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List:       apache-announce
Subject:    Inside Infra: Drew Foulks
From:       "Sally Khudairi" <sk () apache ! org>
Date:       2020-04-27 22:48:13
Message-ID: e142f4c3-193e-4aba-8cf9-2d6418e0c182 () www ! fastmail ! com
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[this interview is available online at https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Drew ]

The second in the "Inside Infra" interview series with members of the ASF \
Infrastructure team features Drew Foulks, who shares his experience with Sally \
Khudairi, ASF VP Marketing & Publicity.

- - -
"I am in the business of making life easy for people who do phenomenal stuff."
- - -

 - What is your name --how is it pronounced?

My name is Drew Foulks. "Droo Follx".


 - If folks were to find you at the ASF, like on Slack or elsewhere, what's your \
handle? How do they find you?

They'll find me at Warwalrux, spelled with an X, so W-A-R W-A-L-R-U-X.


 - So, "War Walrus", but with an X at the end. Where did that come from?

Kind of embarrassing story actually. I got picked on a lot in middle school because I \
was always really good with computers, but as bad as it sounds, I never really wanted \
to be. I always wanted to be one of the one of the cool kids and the cool kids were \
not going to computers. One day I got into a fight at school and one of my friends \
just absolutely made me lose it afterwards. I was sitting there on the ground crying \
and he said, "Man, you were a fighting walrus, like the walrus of war or something. \
It was awesome." I lost it. But ever since then, I've just been like, "You know what? \
I'm not even going to be ashamed about that anymore." I've been that since I started \
doing tech, which was actually not that long ago compared to the other guys on the \
team.


 - How long have you been in tech?

I'm 29, and have been in tech since I was 16, so 13 years.


 - When did you get involved with the ASF? How did you get here?

I was working at NASA for four and some change years, and I decided that I wanted to \
pursue some other opportunities because they really were not supportive of that work \
from home culture. And at the time I had a lot of stuff going on. My wife was sick, \
my daughter, my youngest, has special needs and stepson actually also has special \
needs, so being at home was something I had to do. A buddy of mine tipped me off on a \
Website called We Work Remotely. I ran across your ad there and thought, "There is no \
way that is who I think that is and I'm going to apply for the hell of it." \
Surprisingly, two months later, I got a call back.


 - You do understand how many interview candidates we had, right? A lot of people \
were competing against you.

It blows my mind. I heard the stories after I got hired and I was just like, "Man, \
that's nuts." And then when I got hired, I was actually told, jokingly, of course, \
the ASF was looking to launch its own brand of internet satellite. So that's why we \
hired people from SpaceX and NASA.


 - The Infra guys have such a dry sense of humor! How long have you been a member of \
the team?

One year and one month, 13 months.


 - For some reason it feels like you've been part of the Apache family for years. \
What's your role in ASF Infrastructure? What are you responsible for?

My latest contributions have been the Website builders, so I'm working on helping \
people migrate off of CMS. Some of the ways that I've chosen to do that are by \
working with Humbedooh (the handle for ASF Infrastructure team member Daniel Gruno) \
on his ASF.YAML project, that so many projects seemed to be really enjoying.


 - YAML? Yet Another Markup Language?

That's it. Yet Another Markup Language.

So basically, I built the system that lets you build Websites from ASF.YAML and you \
just specify your Website builder, whether it be Pelican or Jekyll --those are the \
two that we support right now. And you give it a source branch and a target branch \
and every time you check in, boom. It builds your website.


 - Who is this aimed at?

This is for Apache Projects building their TLP Websites. When you commit your Website \
to the repo, say any project, they've all got Websites, but some of them are \
generated via Jekyll. Some of them are generated with Pelican, some are generated in \
a custom way with a Jenkins job. It's just how each project is determined to generate \
their website, but we're trying to make it easy and provide lots of options for \
projects to migrate off of the old CMS. But still projects are allowed to be able to \
choose their own method of publishing or their method of creating a site, but you \
have to be able to enable all of that to happen. 


