Introducing the GoCD bootstrap steering committee
Aravind SV
Hello everyone,
I’m excited to announce some news about the GoCD bootstrap steering committee!
Back in November last year, while announcing changes around GoCD, I had mentioned that a bootstrap steering committee would be set up to help decide the way forward. That time has come!
Drawing inspiration from other bootstrap steering committees in this space, the GoCD one is time-bound and is made up of five members, whose primary responsibilities will be to:
Help decide GoCD’s future, related to its assets and future home.
Put together a plan for a longer-term, technical steering committee for GoCD.
You, as a part of the GoCD community, will continue to be invaluable in helping decide the technical future of GoCD.
What is going on right now and what are the next steps
There is a charter being drafted, with help from attorneys, which will help formalize this process. Once that is done, the charter will be made public and the committee will meet for the first time (likely early in July). This process will be transparent and you will have opportunities to provide inputs and feedback.
If you would like to be notified when anything noteworthy happens, please subscribe to the “Bootstrap committee announcements” GitHub issue, in the GoCD steering committee repository, where all the assets and notes produced during this process will be stored.
Introductions
Without further ado, please join me in welcoming the members of GoCD’s bootstrap steering committee, in alphabetical order of first name:
Ashwanth Kumar
Ashwanth is currently a Principal Software Engineer for Avalara, and before that he was at Indix. He has been using GoCD since 2012 and has authored many plugins and components related to GoCD over the years. For instance, he is the author of the GoCD Github Pull Request plugin and GoCD Slack Notifier plugins. He has also dabbled with a Golang library to access the GoCD API as well as a “GoCD Janitor” to improve the way artifacts are purged.
If you’ve spent any time on the GoCD mailing list or the Gitter channel, you’ve likely encountered useful responses from Ashwanth regarding a variety of topics. He loves to organize and take part in hackathons and he came third in GoCD’s first and only plugin competition. :)
GitHub: https://github.com/ashwanthkumar
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashwanthkumar/
Birgitta Boeckeler
Birgitta is a Principal Consultant at ThoughtWorks Berlin. Of the 6 major delivery projects in her recent past, 2 used GoCD, 2 TeamCity, 1 Concourse, 1 Gitlab. Currently, for the first time in 8 years, she is working with Jenkins again.
She says: “One of my passions is finding different ways to do build monitoring, and one of my frustrations has been that the explosion of tools in the CD space has made that a lot harder, even the little standardization that existed is vanishing (cctray). Overview of content I've put out: https://birgitta.info/ #architectureGovernance #pairing #documentation #programmerStereotype. My life through the Corona lockdown lens: I miss live music; I am forced to cook more and I like it; I played a board game with my sister for the first time in 25 years”.
She built one of the most creative build monitors for GoCD, many years ago. Recently, she has been trying to figure out how CD metrics fit into the "4 Key Metrics" (see the “Accelerate” book), and how (if) they can be measured automatically in a way that makes sense.
GitHub: https://github.com/birgitta410
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/birgittaboeckeler/
Ketan Padegaonkar:
Ketan is a Principal Consultant at ThoughtWorks India. He was the tech lead of GoCD for many years, till late last year. He is known for his passion for code quality and his ability to fearlessly dive into improving what seem like scary parts of the codebase. He leaves them better, more modern and somehow more understandable than before, while sharing that knowledge with the rest of the team.
He’s an Eclipse committer and core contributor and also started SWTBot. To cope with his mid-life crisis (his words, not mine), he built an automated plant watering system, learned how to build planes and took up paragliding.
GitHub: https://github.com/ketan
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ketanpadegaonkar/
Mark Crossfield:
Mark works as a software developer at Auto Trader UK. Mark has helped the GoCD team many times, with feedback, ideas and encouragement to his team members to contribute improvements to GoCD. I’ll let him introduce himself:
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Mostly I support our early-career software developers such as our software developer apprentices. Previously worked as a developer inside and outside our Operations team, and still advocate good practices around CI/CD and source control. Recently, I’ve spent a lot of time with MkDocs, as we’ve recently migrated our engineering handbook from Jekyll to Material for MkDocs. At Auto Trader, I’m also involved in mental health first aid, LGBT+ Network and wider Diversity & Inclusion initiatives.
I’ve used GoCD since around 2009, and Cruise Control back when it was a thing. I’ve appreciated how the visualisation of dependencies between projects has always been a primary concern in GoCD, and once visualised these for fun and to understand better how people were using our CI/CD environment.
I’ve volunteered extensively at music festivals for Oxfam and have a passion for local history and underground / abandoned local features. I maintain a website with a map and information to help others find out more about what is under our feet in Manchester UK.
My pronouns are he/him.
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GitHub: https://github.com/mrmanc
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markcrossfield/
Tomasz Sętkowski:
Tomasz is a Senior Infrastructure Consultant at ThoughtWorks. Previously, he co-founded AI-Traders.
You might know him as “tomzo”, the author of GoCD’s Pipelines-As-Code (config repository) feature and the JSON and YAML plugins which allow GoCD pipelines and environments to be managed in versioned repositories, all of which he did before joining ThoughtWorks recently. His open-source experiences outside of GoCD can bring ideas which help in this transition time for GoCD.
In his own words: “I'm interested in contributing to best practices and tools in the industry. My recent focus is building an open source community around Dojo. My outside-of-tech interests are investing, music (mostly metal), hiking and wild camping in no man's land”.
GitHub: https://github.com/tomzo
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomzo/
Please feel free to ask any questions you might have.
Regards,
Aravind SV (on behalf of the GoCD bootstrap steering committee)