Governance/ElectionsSpring2012/John Dickinson

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

Since the last elections, I have focused on two things: improving the swift codebase and promoting the swift ecosystem. Swift has added many valuable new features in the last six months, and the community has grown greatly. More and more companies are choosing to use swift to solve their storage needs.

Specifically, I have been active at conferences and in meetup groups telling other about swift. I have been active in IRC helping troubleshoot and setup swift clusters. I have contributed features, bug fixes, and reviews to the codebase.

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

The biggest problem facing swift is not technical. The biggest issue is expanding the developer community, both for the core project and for the client ecosystem. Swift is attracting more developers, and I'm excited about the commitments companies have made to future swift development efforts.

There are still technical challenges to be solved, though. One of the most requested features for swift is the ability to support a disperse logical cluster. Doing this at scale is hard, but it is an important issue that will need to be solved.

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

I am part of the team that originally wrote swift, and I have been active in the Openstack community since its inception. I work at Rackspace, and swift is the basis for Rackspace's Cloud Files product. Swift's ability to grow and foster and ecosystem is vital to the success of Cloud Files.

How to find me or learn more about me

I'm "notmyname" on freenode IRC. Also, I have many points of contact on http://not.mn/