I’m pleased to introduce the SourceHut community to Conrad Hoffmann, aka bitfehler, who joins us this month as SourceHut’s third full-time FOSS developer. Like the rest of our full-time staff, Conrad’s role is to do self-directed work to “make FOSS better” per the mission of SourceHut, and in addition to working on the forge, Conrad will be working with many FOSS projects in the community, including projects on SourceHut and in the FOSS ecosystem as a whole.
Conrad is a Berliner whose introduction to FOSS came from his experience with SUSE Linux during his mandatory military service. He fell in love and started contributing to projects like KDE and heading down a career path which brought him deeper into Linux and the FOSS ecosystem, learning to use (and enjoy) the C programming language in particular. Conrad’s last job was at SoundCloud, where he contributed to HAProxy and bore witness to the birth of Prometheus, which eventually became the basis for SourceHut’s own monitoring at metrics.sr.ht.
In his role at SourceHut, Conrad will keep maintaining his Prometheus exporters and will branch out into a number of new interest areas. His experience with ops and infrastructure is something we’re hoping to utilize when setting up the European datacenter, and he’s also interested in joining the community efforts towards building a SourceHut DNS service. We can also expect some interesting things from Conrad in the Pine64 and OpenStreetMap communities, both of which have received funding and support from SourceHut in the past. He also intends to make a difference at a local level as his newborn daughter grows up in a society run by commercial proprietary software by advocating for the adoption of FOSS in schools and other places in his community.
I am very pleased to have Conrad on board at SourceHut, and I’m looking forward to working with him. I hope that you, members of the SourceHut community, will offer him your welcome as well as he begins to work on projects on SourceHut and in the broader FOSS ecosystem. He invites you to reach out and get to know him:
I am bitfehler on libera.chat, you can find me in the #sr.ht.watercooler channel or message me if you feel like chatting!
Please say hello! Welcome to SourceHut, Conrad!