specific amount of hours, unless I'm in a really inspired mood. So, my typical workday is finding things to do that don't take more than half an hour to do, in between suddenly getting the greatest inspiration from up high. I'll be looking at tickets that are easy for me, not absolutely speaking, easy to fix, but tickets that I know how to fix and I'll go in and fix those. I'll catch up on every single email that I receive, which is thousands of emails every single day. I have a mania about inbox zero. If there's an email, I have to read it and sort it. Otherwise, I can't get past the inbox. I can't even close down the mail client unless I know that there is nothing in my inbox. Yeah, it's the same with Slack and IRC and all that. If there's a message pending for me, I have to check it. But that's beside the point. It gives me something to multitask between. Because there will always be a new email, there will always be someone saying something on Slack. So, a lot of my time is spent just multitasking between that, between reading up on news. And then, at some point, the inspiration that I need for that day will hit me and then comes the manic in a few hours where I just code like crazy because I have the inspiration. I tend to form fully thought out ideas which is terrible because if you have a fully formed idea in your head, you know it's going to take eight hours to complete it. But you also know that if you stop, you might forget that fully formed thought. Sometimes a work hour day can be four or five hours and sometimes it can be 10, 12, 13 hours because my muse has sung to me and the inspiration just has to be translated through the keyboard and into some sort of code or what page or documentation or just a specification for a new idea. Having said that though, don't pity me because I work 12 hours a day and don't be jealous because I work five hours a day. Because it adds up to a lot of hours on average per month. But I'm also happy to do it because it brings me joy. With this constant flow of concepts and code and inspiration, how do you keep your workload organized? You might be hammering away on a solution and imaging and envisioning something to develop --there's a lot of things happening simultaneously. A lot of people have a hard time multitasking, or focusing on one thing and managing the thousands of emails coming into the mailbox, et cetera. How do you manage that? I would say I don't manage it, but luckily I have family that helps manage it. I have a boss that helps manage it. I'm a very ... I'm on the autism spectrum and some would say that I probably have ADD as well. So I get very easily distracted and can lose focus, but I am surrounded by people that are very good at a) knowing that I lose focus very easily and b) guiding me back to the right path for that day. I think in terms of my boss, Greg's point of view, I think it's a win win because I get guided back on my path and I get to actually do something useful and not just 20 unfinished projects. And he gets some services that are working and are improving the use of experience of the people that we are there to support: the committers. So serving 350 Apache projects, initiatives and their communities, like how busy are you? How many requests do you receive a day? How do you prioritize these requests? How do you do this? Greg, Drew, and Chris talked to me about JIRA systems, et cetera. Your work, as I understand it, is not necessarily responding to user requests. How do you fit the creativity in with this process? How do you mitigate that? How do you fit everything in? I do respond to users to keep me busy because if I am, I don't want to say stalling, but if I am really idling then I lose interest so I have to always keep busy with something. So I will grab a lot of tickets just to keep busy with that. That's the thing that I had to teach myself how to do. And I don't have the recipe for it, and yet I have somehow taught myself. The thing where you have to not click on every single new ticket that opens up. And not read every single ... Well, you can read email, you just don't have to write a reply to every single email. It took a few years, I think, for me to stop doing every single ticket that came in within five minutes of it coming in. Because at that point, if you do that, plus you have 10 different projects on the side, you get burnout very quickly. And I've had a few burnouts, where I've been unproductive and doing nothing for the next week because I'd lost all hope in humanity because of the amount of tickets and angry users. So a lot of it just letting go and knowing that there are team members who know just as well as you do what this is about and how to solve it. And if they don't then they will ask you and you can help them then. So a lot of managing the workload is learning to let go of the workload. And if someone creates a ticket saying, "My forwarding address doesn't work." It's probably okay to wait more than five minutes before you fix that if you're in the middle of something. I used to be of the, not opinion, but yeah, I used to be of the opinion that this must be fixed right away. The minute I saw someone had a problem, I wanted to help them. But there comes a point where the more you try to help someone, the less you're actually helping them in the end because of the overhead of dealing with too many tasks and being burned out. I think some of it is ... Stefano… Mazzocchi? Yeah. Right. The Mazzocchi equilibrium. There is a certain point where in the effort you put in and the effort comes out of that starts to not align anymore. And so if you're not good at holding back and letting things slide just a bit, then you cross that threshold and you end up putting in maybe, I don't know, 12 hours of work. And really what you are doing is five hours of work or four hours or one hour of work because you're so not interested in what you are doing. I know that some of my colleagues use Trello or If This Then That, or other tools to organize their day, but I want to say that's not for me. I don't think it factors in the creativity that is needed in the role I have. I think without any scientific evidence whatsoever, that if your job is to think up new ideas and think of new ways to do something. These tools, they don't necessarily account for where creativity comes in because you can't put in your calendar: step one, “be creative”; or at 9:00, “be creative”. Creativity is something that just happens. I've found that it happens for me when I am idling, when I am doing a lot of non-work related things, switching between and then switching back to work. And then switching back to non work items and switching back to work. And then suddenly, a link appears between these two things and they're like, yeah, this idea could actually be used for work. But the things I am doing are not something that you can put into plan because you don't know ... I mean if I knew how to be creative, if I knew to just go to this Website, then I would be a millionaire by now. So I don't know *how* to be creative: I know that I can be creative and I know it happens when I let it happen. You have to make space for that to happen, right? You have to allow for that to happen. It's great that you have flexibility to be able to do that in your job --that part of your work is to be able to conceptualize and visualize and come up with things. It takes a while because sometimes you're not going to know the problem unless you're in the middle of it: "so, oh this is an issue … here's an opportunity for us to come up with something that'll help." It's great. And it's especially great because I think honestly if I was stuck and let's say I was doing human resource management or whatever that I studied for, if I was stuck doing Excel spreadsheets, for example, all day long ... Not that that's a bad thing, but when creativity suddenly hits me, I have to get it down on paper or it's going to haunt me to an extent where I just can't stand myself. So I'm very fortunate to have a job where I can, fire fighting aside, I can say, "Boom, I have this inspiration suddenly. I need to focus on that." And then I can go and focus on that. And I have a boss and I have a boss's boss and I have my colleagues that are understanding so that suddenly, "Oh Daniel got inspired. He's probably going to manic for the next eight hours just working on this idea he’s got." It's really wonderful being given that space to be creative because I think no matter what job I have, there would be an urge to be creative and to think up ideas. And again, when I think of an idea, it forms itself completely in my head. Some people will start with half an idea or a fingertip of an idea. For me, it's mostly been the entire idea presents itself to me right away, and I have to get as much of that as possible down on paper before it's lost. To have that opportunity is really wonderful. [END OF PART ONE]

