Latest revision as of 23:32, 17 February 2013

Devin Carlen (Founder, Nebula Inc)

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I am Devin Carlen, the current PTL and original creator of the Horizon project and current policy board member. I was also a founding engineer of Nova prior to the creation of OpenStack. I led the Horizon project through the first ever OpenStack core incubation process and have been providing high level guidance and direction to the project ever since.

1. Since the last elections, what areas have you focused on and what contributions have you made in order to improve your project?

The primary goal has been improving the usability, visual design, and overall user experience while providing formal support for every OpenStack project. Since Horizon faces the challenge of being the integration point of all projects in the OpenStack umbrella, as the number of projects grow it's important to have a common user experience throughout and to empower other developers in the community to contribute support for the projects and features directly to Horizon. To that end, we created a Human Interactions Guidelines document (https://github.com/4P/Horizon-HIG) to create a common visual language for anyone adding features to use to answers questions about design metaphors and decisions. We used the help of professional UX designers as well as documentation resources across the community.

2. What are the most pressing/important issues facing your project?

Horizon is the official face of OpenStack. Many people who first experiment with OpenStack using DevStack or some other installer will typically see Horizon before they see any other project. It is also the project that powers the front end to TryStack (https://trystack.org/). This means it is the job of the Horizon team to ensure that the first interaction with the OpenStack user interface is a positive one. There are many examples in our industry of user interfaces driving adoption of technologies and OpenStack is no different. Providing a great user experience is an important step in the path to mainstream adoption.

3. What is your relationship to OpenStack & why is its success important to you and/or your company?

I was a founding engineer of Nova at NASA and Anso Labs prior to the creation of OpenStack and am the current founder and VP of Engineering of Nebula, Inc. Our core mission is to develop enterprise private cloud appliances based on OpenStack, so seeing OpenStack continue to grow and prosper is essential to the ongoing existence and success of our company.