 - Did you have to learn this or was this knowledge something that you came into the \
position with?

I learned it.


 - Was it difficult? How long did it take you to get this project up?

The Pelican one was a lot harder than the Jekyll one. So, Pelican took a couple of \
months. Really, Greg had a prototype when I came in that apparently had been kicking \
around for a little bit, so I tightened it up and pelicanized it. I think it works \
pretty well. I've not heard any complaints about it.

That took a while before I wasn't doing primarily Python programming, I was doing \
lots of different ops things just in a completely different way than what I do now. \
To be honest, I still haven't wrapped my head around exactly what it is I do here.


 - Do you mind sharing a little bit about that?

I came here from the government world, which is very silent. I worked for the OCIO, \
Office of Chief Intelligence Officer Data Center for NASA Langley, which is a very \
old NASA center. Older than NASA itself actually. Their infrastructure, as you can \
probably guess, is not the newest: It's 100 years old. They have wind tunnels from \
the 1920s. There are parts of the infrastructure that are 100 years old and it's \
insane. Everybody has a specialty, everybody's a subject matter expert in something, \
and there's nothing more permanent than a temporary government program, so if you \
take something on, expect to be doing that for the rest of your life. It's very \
regimented. If you've ever seen Hidden Figures, the computational research facility \
where they've opened the Katherine Johnson Research Center, was my data center.

And then to come to the ASF, it's like, "Okay, so we've got like 11 different Cloud \
providers and these are all the projects that we're supporting. Do you know this, \
this, this, this or this?" Jenkins, Buildbot, VMware, any of the Docker, Puppet and \
all that stuff. Do I know any of these myriad Open Source technologies that one \
doesn't really get to use a lot of in the government sphere. I mean, I've been doing \
Ansible there for three years.

It was very monolithic. We had VMware. I ran a data center. I had hardware. I had to \
track all of that. Coming here, everything is completely different. It's like, "We're \
juggling all these different Cloud providers, and oh, wait: we've got to migrate out \
of this one today, so let's do that. Okay. All right. Where are we going with this?" \
It's just like there's no end in sight. As technology progresses, so do we. It's just \
that we do it so much faster than anywhere else I've ever been.


 - Is that exciting or scary?

Oh, gosh. I've never stopped long enough to think about it. It is a bit of both. It \
is intimidating for sure, because before it was very silent. Like I said, I did my \
thing and I had my interests, my extracurricular interests, running home network \
setups and private media servers and whatnot. Then I come here and those hobbies go \
away, now I'm doing that for the Foundation instead.


 - Yeah, that's cool, though.

It is. I'm a professional hobbyist.


 - To get paid for doing your hobby is pretty rewarding.

It is. Yeah.


 - This has become your hobby in a different way, of course, because I'm sure you \
weren't planning on dealing with ~11 different Cloud providers.

No, I was not.


 - In our chat with Chris Thistlethwaite last month \
https://s.apache.org/InsideInfra-Chris , we learned more about who ASF Infra serves \
and the scope of the work that you provide. Can you tell me more about the who and \
how it works exactly? So, who Infra serves and to what capacity or what is it that \
you guys do? Because I get every person's perspective is slightly different because I \
get the same, we do it all answer, and is that true? I mean, you're saying that so \
far, it sounds like it's true. I guess no one has a reason to expand upon it in terms \
of embellishment, but tell me more.

We serve Apache project developers and development teams. It's not just the people \
who sit down and write the code, the people who orchestrate these very complex \
processes of building testing, checking, doing the sanity work behind the scenes, the \
people coordinating releases, PMCs planning out the future of these projects, we \
serve them, too, and we have to serve them in a capacity beyond, "Hey, here's a build \
platform," it's: "We support your email communications, we're there to facilitate the \
goings on of the Project." Infra's domain is almost everything but the coordinating \
and writing of code.

