SUSE Hack Week Spotlight: Lubos Kocman

SUSE Hack Week is a week-long sprint permitting developers time off from their day jobs to work on something entirely of their own design or wishes. This week we will be showcasing some of the amazing projects coming out of SUSE Hack Week and the brilliant minds behind them. Stay tuned all week long for more features. 

Luboš Kocman, Release Manager for openSUSE Leap.

Today we’d like to introduce you to Luboš Kocman, Release Manager for openSUSE Leap.

Tell us about yourself, your background, your role at SUSE, any interesting facts?

It is almost a year since I stopped to build and release products for RedHat and started to build and release products for SUSE 🙂 I had also a privilege to be one of the founding members of the Modularity team for RHEL.next. Many people don’t know that but I was a leader of the Czech OpenSolaris User Group (CZOSUG) until Oracle bought Sun.

What is your SUSE Hack Week project and how is it beneficial?

Improvement of the release process for openSUSE Leap. Specifically its exposure on github.com/opensuse and changing the way the process is initiated for upcoming openSUSE Leap releases.

I really hope this will really expose openSUSE Release Management and relevant processes to the community and will lead to continuous process improvement. I took a similar approach in both RHEL and SLE and it worked!

https://hackweek.suse.com/19/projects/opensuse-leap-release-process-improvements

What do you enjoy most about Hack Week?

Definitively the individual excitement about working on something cool.

When I’m really into something, I can very easily skip food for the whole day (not the coffee!) and work straight for hours.

Now imagine the atmosphere in the office when half of the company might have it in the same way. It’s kinda like owning a one-week startup company for everyone.

What is the most difficult or most interesting project you’ve worked on?

Currently my family. Aside from a new job, I also moved from Brno, Czech republic to Nuremberg to be on-site with the rest of the SLE Release management team. Being here has a lot of benefits but it also brings a lot of challenges.

Regarding software projects … Probably a ZFS LiveUpgrade for Solaris/OpenSolaris back when I was 17.  It was essentially snapper for ZFS, shortly after Sun introduced ZFS, but before they implemented their own. This also made me get 2nd place in the Regional round of High School projects.

How do you dare to be different? Or what does it mean to you?

I think that I’m willing to risk when I see a big benefit and always try to be an early adopter. This has helped me to offload a lot of unnecessary work back in days when I was a single Release Engineer for RHEL-6. And I hope it’s going to help me with Leap as well.

Favorite quote and why?

“It’s about finding a balance”. I know it’s not exactly a quote. But it’s true and I’ve always enjoyed to just shout it during long meetings and watch everyone nod. It’s essentially a sentence that you can’t really object as far as any topic goes. Try it, it works!