Your new software operations support specialist

[E. Madison Bray]

Hi all,

As many of you have already heard I've been hired with the help of
some of the project's grant money into a new part time position as
software operations support specialist.

I thought I would just send a brief message to the group sort of
"re-introducing" myself. I was one of the early contributors to
Astropy--after Erik Tollerud, Tom Robitaille, and Prasanth Nair I was
the 4th person to commit to the Astropy repository back in 2011. So
many people who follow this list probably already know me. Though I
haven't been very involved in the project in the last 5 years, and I
know there are many new people as well :)

The position I've been hired for has a fairly broad mission, though I
think it can be best summarized as "helping to reduce the number of
technical barriers to contributions to Astropy, and improving the
first time contributor experience". This will include picking up some
of the slack on helping shepherding through pull requests and
responding to new issues. So if anyone needs help responding to any
specific PRs, feel free to @embray on them and I can help. I will
also be helping to triage our >1000 open issues and nearly 100 open
PRs and try to make progress on them. Finally, I hope to help with
some of the devops and infrastructural issues that have burdened
developers and users of Astropy as well as affiliated packages.

To these ends I have a number of small projects and tasks in mind,
which I can detail in future messages once I have time to focus on
them. But to give an overview of what I already have on my TODO list,
I have set up a project board for my tasks. Feel free to propose
additional tasks I can help with by adding them to my TODO list:
https://github.com/orgs/astropy/projects/6

Happy to be back on Astropy, even if only part-time!

Best,
Madison


P.S. Since it is a FAQ I get: For a few years now I've been out as
non-binary and introduce myself to new people as Madison, whereas many
of you already know me as Erik. To be clear, Erik is not a deadname
and I have no problem with people using it, and I still use it in some
official capacities. But I'm also delighted how everyone here so far
has adopted my middle name. Plus, as an Astropy-specific bonus, it
provides a nice workaround to the "two Eriks" problem we've had in the
past =)