Openness, Adoption, Continuity: That’s the mantra of three words MariaDB Foundation uses to describe its mission. At the core of Openness are contributions of code to MariaDB Server. The good news: We are now putting more resources into contributions, by hiring Andrew “LinuxJedi” Hutchings as Chief Contribution Officer, starting today Monday 15 Aug 2022.
A senior position
As you can see already from Andrew’s title, it’s a senior position. When we opened up the position, we were fully aware that only a handful of candidates can fulfil our requirements of experience on the code base. We are excited that we were lucky enough to attract Andrew, who knows the code base inside out.
Based on his earlier career stops (once at MySQL AB, twice at MariaDB Corporation), many of us have also worked closely with him in the past. Both Andrew and MariaDB Foundation know what we’re in for, and we are looking forward to LinuxJedi hitting the ground running.
Metrics: Contributions and backlog
The metrics by which we are looking at how we are doing come in two flavours: Work done over time, and work remaining. Early June, we spoke about our plans to develop and publish stats on the origin of lines of code and change sets accepted in MariaDB Server. As for “work remaining”, we are happy to note that we are getting more contributions – but in turn, this has caused our backlog to again grow over 100 Pull Requests. This is a core reason why we put our limited resources so much into the basket of handling contributions.
You’ll be hearing from Andrew
Andrew will be getting in contact with contributors large and small, both those in the waiting list for their PRs to be dealt with, and those whose recent contributions have already made it to the code base.
Other things to come
In the process, we will also be looking at how to make it easier to contribute, as well as publishing a wish list of what type of contributions we in the Foundation are most interested in. Stay tuned!