Hi Gentoo Science Team,
I'm interested in joining the Science Team as a developer. For a
detailed description of my previous experience with ebuilds and Gentoo I
refer to the emails I forwarded below (the short summary is that I
maintain spyder (The Scientific PYthon Development EnviRonment) and some
dependencies in ::gentoo, and that I'm a Trusted Contributor to the GURU
project.). I'll also add some more information on what I do
scientifically in this email.
After just over 5 years of studying Physics, I'm at the verge of
completing my Masters in Physics of Molecules and Materials. The past
year I've been busy with an internship at the High Field Magnet
Laboratory (Nijmegen, The Netherlands), where I've been working on
creating a setup for Oscillating Cantilever Magnetometry, with varying
levels of success (the pandemic didn't make things easier). I submitted
my Thesis this week, and am currently awaiting a review and a result.
After which I'm hoping to start a PhD (if the pandemic allows that).
I would love to hear if anyone has the time for mentoring me. As I also
said in the emails I forwarded below, I have already taken a look at the
quizzes linked on the Gentoo website and I feel like I can answer a lot
of the questions in there (not all of them though, so I do still need to
study a bit).
Best regards,
Andrew
-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: Interested in becoming a Gentoo developer
Date: Sat, 15 Aug 2020 16:36:58 +0200
From: Andrew Ammerlaan <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
CC: Joonas Niilola <[email protected]>, Michał Górny
<[email protected]>, [email protected], [email protected]
Hi [email protected],
I started contributing to ::gentoo in Novemeber/December of last year
via the proxy-maint project. My first project was getting spyder-4 in
the tree. Spyder is the Scientific PYthon Development EnviRonment, and I
use it a lot for data analysis and such (I study Physics), at the time
the spyder ebuild was outdated and contained a couple of bugs that had
been open for quite some time, eventually I decided that I would just
fix it myself. This was a *massive* Pull Request
(https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo/pull/13988 I had to split it up a
bit), and @juippis, @hartwork and @heroxbd helped me a lot with it. Back
then I didn't really know what I was doing, but I found that everyone
was really helpful in giving feedback on my work and linking me the
relevant documentation and tutorials. I learned a lot from the
experience, and I still proxy-maintain dev-python/spyder and some of its
dependencies such as dev-python/python-language-server.
In January I joined the ::guru project
(https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:GURU) as a Contributor
(https://bugs.gentoo.org/706002). I had some new package ebuilds that I
wanted to share, but I didn't want to add to the already huge amount of
PRs that get assigned to the proxy-maint team. I found that GURU was the
perfect place for these new ebuilds. My second project consisted of
writing ebuilds for Vidify and deps (https://vidify.org/
https://github.com/vidify/vidify). Vidify is an awesome tool that
automagically fetches the music video from YouTube that corresponds to
whatever music you're listening to at the moment on any client (e.g.
spotify web, or media-sound/spotify via dbus). Here and there I helped
the developer of Vidify with some bugs I found, and I translated his
website to my native language (Dutch). In ::guru, I still maintain
media-video/vidify and dependencies such as dev-python/tekore,
net-misc/lyricwikia, dev-python/httpx, dev-python/uvicorn,
dev-python/python-vlc, dev-python/python-mpv and dev-python/pydbus.
Because I noticed that contributions to GURU's dev branch were not being
merged to the master branch, I requested to become a Trusted Contributor
to ::guru in early-March (https://bugs.gentoo.org/711868). My request
was granted, and from that moment on I've been reviewing commits from
other Contributors to GURU's dev branch a couple of times each week, and
providing feedback where necessary, before merging them to the master
branch. Among others, I also added ebuilds for media-tv/droidcam,
games-action/multimc and games-action/minecraft-launcher to ::guru.
Nearing the end of March, I discussed with @mgorny and @juippis the idea
of mentioning the GURU project in Pull Requests to ::gentoo that only
add 'new packages'. My hope was that this would reduce somewhat the huge
amount of PRs assigned to the proxy-maint project, and at the same time
increase the amount of contributions to, and popularity of, the GURU
project. Initially, I did this manually by leaving comments on the 'new
package' Pull Requests, but together with @mgorny we automated this:
https://github.com/mgorny/assign-pull-requests/commit/f2115b4f253d55a1fd63dbe77165aec5174069e9
. This has resulted in a steady stream of new Contributors to ::guru.
In April, @juippis opened a discussion on adding some common guidelines
for the GURU project (https://github.com/gentoo/guru/issues/5). After
discussing some basic rules and regulations with the community of
Contributors, I wrote a draft README.md for the ::guru repository, which
I committed to the repository early in May, and can be viewed on the
::guru GitHub mirror: https://github.com/gentoo/guru .