Taking care of their code management systems, providing them with the means to do \
build testing and having it not kill us in the process. That's a big, big addendum to \
that requirement. Like I mentioned, email, I call them the central services, things \
like LDAP, authentication, your virtualization services, file sharing, all of those \
things that make the business of a TLP easy(ish). I am in the business of making life \
easy for people who do phenomenal stuff. That's honestly how I view my job and it's \
very, very different than my old one.

In my old job, I had one customer who I bent over backwards for; here, it's very \
much, "Listen, my job is to provide these services and to facilitate what you guys \
do, not do it for you." Drawing that line sometimes becomes difficult for me \
personally because I don't have as much experience in the ASF, I think. But that \
seems to be a skill that the other guys have is when to bounce back and say, "No, \
this is definitely a PMC or a PMC issue that you guys should be dealing with because \
it sets a bad precedent if I make this decision. I'm not going to do this work for \
you." It wouldn't be a right to pollute a project like that.


 - What you're saying doesn't come across as odd. One thing that I always want to \
know is how ASF compares with other infrastructure operations in general. Chris had \
said this also, here you have 300+ projects and all sorts of different groups that \
you're interfacing with, so it's a completely different type of interaction. Your \
response is totally legitimate: it takes a certain type of personality to be able to \
handle that because most people would likely be overwhelmed and run away. The fact \
that you're here and thriving and our projects are expanding is awesome.

Thank you. You can thank my wife for not letting me run away.


 - Based on my understanding, as a team you're autonomous yet coordinated. Is that \
the right way to describe how you work together?

Yes. That is a good way to describe how we work together.


 - Do you feel like that model works or do you think something else should be \
happening or how does that work for you?

That's a tough question because I'm not sure that the answer would make any sense, \
but I'll give it a go anyway. By constantly talking with each other, the team gets a \
sense for the direction that we need to be heading. Leadership is very organic and \
not spontaneous, but they're like a current guiding us towards the goal, really, \
whatever that is, so all of the decisions that we make on the daily really kind of \
help us towards that goal, because fighting the current is difficult.

In a lot of ways that long-term coordination is really facilitated by this, I'm going \
to call it "on a current of progress". It's not forceful. That's kind of what it \
feels like. The team is driving towards something, it's not random, to be honest with \
you. It's typically a goal that we have in mind, but all of the work that we do is \
just like, "There's a cool idea that I had related to this, so let's just work on \
that." And we end up getting there. It's crazy.


 - Describe your typical workday. Are you on a rolling schedule? Do you guys work on \
a shift? How do you get it all done --and you're down one person now-- how do you get \
it done?

I have no idea. So really, personally, I have a nine-hour a day week schedule that I \
follow every day. So basically I start work and I break it up into two or two-and a \
half hour chunks and I do four of those, take little breaks in between, try to keep \
myself sane, try to throw in a dog walk. Really, I just approach it like I approach \
any other job, one ticket at a time.


 - Do you work in shifts? How do you cover those 24/7? How do you balance the load?

So there's a one week on-call rotation. So right now there are the... gosh, how many \
of us are there? Five? Anyway, so there's one week on-call rotation and that person \
is on 24/7 for the week, Monday to Monday. And then after that, it's pretty much just \
you cover your time zone. Yeah. So the scheduling, it's so loose that I mean really \
as long as you're putting in your eight hours a day, nobody really cares when you do \
that. I choose to have that nine-hour work day because kids really. It's fantastic \
for having a family, but whether you want to jump on at 1:00 in the morning and work \
for six hours, that's fine.


 - OK, so as long as someone's there, and it doesn't have to be you, you can work on \
your own timeframe. Are you guys usually slammed? Is it low-level? Is there a busy \
time for Infra on the whole? Is it like tax season if you're an accountant, or is it \
constantly just 24/7/365?

It's pretty much 24/7/365, but we do definitely have "seasons" as well. We do a one \
week on-call rotation, so somebody's always on, but the scheduling is very relaxed. \
So, it's optional, the hours you'd like to keep. I choose to work a work day because \
of the family and that just kind of fits in nicely actually. Some people may decide \
that, "I'm awake It's 1:00. I can't sleep. I might as well get some work done and I \
do that." And I've certainly done that before. So, yeah, it's pretty whatever and \
we're all kind of, I don't want to call us workaholics because I think that's a bad \
word, but we're all …

 - "Work enthusiasts."

