Introduction

The best place to start for more info on my open source contributions is a Github advanced search by author:

• GITHUB issue tracker items opened by me

• GITLAB issues opened by me

Gitlab Long Standing Item

The mysteries of open source software development are highlighted by this issue below, which I opened in February 2020. It is still open in March 2024, and has had numerous comments and citations over the last 4 years.

Unknown Error pulling private image from Gitlab Container Registry

Full Details: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/205936

Many things in the software and DevOps Space can become huge rabbit-holes, where sometimes the only effective solution is to use another providers offering short-term (often long-term!) or sometimes an older version of some tool etc.

This extremely hard to debug issue above, related to Gitlab Container Registry is a perfect example of the complexity of different implemenations of tooling that are supposed to provide identical features as a competitors offering. In this case, the quay.io offering versus Gitlab offering have a notable difference in behavior, despite claiming to provide the same offering.

Due to my deep experience working with Docker containers and Kubernetes, I was likely the first person to come across this issue, and am proud to have been the first to report it to the Gitlab team and open source community.

Ubuntu, OpenSolaris, OpenIndiana

Many years ago, I was an early adopter and tester of the Ubuntu Linux Desktop distribution. And later on Ubuntu Server. At the time I was still relatively new to Unix-like operating systems, so my contributions were pretty small at the time.

I contributed to early Ubuntu Forums and Ubuntu wiki pages.

Back then I was mostly interested topics such as PPA packaging and getting a developer system configured properly for doing various development tasks.

Later on in my career as I became interested in File Systems, and especially ZFS, I was an early user of OpenIndiana¹ in productions environments because it had a native and stable ZFS integration, long before the ZFS On Linux project became stable and useable.

OpenIndiana became a fork of OpenSolaris, when OpenSolaris team stopped making source code contributions available to the wider open source community. They evidently stopped because of the Sun Microsystems aquisition by Oracle Corp. Thus I was essentially forced to adopt the new fledgling OpenIndiana OS to keep things running smooth in the data-center.