[gentoo-science] Fwd: Re: Interested in becoming a Gentoo developer

[Andrew Ammerlaan]

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 <andrewammerlaan@××××××.net>
To: 	recruiters@g.o
CC: 	Joonas Niilola <juippis@g.o>, Michał Górny 
<mgorny@g.o>, heroxbd@g.o, sping@g.o


Hi recruiters@g.o,


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the spyder ebuild was outdated and contained a couple of bugs that had 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 <andrewammerlaan@××××××.net>
To: 	Benda Xu <heroxbd@g.o>, Joonas Niilola <juippis@g.o>
CC: 	recruiters@g.o, Michał Górny <mgorny@g.o>, 
sping@g.o


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 <juippis@g.o> 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 <mgorny@g.o>
Organisation: 	Gentoo
To: 	Andrew Ammerlaan <andrewammerlaan@××××××.net>, recruiters@g.o
CC: 	Joonas Niilola <juippis@g.o>, heroxbd@g.o, 
sping@g.o


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