I don't know that I've called them busy seasons as much as busy cycles.


 - What are they? What triggers them?

Typically? Releases. The most tickets coming in is when some project is putting out a \
build or is putting out a release. For a large project release, we'll have a lot of \
tickets sent in because they're utilizing a bunch of resources and stuff gets backed \
up. That's typically it.


 - So whoever is on call during that time period, it's really their responsibility to \
handle: it's not like when Apache Wombat or whatever Project has an issue, it becomes \
"Drew's issue". You're not assigned to a project to facilitate that, it's whomever is \
there will help them however possible, correct?

Yeah. And I think that you said it earlier: everybody that you've talked to says that \
we do it all. I'm going to tell you that we do it all. It's every project from Apache \
Zeppelin to Airflow, whatever the first one is. That's not our work.


 - I don't know if this is actually the case, but I'm curious: is it possible for an \
ASF Infra team member to be an introvert or do you all have to be "client-facing"? I \
know that we don't have an office, and you see people from time to time at ApacheCon, \
but do you have a wall that you can hide behind or do you have to interface with \
people all the time?

Did you go to the end for Lightning Talks?


 - I was not at Lightning Talks at ApacheCon/Vegas, but I heard it had quite an \
activity that happened there, Chris told me about it during his interview, let's put \
it that way. No one said anything to me up until that interview, so I was surprised. \
Fill me in with some more. What do I need to know?

[laughing] So, an introvert and two extroverts that are way too drunk, get up on a \
stage in front of people and proceed to just make fools of themselves for a minute. \
That's pretty much it.


 - I guess I know who the introvert was.

Yeah. So the original plan was to go up there and make thunder noises because that is \
the sound of lightning talking. That was a fun experience. Not one that I would do \
again, I think but it was fun.


 - Let's go back to the daily schedule for a minute. This is always a curiosity for \
me for anyone who's super busy, which is pretty much everyone at Apache: how do you \
keep your workload organized? Your structure for your day is very impressive, I have \
to say, this two-and-a-half hours times four. I think it's fascinating. But your \
actual workload, for example, you get one of these huge releases, how do you manage \
all that?

Okay, so the first part of my day is typically spent organizing my day as awful as \
that sounds. We get so much email that I think that it's literally impossible to read \
it all. I'm pretty sure it's literally impossible to read it all and so much email, \
so the first order of the day is sift through that while you drink your coffee \
because there's no way I can get through that. I catch up on the stuff that the team \
has been talking about, catch up on all the slack channels, look at my tickets, \
prioritize my workload, and that usually takes about an hour. So right at 8:30, I'm \
ready to actually start doing stuff. Then it's usually tickets and then a break. And \
then I don't like to check my email too terribly often. I wish I could three, four \
times a day, because I think it gets me off task, but that's not really something I \
have the luxury of being able to do all the time, so I do have to monitor my Ubuntu \
alerts as emails come in, scanning for anything important. But yeah, it's ticket work \
for the first half of the day, a project work for the back half of the day. And then \
right after lunch, I'll sit down and I'll figure out where I am on my project, and \
then try to move forward from there. Typically, that involves research, but yeah, I \
like to spend the last couple of hours of my day trying to do something. So, \
typically project work, because I don't like doing ticket changes at the end of the \
day.


 - Why is that?

Well, if you're going to nail your foot to the floor, don't be surprised when you can \
only run in circles.


 - I presume when you do ticket work, more things come out of it, too, so it never \
ends.

Yes. Typically, ticket work involves making a change of some sort, to something \
that's actually being used, whereas project work is kind of this nebulous, unused, \
non-production thing.


 - I'm hearing that you need to know a little bit about everything in addition to \
your own areas of expertise. How do you stay ahead of the curve? How do you learn \
about everything that you need to know especially if you don't know what you need to \
know? How do you do that?

