Next to escaping the snow currently blanketing New England, Matthew Miller is most excited about visiting SCALE 13x and speaking at the event. Matthew will be speaking on SCALE 13x Sunday at 4:30 on "Fedora.next: Bringing Change to a Classic Distro (without too much kicking and screaming)." The SCALE Team caught up with Matthew to ask him about his presentation.
Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your background?
A: Absolutely! I'm Matthew Miller, and currently I have the privilege of being the Fedora Project leader. Before that, I worked at Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences as a systems architect and, because I can't leave well enough alone, agile/devops rabble-rouser. And before that, I was at Boston University's central IT department, where I worked on our bespoke BU Linux distribution. In some ways, I'm still a sysadmin at heart, but I try to listen and understand the mysterious ways of software developers, end users, and everyone else in the free and open software ecosystem.
Q: You're giving a talk on Fedora.next: Bringing Change to a Classic Distro (without too much kicking and screaming). Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an idea of what we might expect?
A: Sure. Fedora is, of course, one of the big community Linux distributions, with a ten-year history. As we got to that anniversary, it was time to look at what we'd done right, what we'd done wrong, what we could do better, and what could or should just be different. We had some years with disturbing dips in some of our metrics, and a lot of low morale — even though by a lot of other measures we were continuing to be _awesome_. Some of us had some ideas for improvements, and this talk is a little bit about what those are, and a lot about lessons learned in the process of going from ideas to reality, and changing
areas that needed it without losing the good parts, including Fedora's core values and vibrant community.
Q: Is this your first visit to SCALE? If so, what are your expectations? If not, can you give us your impressions of the event?
A: It is my first visit. I won't lie — right now, I'm probably _most_ excited about escaping the snow under which my Boston-area house is buried. But a close, close second: I'm excited by the enthusiastic community I see around this event, and the schedule of talks looks like it'll be hard to choose where to be at any given time.
Q: Is your talk aimed mostly at Fedora users and community members? Are fans of other distributions welcome?
A: I hope to see an audience with backgrounds in many different distributions, so I can share our lessons and learn from yours. There's a lot of awesome in the Linux community and we can all benefit from collaboration!
[SCALE Team interview by Larry Cafiero]