On Tue, 2 Sept 2025 at 16:38, Michael Winters via infrastructure < infrastructure@lists.fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> Hey y'all. Unemployed SRE here, looking to join the ranks. > @mwinters:fedora.im and hoping to see you in this Thursday's meeting > (September 4). I'm currently in US Central time. > > Onboarding is always the hardest part, and it's why I hadn't joined > previously -- it's too difficult to build the necessary context across > small slices of time. But I'm hoping to do that now as quickly as I can > with my current excess of spare time, because that will (hopefully) > enable me to make ongoing contributions even after I'm employed again. > > So, apologies that I'll be pretty noisy for a bit. I'm going to try > real hard to pay back your investment. > > Welcome. When I was in Fedora Infrastructure, the biggest thing I never had energy to do was updating the onboarding documentation. It would be useful that it and the other documentation got a viewpoint of an SRE because you have a better knowledge of "what I know I don't know" about a new place. It might be useful still to get that from someone who is fresh. What are you looking for that would help you understand how the Infrastructure is run What are the general tools (aka ticket list versus Jira or monitoring versus Nagios) you were looking for to get a better idea of the infrastructure and how hard was it to find those. If it was hard, what would have made it more intuitive? The questions you have below would all probably be answered with "See our entire infrastructure history" which may also be needed to be written somewhere. > Here are the vitals: > > - Skills > - SRE > - I've been using "other people's computers" since before they > became weather formations. Sometimes lots of them. > - Historical focus on reliable and scalable app architectures, > but reliability is also QA, CI/CD, PM, Finops, etc etc. So I've done > some of all of that. > - I feel I'm obligated to say "Kubernetes" here. I'm > OpenShift-curious but the licensing prohibits curiosity. > - Some leadership stuff like spearheading SLO adoption. > - Recently started exploring kernel internals and eBPF. > - I know my ARP from my ARPA. (Not a networking expert but no > stranger to RFCs.) > - Programming > - Basically any common language except .NET, most recently Go > and Rust. Never found a good reason to use a functional language but > always wanted to. > - Mostly backends and systems-level stuff (e.g. tooling), but I > can commit web UI war crimes if ordered. > - Lots of OSS contributions but never to a distro. > - People > - I feel strongly that technology *is* people. I see the > strength of that symbiosis as core to the outcomes, so I'm often focused > on smoothing out the bumps for others when my boss would rather I be > shipping features. (Have I mentioned that I'm unemployed?) Docs, > sweeping the floors, etc. > - I love to teach. I've been told that I'm good at it. > - I was briefly the wrong kind of journalist, and then an > editor. So maybe some Magazine contributions eventually? Or at least > some pedantry on tap. > - Infosec > - A lifelong interest but never a career focus. I did get a > CISSP though, so I can tell you all about Bell-Lapadula. And I've had > to operate in some highly-regulated environments and work through some > audits. "Security-minded"? > - Familiar enough with OAuth, OIDC, LDAP, etc. but no Active > Directory. Might still be able to install Netware 4.11. > > > - Goals > - My only real goal right now is to learn the ropes as quickly as > possible and make at least one actual contribution ASAP. Sort of a "new > contributor smoke test." That said, I've found a lot of bumps along the > way so far in onboarding, and I think some of those fall under infra so > I'll likely start there. > - I'm curious about the Zabbix migration since I've had to do a lot > of observability in the past. This is also a great opportunity to > understand where things are and why they are that way. (The full answer > to "Why Zabbix?" is probably "see also: our entire infra history".) > > > - Initial Questions > - I have so many, I think I'm exceeding the capacity of folks in > Matrix. So I'm planning to start dumping those Q's here on the list or > into Discourse where they might be treated more like a queue. My actual > question here: is that the recommended approach? (Aside from RTFM'ing > as hard as I can?) > - A number of the onboarding bumps that I want to smooth out are in > the infra docs, and those docs say that I need to be an apprentice to > make a PR to the docs ... is that correct? If so, how can we proceed > since I'm the newest noob around? > > > Thanks for reading all of this, and looking forward to working with you > all! Feel free to email me or DM on Matrix if you want to connect. > > Michael Winters > -- > _______________________________________________ > infrastructure mailing list -- infrastructure@lists.fedoraproject.org > To unsubscribe send an email to > infrastructure-le...@lists.fedoraproject.org > Fedora Code of Conduct: > https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ > List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines > List Archives: > https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/infrastructure@lists.fedoraproject.org > Do not reply to spam, report it: > https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue > -- Stephen Smoogen, Red Hat Automotive Let us be kind to one another, for most of us are fighting a hard battle. -- Ian MacClaren
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