I don't think that you do stay ahead of the curve. I really don't. I think that we do \
our best to ride it. Getting ahead is so immensely difficult. This technology \
essentially fractalizes into these many different various facets of high computing.

From virtualizing, networking, programming, you have all of these facets. Nobody can \
really, truly stay ahead of the curve. I mean, holy cow, the guys in the Infra team, \
they are all 12-pound brain-type dudes. They'll go from talking about hardware specs \
to talking about virtualization. They'll bounce around all these different facets of \
technology, and obviously you have strengths and weaknesses, I don't think anybody \
can really stay ahead of the curve at this point, and I feel like it's been a long \
time since anybody has. Technology has just gotten so complicated. We've really tried \
to, without specializing too much ... kind of pick out some of the non-essential \
fluff, the stuff that we don't use. I mean, hypervisors aren't really like super in \
these days. It's all about the Cloud, which is really just an abstract hypervisor, \
but whatever.

So, we don't really have any "machines" anymore, spec-ing out a physical machine is \
not something many of us do very often. It's not part of our job anymore, but that's \
definitely one area of technology that continues to advance as they put out better \
processors and whatnot. Mostly we try to stay ahead on the DevOps side of things \
without focusing too much on this operational infrastructure portion. And that's \
where I came from, this operational infrastructure, the data centers, the servers, \
the hypervisors, making VMs for people. That's what I used to do and now it's a lot \
less of that and a lot more fine-tuning this nebulous system of intermeshed tools \
that I don't fully understand yet.


 - Seeing that you and others can't stay ahead of the curve, can ASF Infrastructure \
actually stay ahead of the demand? I mean, is there any way you aren't constantly in \
a reactive mode of "this new thing we're responding to, or here's a new part." Can \
you get your house in order, or is the house in order?

At the ASF, especially Infra, we do a very good job of listening to our projects \
because we as individuals cannot stay ahead of the curve *and* have every good new \
idea that there ever was to be had. Our community is large, and our community is very \
smart as people and as a group. We have a lot of really excellent ideas that come in \
from tickets and you say, "You know? I think I'm going to look into that today." And \
you look into it. You realize that it has all this potential and suddenly, that's the \
service that we're now using, some things like Travis, which is a third party build \
validator, came to us in that way.

Since I've been here, some of them have come to us via tickets, where it's been, \
"Hey, I saw that GitHub has this new thing, you should check it out." So one of us \
will check it out and we're like, "Dude, that's awesome. We should use that." I think \
that we're constantly being batted in front of the curve by a community, by a \
boots-on-the-ground community that knows what's up. We obviously have our own \
interests and our own passions, but I don't think if left to our own devices, it \
would look quite the same as if Apache TLPs couldn't put in tickets.


 - So it's been one year and one month, but how has Infra changed for you since \
you've come on board or has it changed?

Nope, still terrified. [chuckles]


 - How is the team coping with the ASF's unstoppable growth? We have 45 projects in \
the incubator and there's more than 300 projects out there … there's a geographic \
influence now on demand, an increase in users and committers and projects from China, \
for example. Are there any issues that the team feels like, "Oh boy, we got to deal \
with this?" Is computing an international language, where it doesn't matter where \
you're from or what's happening? Are any shifts going on from the ASF's growth \
impacting you guys beyond more of what you're already doing?

So, typically, all of my jobs really have been this kind of larger, national or \
international affairs so basically, since I was 20. I worked for a really large \
mortgage company, and then I left there and I went to a massive health insurance \
company. Lots of international folks and so, aside from the language barriers, yeah, \
I would say that computing is kind of an international thing. As far as the unlimited \
growth, I don't really know. I'm not sure. That sounds like a question that I would \
definitely advise you to go ask one of the Board members about.

 - "Management."

Right: "Management".


- You had mentioned that you were working on the no-longer-CMS project. Is there \
another project that you're doing? Are you a go-to guy for something?

