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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

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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 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 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

- 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

- 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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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

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

- 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

- 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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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 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

- 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

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

Tuesday September 01, 2020

Apache Month in Review: August 2020

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

New this month --

- ASF Annual Report – a look back at our many achievements during the 2020 Fiscal Year
-- Press release https://s.apache.org/FY2020AnnualReport-PR
-- Full report https://s.apache.org/FY2020AnnualReport

- ApacheCon™ – the ASF's official global conference series, bringing Tomorrow's Technology Today since 1998.
-- ApacheCon @Home 2020: ApacheCon North America and Europe have been combined and will be held online and free of charge 29 September - 1 October 2020. Sponsorship opportunities available. Join us! https://apachecon.com/acah2020

- "Trillions and Trillions Served" – the feature documentary on the ASF filmed onsite at ApacheCon Las Vegas and Berlin in 2019.
-- “Apache Innovation”, the fourth and final segment of the series now available https://s.apache.org/ApacheInnovation

- Success at Apache: the monthly blog series that focuses on the people and processes behind why the ASF "just works".
-- I Became an Apache Solr Committer in 4,662 Days. Here’s how you can do it faster! by Eric Pugh https://s.apache.org/hney3

- Apache Month in Review: July 2020 https://s.apache.org/July2020

Important Dates --

- Next Board Meeting: 16 September 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 August was 99.79%. http://www.apache.org/uptime/

Committer Activity --

In August, 822 Apache Committers changed 16,077,266 lines of code over 14,003 commits. The Committers with the top 5 highest contributions, in order, were: Mark Miller, Daniel Klco, Jean-Baptiste Onofré, Gary Gregory, and Andrea Cosentino.

Project Releases and Updates --

New releases from Apache Calcite (Big Data); Cocoon (Web Frameworks); Commons Imaging (Libraries); Commons NET (Libraries); Commons Pool (Libraries); Commons Validator (Libraries); Commons JCS (Libraries); CXF (Libraries); Flink (Big Data); HBase (Big Data); HTTP Server (Servers); Kafka (Big Data); Log4cxx (Libraries); Lucene (Search); NiFi (Big Data); OpenMeetings (Web Conferencing); OpenNLP (Machine Learning); Parquet (Big Data); PDFBox (Content); Qpid (Messaging); ShardingSphere (Big Data); Skywalking (Application Performance Management); and Solr (Search).

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 APISIX (API) and IoTDB (IoT).

# # #

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 09:11AM Sep 01, 2020 by Swapnil M Mane in Newsletter | |

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