Code reviews are vital to the success of any software project. In Open Stack, code must be reviewed to be accepted. If there are not enough people doing code reviews, the reviews get stagnant, and the project can’t move forward.
Right now, there are only three active core contributors focused on Keystone. There are a couple people that are core on multiple projects the pay attention to Keystone from time to time, but mostly it is just three of us.
“Step through your code” –some of the best advice I ever got, from Code Complete.
I am a fan of Eclipse. Although I am conversant in VI and Fluent in emacs, I tend to write code in Eclipse. While the Python source code browsing is only mediocre when compared with the Java support, the integrated debugging is very powerful. Here is how I have set things up to work for Keystone.
Gerrit is great, but one thing it does not do well is tell you the differences in an update to a review request. Here’s how I found I could focus review requests to just the deltas between submissions.
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“Go (Chinese: åœæ£‹ wéiqÃ, Japanese: å›²ç¢ igo, [nb 2] Korean: 바둑 baduk, Vietnamese: cá» vây, common meaning: “encircling game”) is a board game for two players that originated in China more than 2,500 years ago.” — From the Wikipedia Article
I love this game. It keeps me humble. No other game teaches so much so simply. Go is about influence. But sometimes, it is about tactics. I recently lost a game. I made not 1, but 3 mistakes, that cost me the game. If I had not made any one of these three I would have won, and quite soundly. Instead, I lost by 1.5 points, a very close game.
Embracing change is hard. Accepting criticism on code you worked so hard to prepare for review can be hard on the ego. But when you have additional work that is underway that depends on submissions undergoing review, it can also be a challenge to your organizational skills. I’ve recently learned a trick about git that makes this easier in the context of Open Stack development.
West Point’s motto is “Duty, Honor, Country.” I graduated in 1993. Why did a former Army Officer end up at Red Hat?
Something you have. Something you are. Something You Know. Pick Two. This is the conventional wisdom for the basis of secure authentication.
With PKI, tokens have gone from 40 byte to a varying size more than 3000 bytes long. This plus additional payload in Horizon means that they no longer fit inside an HTTP cookie. How do we deal with this?
“I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a Hamburger Today” –Wimpy, from the Popeye Cartoon.
Sometimes you need to authorize a service to perform an action on your behalf. Often, that action takes place long after any authentication token you can provide would have expired. Currently, the only mechanism in Keystone that people can use is to share credentials. We can do better.
The Live CD shipped with Fedora 18 is a perfectly serviceable virtual machine image, provided you give it some writeable disk space. It even ships with a tool to make this happen. All it needs is a block device. Continue reading