I don't think I'm the go-to guy for anything really. I just try to pick up whatever \
is there to be picked up. One of the things that I'm working on right now in the \
"demise of CMS" project is this custom builder. I'm still working on it, so it's \
still a work in progress, but the idea is that you'll be able to have a custom build \
environment that would allow you to, from the ASF.YAML file, write a script, do a \
"thing" to create your own custom build environment so that we can really, really \
make a hardcore concerted effort to get off CMS.


 - Why? What was the issue with CMS? Why do we have to migrate from it? What was the \
problem?

To be honest with you, I've never actually used CMS. Fortunately, I have never been \
asked, too. John (former Infra team member John Andrunas) was, but I was not. I was \
spared, by the CMS gods, they shone their countenance upon me. It was pretty awesome. \
From what I understand, it's very cumbersome to use and not very friendly and also \
very old. My understanding is that although it works, there are changes we wish we \
could make to it that we cannot, so it might be time to just move on to something \
newer that maybe works a little bit better for us because our use case has changed.


 - You're still rather new to the role: when you first came on board, what was the \
biggest challenge or surprise? What really opened your eyes?

So, what really opened my eyes was how much of a learning curve there is. Man, that \
was rough.


 - Is that still the case?

Yes, that's still the case. It's just not as bad as it was. Where I was before, I was \
using all of the stuff that we're not using here, all the Enterprise Edition stuff. \
So I came in with a completely different toolbox than what I was handed, so the \
learning curve was massive. I had to relearn how to use the automation software and \
we were all Splunk, so I had to learn the ELK stack stuff and we were Ansible or they \
were Ansible, the Foundation is using Puppet. Just all of it down to the monitoring. \
We didn't have any third party monitoring because, "government": we had this really \
unfathomably convoluted Xymon setup, which was interesting but  we were using RCS for \
everything. So instead of git or subversion or even CVS.


 - Yeah, they're stuck with their legacy, that's for sure.

Yeah. You got text files in there that have got 10,000 versions in RCS. It was like, \
"Oh, my God. What am I going to do with this?"

So, I tried to implement some of the new hotness there. The git workflow, gitflow, \
actually, the exact same kind of thing that we do here.

I had a good understanding of how ASF did business from an operational standpoint. I \
understood it, because I've helped implement it elsewhere, but this is the first time \
I've ever been fully immersed in the river of PRs and tickets and all that other \
stuff, so it's been a hell of a learning curve, like it has really, really kicked my \
butt.

 
 - But you're kicking it back. I mean, you're here. You're making it work.

Oh, yeah, hustle, man. That's really all you've got to have is hustle.


 - As you're describing the way the ASF is and you were talking about some of the \
tools and the orchestration requirements, is this a common thing that Infrastructure \
today in general is heading in that direction, or is it an anomaly not only from your \
personal experience, obviously, but that is an anomaly but from the way you see the \
industry? Does "infrastructure" in general seem to be headed in this direction, or is \
ASF really a unique animal in that way? Do people really have to be more \
jack-of-all-trades?

So the ASF is a unique animal. It is. Typically, people don't have 11 Cloud providers \
and if they do, they've usually got some sort of system underpinning all of that \
whereas ours is tribal knowledge and text documents and we're really trying to get \
this knowledge codified and our technical writer Andrew Wetmore was really doing a \
kick ass job with that. But, yeah, typically an infrastructure team of this \
sophistication would probably have a different set of tools.

It's surprising that we're not using, like Vagrant and Packer and Teraforms which \
abstract the way Cloud providers make VMs. We still make them by hand. It's work, and \
really the only way to be good at that is to know what you're doing and to be \
confident in that particular UI, which is always its own special kind of awkward, \
trying to get used to a new UI, finding out where all the options are, and we're \
doing all these things by hand … everybody just picks up this knowledge through \
osmosis, just by stumbling through these tickets from time to time and it's really \
crazy to see sometime how much process there is and how little documentation there \
is. So I'm really happy to have our documentation writer on board.


 - That's Andrew, right? Andrew Wetmore is working on the documentation?