This week I finished the first draft version of my thesis, and therefore
I now have a lot of extra time on my hands. I would like to spend this
extra time learning even more about ebuilds/portage/Gentoo, and
hopefully become a Gentoo developer at some point. I read the 'Becoming
a Developer' section on the Gentoo website, and took a quick look at the
quiz linked there, and I feel like I could answer a lot of the questions
in there. Though there are also some that I do not know how to answer,
and therefore still require more studying and reading on my part.
I read that I have to find a mentor, and I was hoping either @juippis,
@mgorny, @heroxbd or @hartwork (who I have CC'ed) would have the time to
do that.
Best Regards,
Andrew
P.S. Sorry for the really long email, I felt like I needed to describe
my past involvement in the Gentoo community, but the length of the email
might have gotten a bit out of hand.
-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: Re: Interested in becoming a Gentoo developer
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 2020 12:37:29 +0200
From: Andrew Ammerlaan <[email protected]>
To: Benda Xu <[email protected]>, Joonas Niilola <[email protected]>
CC: [email protected], Michał Górny <[email protected]>,
[email protected]
Hi all,
Thank you for your replies and kind words :)
On 18/08/2020 01:09, Benda Xu wrote:
Hi Joonas,
Thanks for informing us.
Joonas Niilola <[email protected]> writes:
To all other CCd members: Andrew is definitely an upcoming candidate for
becoming an official developer. I acknowledge the work he's done for
Guru and Proxy-maint projects so far, and can vouch for him. He's also
been polite in his interactions with us, and everyone he's been guiding
so far.
To Andrew: Sorry I'm currently not in a position to mentor. It's good to
see you peeked at the quiz. If you can comfortably answer the questions
without having to search too much to tackle them, that's a good sign.
I'd personally still like you to get more experience first.
Note: I'm not a recruiter so everything below this line is just my view
on things, they can either be regarded or disregarded, but should
possibly give you some tips how to continue. I just wanted to reply in
case no one else has yet:
So far your activity consists of basic package maintenance in ::gentoo
and managing Guru overlay. You have 120 commits in 8 months to ::gentoo,
and you had a short period where you were reviewing Github pull requests
for ::gentoo repo. You've kept Guru clean and merged other user commits
to master branch.
I'd suggest you to try help projects that are close to packages you use
/ are interested in. Looking at your previous contributions, I'd say
python and science projects would be closest. Something a bit more
technical than version bumps through proxy-maint. Not saying you should
attempt to fix any/every bug in bugzilla, but check what packages you
use, which projects maintain them and if there is a call for aid from
them. That'd make you more visible for others, too. It's always better
to focus on packages you use, because you see the outcome and have
experience of them.
Cool. The science project welcomes Andrew to join. We have worked with
Andrew since at least the beginning of this year. His contributions
were of high quality.
It would be awesome to join the science project. Scientific/python
packages are indeed the packages I am most involved with.
I'm currently working on another major version bump of spyder-5.0, which
introduces some new dependencies, and hopefully python3.8 compatibility
(it's another huge PR I'm afraid).
I know you had that eclass you wanted to push and we'd need to finish
checking it... I'm not 100 % convinced about it yet. But let's finish
it. Just keep doing what you do and be yourself, you'll get there!
I indeed still have an open PR for a version bump of mkdocs and adding
the docs.eclass. The PR might have gotten slightly out of date in the
meantime, but I'll update it to the latest version once I get a green
light on the eclass.
As far as the eclass itself is concerned, it has been in ::guru for some
time and it has been doing what it should be doing, though it might
indeed need some more work as it probably is not perfect yet. It would
be awesome if I could get some feedback on it. I already sent it to the
mailing list once, but I suppose I could send it a second time.
Best regards,
Andrew
-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: Re: Interested in becoming a Gentoo developer
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 2020 08:19:45 +0200
From: Michał Górny <[email protected]>
Organisation: Gentoo
To: Andrew Ammerlaan <[email protected]>, [email protected]
CC: Joonas Niilola <[email protected]>, [email protected],
[email protected]
Hi,
On Sat, 2020-08-15 at 16:36 +0200, Andrew Ammerlaan wrote:
[...]
I read that I have to find a mentor, and I was hoping either @juippis,
@mgorny, @heroxbd or @hartwork (who I have CC'ed) would have the time
to do that.
I can vouch for Andrew as well. He's going to be a great new member
in our community.
However, with my current workload I can't really mentor you full-term.
Nevertheleess, if you need some extra help, please don't hesitate
to ping me.
--
Best regards,
Michał Górny
