[arch-devops] Iraklis Akritas Application for Junior DevOps

[LambdaClan]

Dear Arch Linux developers, this pull request aims to alleviate the long 
ongoing issue #0 "we need more manpower in terms of working on our 
tools, infrastructure and difficult problems".

-----BEGIN APPLICATION BLOCK-----

INTRO

My name is Iraklis (Ira) Akritas also known as lambdaclan up on the 
IRC/Matrix/Aur lands and with svenstaro's consent and support I would 
like to apply for Junior DevOps engineer. I normally hangout in the 
#archlinux-devops and #archlinux-projects channels. I have been an 
active contributor to Arch Linux DevOps team [0] for a few months now 
and I have been thoroughly enjoying tinkering with new tech to tackle 
various issues and the challenge it brings. I was pleasantly surprised 
that my work has been noticed to the extend of being asked to prepare 
this very application to officially join the team.

I don't want to be over dramatic but this will be a big personal 
milestone if successful. Linux and the Open Source movement have 
literally changed my life and shaped my core beliefs. It has been a long 
term goal of mine to get involved with any of my favorite distros, 
desktop environments or tools that are part of my daily work in order to 
give back to the community that has offered me so much.

PROFILE

I like to describe myself as a software engineer for software engineers. 
I manage and automate the computers that run the applications developers 
make.

Mantra: I believe repetitive work should not be repeated, it should be 
automated. This reduces human error and saves production time.

In a nutshell:

- Born and raised in Limassol, Cyprus

- Currently living in Tokyo working as a Senior DevOps engineer

- Worked in many countries including UK, Germany, France and now Japan

- Can speak/read Greek, English, Japanese and some French

- Have a diverse background since I started as a 3D artist/animator and 
eventually became an engineer

As a 3D artist and animator I started delving into the programming world 
to automate many of the laborious tasks I had to do on a daily basis and 
were in the form of plugins for various DCC applications. Over time, I 
realized that I enjoyed automating tasks and particularly making others 
more productive. Here is a quick overview of my professional progression:

3D Aritst/Animator
│   Blender
│   Maya
│   3ds Max
│   Houdini
│   SketchUp
Games Programmer
│   C
│   C++
│   C#
│   Unreal Engine
│   Unity
│   3D Graphics
│   AI
Technical Artist
│   Python
│   Ruby
│   Qt
│   DCC APIs
Tools Engineer
│   Map Editors
│   Pipeline Development
System Administrator
│   Managing Servers
│   Living in the Terminal
│   Virtualization
DevOps Engineer
│   IaC (Terraform, AWS CDK)
│   CI/CD (Jenkins, GitLab, GitHub)
│   Containers (Docker, Podman)
│   Configuration Management (Ansible, Vagrant, Packer)
│   Monitoring (Elastic, Prometheus, Grafana)
│   Cloud Providers (AWS)

Lately I have taken a great interest in functional programming and 
especially Haskell not only because is pure but also because of the way 
it makes you think in terms of how to solve a problem. I feel learning 
Haskell is making me a better engineer. In the future I would like to be 
able to use Haskell as part of my toolset for automation scripts. Along 
with Haskell I am also tinkering with Rust and Go since they are quite 
popular in the DevOps world.

Note: my user name is a play on the Haskell logo which also happens to 
be Greek.

LINUX EXPERIENCE

I have been a Linux user for the past 10 years and an Arch Linux user 
for roughly half of that time. I was introduced to Linux by a colleague 
and as a privacy conspicuous person I was immediately hooked. I have 
experience with Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Debian, Fedora and OpenSUSE. I chose 
Arch Linux as my daily driver because I do like minimalism and want to 
be in full control of how my machine is setup. I really enjoy checking 
out the latest and greatest in the Linux world and I always spin up 
virtual environments to see how other distros progress. Lately I have 
been looking into NixOS and nix as it is built from purely functional 
specifications which captured my interest.

OPEN SOURCE CONTRIBUTIONS

I have contributed in many ways to various projects including 
development, translation, technical documentation and support on the 
various forums and reddit. Most recently I have been contributing to Rez 
[1] a cross platform package manager via code contributions [2] as well 
as discussions [3] and of course Arch Linux [4]. My contributions to 
Arch Linux started when I decided to take my involvement with the FOSS 
community more seriously meaning that I wanted to start having a track 
record of my contributions. All my past contributions have been off the 
record with one off comments or commits with older accounts. I do not 
currently maintain any AUR packages but I have an account [5] where I 
sometimes help out with out of date flags. I am planning though to add a 
few of my local packages to AUR as they might be useful to other members 
of the community.

PROUD MOMENTS

- Helped a startup company to completely switch from proprietary 
Autodesk Maya application to Blender as their internal DCC application. 
I was responsible for training the team and developing automation 
scripts as part of the pipeline.
- Always promote open source applications and tools over proprietary 
solutions and many times my recommendations have been accepted.
- Throughout my different jobs I have introduced various development 
techniques such as code reviews, pair programming and learning sessions 
to help developers improve their skills.
- Trained and mentored many interns and beginner developers.

HOW CAN I HELP?

I am a problem solver and not afraid to take on tasks regardless of how 
challenging they may be. Although this is volunteer based work I take my 
responsibilities very seriously and always strive to complete them to 
the best of my ability. I always take constructive criticism with 
humility and in fact use it as a way to grow personally and 
professionally. I like to believe that I am friendly, easy going and 
that I get along with the existing team nicely and I always aim to make 
my self available to help out.

BREAKDOWN

- Highly motivated and enthusiastic towards contributing to Arch Linux
- Dependable and approachable for any kind of issue (including personal 
issues)
- Able to manage multiple responsibilities at the same time and handle 
them all with the same integrity
- Willing to learn and get involved with as many areas of the 
development as possible to progress through the ranks of the team
- Take standards, guidelines of whatever language, technology I am 
dealing with and always try to follow them to the letter to produce 
clean readable and generally acceptable code/solutions
- Take pride in helping others out but prefer to be silent about it

[0] 
https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/infrastructure/-/merge_requests/28/commits 


[1] https://github.com/nerdvegas/rez

[2] 
https://github.com/nerdvegas/rez/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3Alambdaclan+is%3Aclosed 


[3] https://github.com/nerdvegas/rez/issues?q=commenter%3Alambdaclan

[4] 
https://gitlab.archlinux.org/dashboard/issues?scope=all&utf8=✓&state=all&assignee_username=lambdaclan 


[5] https://aur.archlinux.org/account/lambdaclan/comments/

-----END APPLICATION BLOCK-----

Thank you all for your consideration. I hope I have managed to portray 
my passion for the project and Linux in general and that I will be 
merged into master or main whatever you preference may be.

Kind Regards,

Ira




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