Oh, yeah. Yep, and he's doing a really good job, helping us sort it out.


 - And he hasn't left screaming and running either, so that's a good sign. It's a lot \
of work.

That's true. Yeah. It is. It is a lot of work and he has not left running, but he is \
a really chill dude.

Our infrastructure is unique in that we do all of the things that are kind of \
necessary. There really isn't too much of a go-to guy for any of this stuff. If \
there's a problem in the build system, you take care of it. If there's a problem with \
a Web server, you take care of it. That's where the autonomous nature of Infra comes \
in. If there's a problem, you just take care of it. You have these tools, you know \
how to do it, you just do it.


 - How do you know that someone's not fixing it on their own at the same time? If \
something's broken, you're like, "Hey, this is broken. I'm dealing with it" or \
something else?

Just Slack, typically. I always check.


 - Yeah. Okay, what's your favorite part of the job?

Oh, gosh. My favorite part of the job is not feeling icky at the end of the day. I've \
worked for some companies that kind of made me feel a little ick in their mission. So \
one of the stories that my wife likes to tell is that I quit [MEDICAL INSURANCE \
COMPANY] because I disagreed with them as a company and I paid $5,000 to do so. But \
yeah, so I worked in the mortgage industry a little while shortly after the housing \
collapsed and I just thought about it. It was like, "Man, I really don't feel good \
about this job anymore." And then I moved to [REDACTED], which was arguably a bad \
move.

 - Big Health.

I was there for like 11 months. I signed a contract, I got a sign-on bonus, I moved \
to get there, so the stipulation was I stayed a year. I stayed 11 months and three \
weeks and I quit. I couldn't take it anymore. I'm just like, "I'm not doing this. I'm \
not doing this."

I was walking on an image parser for the Affordable Care Act pipeline, which was \
awful. They were still implementing it. This was 2012, 2013.

It was really bad. So after that, I went to NASA and I finally felt good about what I \
was doing and to have made a move where, again, I agree ethically and morally with \
what we're doing. I mean, it really is noble work, not specifically the work that I \
do, but the work that the people that I support do, and so, by proxy, my work is \
also. 

At Apache, we have volunteers that dedicate hours of their life to these projects \
that we distribute freely because it really does make the world a better place. I \
mean, where would the world be without HTTPd?


 - What you just said right now has totally touched me. I feel like I'm ready to \
burst into tears, that's amazing. Really: I mean, wow. That's from the heart. I \
totally get you about doing things for people you don't believe in. That's so hard.

That sucks so much.


 - I totally get it and you're right. This is such a crazy group. It should not work \
and they do and it's incredible: 21 years of this. It's amazing.

Yeah, it's like trying to watch an eight-legged horse run.


 - [laughing] A what?!

An eight-legged horse. Somehow twice as fast, but you have no idea how it's working. \
Or which direction it's going to go.


 - I can't stop laughing over the visual of that.

It's actually really funny because I'm a huge classics and mythology nerd. Technology \
was not my first choice in careers. I wanted to be a Latin teacher.


 - I love this. These are the backstories that everyone wants to know. You want to be \
a Latin teacher?!

I wanted to be a Latin teacher, yeah. I did Latin from freshman year in high school \
until I decided that college wasn't for me. So sophomore year, I took six years of \
Latin and it is really awesome what learning Latin does for your programming ability \
because it's surprisingly similar to learning to code. But yeah, I make a lot of \
really, really stupid classics and mythlogy puns. So my daughter, her nickname is \
actually Livy, in reference to the famous historian, which is not something a lot of \
people get, but that's okay, it makes me chuckle. And Odin had an eight-legged horse \
that was twice as fast as the other horses, supposedly really fast because it had \
twice as many legs.


 - It's interesting with your career, you've worked at places that are big names and \
people would be very impressed with that, but you're stressing that just because it's \
a big name or big group, it's not what it's all cracked up to be. What are you most \
proud of with your career, your Infra career, with Infra as a whole? What makes you \
say "yay"?

