Interns

So... If you have to find interns, what would you be looking for...

In my case:

• Passion for open source
• English, at a good level
• Technical knowledge at a certain level
• Something more that I just can't define

I was told as a student - eons ago - that you can have to types of university studies that are worth looking for:
- The first one has high marks, they are good students, you know they can learn and do academic things.
- The second one is the collaborative one. They work, they do more things than just studying, they are open to the world, work in teams.

I like both. I understand that every team need to have a mix of different people, and profiles, be balanced. I wonder what is the best for Red Hat. So I want to see their grades so far, I want to know how they work with people, and I want to see if they are good programming. I've asked them to bring a small program in a language that they don't normally use but they will need in the project, Ruby and Ruby on Rails.

And, what do you ask them? I haven't realized how complex is to do the right questions in a short interview to know them.

We are so close to start now...

The starting point

What is our starting point?

Imagine you want to collaborate in an open source project. It should be easy, you think, just go there and program, but in fact, there are some soft rules to follow:

- First: you need resources. So we have started to work with the University of Seville to find people interested in Open Source, in cloud, and in working with us for an internship. Amazingly, we won't be alone, at least 3 companies will be collaborating.
- Second: a good value proposition,  I was going to recommend one of the books I am reading, but I have discovered that although the first book on business models was using licenses from creative commons for charts and slides, and thus was perfect to share, this one is not, so I don't recommend it any more...
- Third: we need some infrastructure, a small one, just enough to run RHEV so it can be managed. Working on that
- Fourth: whatever is needed to make the development, TDD (test framework), CI (Maven and/or Jenkins), a compiler,.
- Fifth: let's not reinvent the wheel... what open source components can be used which license is compatible with ManageIQ? The license should be compatible and no problem created beacuse of it. And architectural should be compatible too...
- Sixth: Documentation: where should we store documentation? Wiki style?

So I've been investigating and:
- Trello is a good tool to keep requirements and make them go through a Kanban process. Building a project there.
- Github is needed, upstream uses it already, so aligning is the sensible thing to do. We could think of some tool like Gerrit for code approval, but due to the small team we are, it wouldn't make sense to have an installation for gerrit onsite. We need to evaluate gerrithub as an interface to github, any way
- We are not mandating anything to code, as long as it works :D

Starting point

Back to the future

A few years ago I was having the best time of my life at work. I was doing standardization at OMA, working in R&D on charging and billing at Vodafone, travelling around the world, singing every morning.

For different reasons, I decided to move on. Let's say that I was comfortable with my work but the impact was somehow tiny, just pats in the back, and pay "could be better", so I was impelled to change work. A pity, as I believed - and still believe - that I was making a difference.

I've been missing that since I left, enjoying my new work, learning new things, and thinking how could I have done the work better, and created new opportunities for me and for the company.

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to do it again. I am currently working with a couple of universities to see if we can develop, in the best of the R&D world, a new functionality into the ManageIQ Open Source product. 

Coming back to charging and billing, with universities, researching new ways of gather and present information in the cloud, developing something real and that can make a change.

 I will use this blog to show what we are doing and, in the best of the open source world, gather inputs and ideas to implement

This is so good :D

Sergio