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The Linux Foundation Supports Asian Communities

By Blog, LF Edge, Linux Foundation News

The Linux Foundation and its communities are deeply concerned about the rise in attacks against Asian Americans and condemn this violence. It is devastating to hear over and over again of the attacks and vitriol against Asian communities, which have increased substantially during the pandemic.

We stand in support with all those that have experienced this hate, and to the families of those who have been killed as a result. Racism, intolerance and inequality have no place in the world, our country, the tech industry or in open source communities.

We firmly believe that we are all at our best when we work together, treat each other with respect and equality and without hate or vitriol.

This blog originally ran on the Linux Foundation website.

Open Horizon Mentorships with LFX

By Blog, Linux Foundation News, Open Horizon

Joe Pearson, Open Horizon Chair of the Technical Steering Committee and Edge Computing and Technology Strategist at IBM

Late this summer, a representative from the Linux Foundation’s LFX Mentorship program attended the LF Edge Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) bi-weekly meeting and gave a presentation about their mentorship program.  The program potentially gives open-source projects a turn-key mentorship program with minimal work needed to get it started, which sounded great to me!  At the end of the presentation, they offered to speak to each project’s leadership teams if they would like to learn more.

The Open Horizon project eagerly accepted the offer, since we had plenty of opportunities for interesting work and few volunteers. We were told that once we began accepting applications, we would be flooded with more than enough well-qualified mentee candidates.

Easy onboarding experience

The project sign-up process was ridiculously easy. We filled out the forms and specified that we wanted to see each candidate’s CV/resume, a link to their GitHub repo, and a cover letter explaining in a single paragraph why they wanted to be a mentee of our project.

Incredible applicant pool

The applications began to come in. At first two (pretty easy to handle), then two more (great!), then four more (OK, this is quite a few). Within two weeks, we had over 15! By the end of our open application period, we had over 30 which was more than enough to handle. In fact, we ended up identifying both a primary and a secondary applicant for each open slot in our initial fall term.

Choosing our mentors

To select our project’s mentors, we looked for maintainers in our project with a natural teaching ability, approachability, maturity, and availability. We also assembled a pool of potential items for our mentees to work on. The four mentors selected were:

  • David Booz (Dave) – Chief Architect and founder of the project, Chair of the Agent Working Group, and a member of the team from the start almost six years ago. Dave understands the project code from both the macro level as well as the specific details about how the client software — the Agent — functions.
  • Liang Wang (Los) – Technology Advocate and Chair of the China Manufacturing Special Interest Group (SIG). Los is building up the SIG, overseeing translation of the project materials, and creating a community around manufacturing and industry 4.0 use cases.
  • Troy Fine – Software Engineer and Chair of the Developer Examples Working Group. Troy oversees creation and maintenance of all code and services that demonstrate all project solution functionality from the simple to the complex.
  • Joseph Pearson (Joe) – Project Chair and Chair of the Documentation Working Group. Joe ensures that people looking to use Open Horizon, develop it, extend or port it, and to build solutions with it have the information they need.

Choosing our mentees

We created a set of filtering criteria to shorten the list down to candidates who were not only qualified, but also exhibited a natural curiosity about our project, and were eager to get started. We also approximately matched the geographic location of the candidates as well as their linguistic abilities.

The mentors then interviewed those candidates on the short list over Slack, email, and Zoom or WebEx. It was not an easy task, and we wish that we could have accepted double our limit of four mentees.

For the work the mentees would be completing, the mentors identified tasks that fit the candidate’s natural abilities and strengths and yet would stretch them a bit. We also aimed for tasks that could be completed within the timeframe of the fall term.

Anukriti Jain

Dave selected Anukriti Jain as the mentee for his Working Group. Anukriti is a Computer Science Engineering student in the last year of her undergraduate program. She is based in India.

Han Gao

Los chose Han Gao as mentee. Han Gao is pursuing his doctorate in the Netherlands.  His goals are:

*  Become an effective contributor to the Open Horizon project with a deep understanding at the code level around its architecture and key policy-based management flow.

*  Contribute by translating Open Horizon technical documentation into Chinese, as well as creating new hands-on guidance for getting started with an end-to-end example.

*  Broaden his view and build insight across other LF Edge projects.

Clement NG

Troy went with Clement Ng for the Examples Working Group. Clement, like Troy, is based on the US west coast.

Edidiong Etuk

Joe tapped Edidiong Etuk to assist with the Documentation Working Group. Eddie is from Nigeria and is pursuing a degree in Computer Science.  He has natural leadership qualities and is an eager self-starter with a gift for intuition.

Lessons learned from the mentorship program

Now that we’re about 2/3 of the way through the fall term, we have gained some perspective through the benefit of hindsight.  It turns out that four mentees is just about the right number for our small project to handle.

The tasks have been adjusted to ensure that each mentee can complete the work in the allotted time without too much stress.  And several of them have already gained such a sense of belonging and ownership that they plan to continue working with the project after their mentorship term is complete.  We highly recommend that other projects take advantage of this opportunity.

For more details about Open Horizon, click here. Stay tuned here for updates about the next mentorship.

Demand for DevOps Talent

By Blog, Linux Foundation News, Trend

A few years ago, the demand for open source DevOps talent was relatively low. But this year, there has been a massive shift in the hiring pattern. Companies need developers with these skills who can not only maintain the performance of legacy workloads but also deliver agile and responsive operations for digital transformation.

According to The Linux Foundation’s 2020 Open Source Jobs Report, which examines demand for open source talent and trends amongst open source professionals, DevOps is currently in high demand and there are no signs of slowing down.

DevOps is the top role hiring managers are looking to fill (65% are looking to hire DevOps talent), moving demand for developers to second (59%) for the first time in this report’s history. 74% of employers are now offering to pay for employee certifications, up from 55% in 2018, 47% in 2017, and only 34% in 2016.

Additionally, companies have increased their recruitment of open source technology talent while offering educational opportunities for existing staff to fill skills gaps.

Companies and organizations continue to increase their recruitment of open source technology talent while offering increased educational opportunities for existing staff to fill skills gaps. 93% of hiring managers report difficulty finding open source talent, and 63% say their organizations have begun to support open source projects with code or other resources for the explicit reason of recruiting individuals with those software skills, a significant jump from the 48% who stated this in 2018.

Other key findings from the 2020 Open Source Jobs Report include:

  • Hiring is down, but not out, due to COVID-19: Despite the pandemic and economic slowdown, 37% of hiring managers say they will be hiring more skilled IT professionals in the next six months.
  • Online training gains popularity during the COVID-19 era: A full 80% of employers now report that they provide online training courses for employees to learn open-source software, up from 66% two years ago.
  • Certifications grow in importance: 52% of hiring managers are more likely to hire someone with a certification, up from 47% two years ago.
  • Cloud technology is hot: In terms of knowledge domains, hiring managers report knowledge of open cloud technologies has the most significant impact, with 70% being more likely to hire a pro with these skills, up from 66% in 2018.

 The full 2020 Open Source Jobs Report is available to download for free here.