To be honest, becoming an Apache Member was pretty freaking awesome. When I got here, \
when I start a new job, I always try to set a goal for that job. Sometimes I get it \
and sometimes I don't, and sometimes I don't realize how hard it is to actually do \
what I'm setting out to do when I start. My goal at NASA was to win a silver Snoopy, \
but that was never going to happen.


 - Silver Snoopy? What's that?

That's an award given by astronauts to engineers. They don't typically give that to \
IT folks, but I didn't know at that time. 

But here, it was to kind of become a Member and really to be accepted. I feel like \
I'm doing okay on that. That's pretty cool. That's going along really well.


 - You fast tracked. I mean, if you've been here for 13 months and you're in as a \
Member, that's pretty cool. That's good timing, good performance on you.

Well, thank you. I have no idea of how well or badly I am doing. I'm just doing \
things in the hope that they affect the universe in a positive way.


 - You're there, we couldn't do it without you.

That's excellent. Thank you.


 - You got to pat yourself on the back for the work that you're doing, because with \
our community, you know if you weren't doing it, you'd hear it. People would grump \
about it.

That's true. That's very true. But again, this is a mindset that's really prevalent \
in IT is the Tetris mindset where when you're playing Tetris, you fill up a row and \
it disappears. As such, those are your successes. 

The Tetris mindset really is being bogged down by the monument to failure that you've \
built because really, when you're playing Tetris, that's what you're looking at is \
the monument of your failure, places you haven't quite gotten the row completed yet \
and shifted out of your bucket. And it's really easy to succumb to that mindset, \
especially in a place like this.

And I really, really enjoy the fact that the Apache Community is they seem eager to \
call out wins for other people and that is an awesome attitude for a community. It's \
something I've not experienced a whole lot of being called out for successes. I think \
that on the whole, the community and being embraced by the community has really kind \
of helped me not fall into that funk, that Tetris mindset just doesn't seem to be \
prevalent in this community, which is nice.


 - Do you think that puts people in a kind of "I'm not good enough" mindset because \
there's not a reward? You're young enough to be part of that community that likes or \
is accustomed to getting trophies for showing up. Apache doesn't allow that. It's \
nice for you to show up, but you're not going to be rewarded. Do you think there's an \
impact with that?

I was on a soccer team once and I did get a participation trophy. You know what? I \
couldn't even tell you what the name of that soccer team was because I didn't want to \
play soccer. So, really, I think that if you're coming to The Apache Software \
Foundation, you're not doing it for the participation trophy, you're doing it because \
you want to, so the reward doesn't matter. You're doing it because you want to. It's \
really weird to be surrounded by people who are motivated by nothing other than the \
fact that they want to be here doing this.

And it's refreshing and I love it. I do.


 - I love hearing that, that's great. Here come the somewhat personal questions: \
there's just a few of them. Chris was laughing hard when I was asking them; I don't \
know if you read the full Chris interview, but it's always interesting to hear what \
they have to say. So ... how would your co-workers describe you?

Less cool than my wife.


 - What is your greatest piece of advice... what would you tell aspiring infra \
people, sysadmins, people like yourself, what would you give them for work advice or \
career advice or life advice: what would you say?

Oof, that's tough. I guess I would have to say that if at the end of the day you \
don't feel like your job is worth it, it's probably not. 

So, if you're going to do something, make it worth it. That's my advice.


 - If you had a magic wand, what would you see happen with ASF Infra?

What would I see happen? Well, obviously bonuses and pay raises, but I have no idea. \
If I had a magic wand, I'd probably turn it over to someone who I thought could make \
the wish better than I could, but yeah, I have no idea.


 - What else do we need to know that I haven't asked?

Oh, gosh. So many things, but none of them would make sense out of the context of \
this particular conversation. To be honest, I'm still under the impression that \
everybody knows more about this than I do still, so I don't know.



Drew is based in Tennessee on UTC -5. His favorite thing to drink during the workday \
is a black coffee prepared using a French press or the pour-over method.

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