About me

Creative Stuff

Music, art, code and misc.

Welcome to my website!

About me

I look like this, more or less.



I'm Zara.

I'm a professional software developer.

I make a lot of things, in various media, so I'm hoping this website can serve as a hub. :) I find I never keep up with blogs when I try to start them, so here goes the hundredth try!
This will also summarize my professional experience, for the curious. It's pretty dry. If you wish to contact me, the best email to use is this one .

I'm generally on freenode as Zara and/or zara_the_lemur__.





Professional Experience and Skills



I am a core reviewer in the OpenStack community for StoryBoard, a task-tracker designed for cross-project work. It's over here!

I have been working for Codethink Ltd for almost 3 years. I am currently resourced to work on a proprietary Java codebase, so my stackalytics etc are sporadic over the most recent cycle.

I have experience with:

OpenStack

I am active in the community, and am familiar with the processes, terminology, and many of the tools. Kendall Nelson, Adam Coldrick and myself have a talk planned for the Boston summit!


As a core reviewer on the StoryBoard project, part of the OpenStack project's infrastructure, I have gained a working knowledge of the the infrastructure configuration and documentation, along with cross-project initiatives. I have a high-level view of how OpenStack core services fit together, along with the roles of many other projects, and I have an understanding of OpenStack governance. I'm also used to standing up in front of a room full of people and talking about our work, all over the world...

* In October 2015, I co-moderated a task-tracking infrastructure session in Tokyo with Thierry Carrez (ttx) at the Mitaka summit.
* I co-led the Newton task-tracking infrastructure session in April 2016, Austin, Texas, with Adam Coldrick (SotK) and Craige McWhirter (craige).
* In October 2016, Adam and I co-led the Ocata task-tracking infrastructure session in Barcelona.

I was previously responsible for announcing StoryBoard news, so have been interviewed in the OpenStack SuperUser magazine about it a couple of times (links on the right). I also set up the original StoryBoard Blog infra, though these days it's hosted on SotK's server, where it's much happier. StoryBoard is continuously delivered, so I am meticulous about testing and reviewing patches, to ensure that the infrastructure production instance always functions as expected.

I also offer input on UI and UX for works in progress and respond to our users. I prefer editing existing interfaces to creating interfaces from scratch; I'm generally more motivated to fix bugs than make new features.

Linux

Common tools, the shell, the FHS... I don't really know what to say since I mostly work on Linux and no longer know what I know. I'm most familiar with Debian and Ubuntu, with some experience with Fedora.

Git

I use Git daily, and understand how Git itself stores information in trees, blobs and commit objects. I'm familiar with most git commands by now, including some 'plumbing' commands (eg: `git cat-file` for reading git objects) and am familiar with common flags. I have written git hooks, including one to automate building documentation with Sphinx. I also have some familiarity with tig, for more finegrained history searches, though I'm not proficient with it yet. I use git on both Linux and Windows.

Gerrit

Gerrit's great! I use it frequently for code review, and have written scripts that use the API. (One reason I'm so fond of Gerrit is that the python gerritlib API made it easy to do this back when I knew almost no python) I've helped test the OpenStack infrastructure staging instance in the past. I'm currently learning how gerrit's NoteDB uses git notes to record review information in git repositories, to help develop a Python NoteDB API.

Python

For professional work, I mainly use python for scripting; there are example tutorial scripts I wrote for others here. Those are commented versions of the scripts I made to help with the OpenStack infrastructure team's September 2016 bugsquash.

I like python, as it pushes people to write code that is easy to understand; communication matters to me. There are also libraries for everything.

I'm learning python in more depth at the moment, so that I can feel more comfortable with frequently-used libraries, and classes and object-oriented design more generally; you can follow my progress on Github.

Java

I use Java on my current project at work. I have some familiarity with Eclipse, JavaFX and Maven.

Virtual Machines

I use Virtualbox on a daily basis, and have used KVM + Virtmanager in the past-- and of course OpenStack's Horizon interface!

HTML, CSS and Bootstrap (eg: this website)


SQL, MySQL, PostgreSQL

StoryBoard uses a MySQL database, and in the past I have done some work to support PostgreSQL also. Aside from commandline SQL queries for both database backends, I have experience using alembic to generate database migration scripts, and getting sqlalchemy to work with both mysql and PostgreSQL (basically just casting a billion enums).

Docker

I have some experience with docker administration, including editing dockerfiles, running containers, working inside them, and other basic Docker commands, for proof-of-concept R&D things.

UI design


IRC, mailing lists, etherpads, and other communication tools


C

This was the first programming language I learned, so it's vaguely familiar to me, especially as Python is based on C.

Perl

I started learning perl a little while ago, in an effort to translate a Perl codebase into Python. So now I know the difference between $_, $_[0] and $1 (along with `.` `..` and `...`). I can't yet write Perl; I can just read (a little of) it.

Setting up computers

I built my own PC, partitioned the drives and installed the operating systems. That doesn't really fit in here, but I'm noting it anyway, because I've always wanted to do it. :)

Misc: markdown, Pygame, Github, npm, software licenses, sphinx, pelican, UE4 basics, documentation, make, gcc, ssh, scp, vim, ubuntu, debian, fedora, Apache, cgit, bash/shell scripts, Jira, Confluence, Jenkins, Artifactory, Blender


And technically, I've been working in AngularJS for over a year-- but I still feel like I just hack. (I looked at Angular 2 recently, and preferred it; I got a simple single-page app working fairly quickly-- but packaging was beyond me. angular-cli has since been recommended to me for that, so I intend to try it sometime.)


Before StoryBoard, I mainly worked on systems engineering, using a framework to write build and install instructions for custom operating systems.


I have experience drafting reports and other written materials. I have helped to train interns at my current workplace, and I enjoy working publicly in teams.





Academic History


* B.A. (Hons) Philosophy, 2:1, The University of Manchester


Earlier Qualifications

* A Levels: A*, A*, A in English Literature; Drama and Theatre Studies; English Language

* AS Levels: AA in Mathematics; Sociology


* GCSEs: A*A*A*A*AAABC in English Language; English Literature; French; Religious Studies; Mathematics; Science1; Science2; Drama and Theatre Studies; Art



















I made this website using Bootstrap