Settling Into The Rhythm

After another two weeks, my experience of Outreachy has been even more stimulating.
I am writing this blog to make the reader familiar with my community, project, and work. Here is a quick introduction to OpenStack and Ironic.

OpenStack is a cloud operating system that controls large pools of compute, storage and networking resources throughout a data center, all managed and provisioned through APIs with common authentication mechanisms. It is a platform for cloud computing whereby virtual servers and other resources are made available to customers.
OpenStack is one of the fastest-growing open source communities in the world.

Ironic is an OpenStack project which provisions bare metal machines instead of virtual machines (forked from the Nova baremetal driver). It can be thought as a bare metal hypervisor API and a set of plugins which interact with the bare metal hypervisors.

My project title is - "Improve Ironic Agent Image Builder". As my last post explains the technical details of the project, I will give a short description here. The ironic project has an element "agent" (which runs inside the baremetal machine) that needs to be embedded into a bootable Linux image. For this purpose, ironic has created ironic-python-agent-builder. It contains tools and scripts for ramdisk based on Ironic Python Agent. My task covers improving ironic-python-agent-builder.
A typical example of my task includes migrating an element from IPA to ironic-python-agent-builder and thus making the build process smooth.

Work Done So Far
      In the past two weeks, I started to work on my second task. I completed my initial task and my patch for review got merged after positive reviews from the community. I also spent time in completing all the side-tasks I got to know from the feedback and comments of the first task. Speaking of the struggle in my new second task of this week, it was not straightforward but easy once I truly understood the bug. It seems redundant after one arrives at the solution but the journey before is brainstorming. This is the best opportunity for discussion and interaction with mentors. I put in my complete efforts to arrive at the best way to tackle the problem, after which the discussion with my mentors provides me the right direction. This is how my last week was spent, figuring out things and then finally I was able to crack the issue. :)

Work Culture in OpenStack/ironic Community
      The Ironic community in OpenStack is very helpful, friendly and hardworking. The documentation of OpenStack is amazing. IRC is the public chat forum used by the community. For any of my query, the community members help me resolve all my doubts. Their timely reviews and comments are truly helpful. For the past work of my internship, my mentors and other members of the community have helped me a lot in the review process. This is what I like about my project and community. It keeps me engaged as well as excited every time.

Things I learned so far
      In technical terms, I have understood the complete background of ironic-python-agent-builder and the image building process in ironic. Furthermore, I have improved my debugging skills after the tasks I have been working on. I have also developed my thought process and approach for solving a bug. I am highly enjoying my internship and work with OpenStack. :)

Keep following for more updates!