[this post is available online at https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Daniel1 ]
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 an