Posted at 02:47PM Sep 07, 2020 by Sally in SuccessAtApache | |

Friday September 04, 2020

The Apache News Round-up: week ending 4 September 2020

Welcome, September! We've had a great week within the Apache community. Here's what happened:

ASF Board – management and oversight of the business affairs of the corporation in accordance with the Foundation's bylaws.
- Next Board Meeting: 16 September 2020. Board calendar and minutes https://apache.org/foundation/board/calendar.html

ApacheCon™ – the ASF's official global conference series, bringing Tomorrow's Technology Today since 1998.
- Registration is open (and free) for ApacheCon@Home 29 September - 1 October https://www.apachecon.com/acna2020/
- Sponsorships available for ApacheCon@Home https://www.apachecon.com/acna2020/sponsors.html

ASF Infrastructure – our distributed team on three continents keeps the ASF's infrastructure running around the clock.
- 7M+ weekly checks yield uptime at 99.76%. Performance checks across 50 different service components spread over more than 250 machines in data centers around the world. http://www.apache.org/uptime/

Apache Code Snapshot – Over the past week, 387 Apache Committers changed 2,230,138 lines of code over 3,461 commits. Top 5 contributors, in order, are: Mark Miller, Hervé Boutemy, Tellier Benoit, Andrea Cosentino, and Claus Ibsen.

Apache Project Announcements – the latest updates by category.

Content --
- Apache Jackrabbit 2.18.6 and Oak 1.8.23 released https://jackrabbit.apache.org/

Libraries --
- Apache Commons Codec 1.15 released http://commons.apache.org/codec/

Messaging --
- Apache Proton 0.32.0 released https://qpid.apache.org/

Search --
- Apache Lucene 8.6.2 and Solr 8.6.2 released http://lucene.apache.org/

Web Frameworks --
- Apache MyFaces Core 2.3-next-M4 released http://myfaces.apache.org/

Did You Know?

- Did you know that details about the online/virtual format, presentation sessions, Apache projects and communities featured, schedule selection, languages available, sponsors, Slack channel & more are available at https://blogs.apache.org/conferences/entry/apachecon-home-2020-is-just ?

- Did you know that Target uses Apache Druid to ingest more than 3 trillion rows of data across 3,500+ data sources? http://druid.apache.org/

- Did you know that Apache Kylin enables SQL developers and BI users to achieve sub-second response times for queries against petabytes of data? http://kylin.apache.org/

Apache Community Notices

- Apache Month In Review: August 2020 https://s.apache.org/Aug2020

- ASF FY2020 Annual Report https://s.apache.org/FY2020AnnualReport

- "Trillions and Trillions Served" documentary on the ASF: 1) full feature https://s.apache.org/Trillions-Feature 2) "Apache Everywhere" https://s.apache.org/ApacheEverywhere 3) "Why Apache" https://s.apache.org/ASF-Trillions 4) “Apache Innovation” https://s.apache.org/ApacheInnovation

- The Apache Software Foundation Statement on the COVID-19 Coronavirus Outbreak https://s.apache.org/COVID-19

- The Apache Software Foundation Celebrates 21 Years of Open Source Leadership https://s.apache.org/21stAnniversary

- Apache in 2019 - By The Digits https://s.apache.org/Apache2019Digits

- The Apache Way to Sustainable Open Source Success https://s.apache.org/GhnI

- Foundation Reports and Statements http://www.apache.org/foundation/reports.html

- "Success at Apache" focuses on the people and processes behind why the ASF "just works". https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/category/SuccessAtApache

- Inside Infra: the new interview series with members of the ASF infrastructure team --meet Christ Thistlethwaite https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Chris | Drew Foulks https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Drew | Greg Stein Part I https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Greg , Part II https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Greg2 and Part III https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Greg3

- Please follow/like/re-tweet the ASF on social media: @TheASF on Twitter (https://twitter.com/TheASF) and on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-apache-software-foundation

- Do friend and follow us on the Apache Community Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/ApacheSoftwareFoundation/ and Twitter account https://twitter.com/ApacheCommunity

- Are your software solutions Powered by Apache? Download & use our "Powered By" logos http://www.apache.org/foundation/press/kit/#poweredby

= = =

For real-time updates, sign up for Apache-related news by sending mail to announce-subscribe@apache.org and follow @TheASF on Twitter. For a broader spectrum from the Apache community, https://twitter.com/PlanetApache provides an aggregate of Project activities as well as the personal blogs and tweets of select ASF Committers.

Posted at 11:28AM Sep 04, 2020 by Swapnil M Mane in Newsletter | |

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