Introducing Helm Emeritus Core Maintainers
One reality of the open source world (and, indeed, any passion projects) is that sometimes we have time to participate, and other times we don't. This is true even of the core maintainers of a project. In Helm, we wanted to find a way to allow core maintainers to diminish their responsibilities. At the same time, though, we wanted to perennially express our gratitude to these individuals for their leadership and influence.
Thus the Helm community is officially rolling out a new title in our community: Emeritus Core Maintainer.
What Is an Emeritus Core Maintainer?
In academia, when well-regarded faculty move on to other interests, the school may give them the title emeritus professor. This title confers honor on the recipient. In this way, the professor remains associated with the department and school in which she or he taught. But an emeritus professor is no longer required to teach courses, fill research obligations, or serve on committees.
That is exactly the idea we wanted to capture with our title. Those who attain this title are no longer expected to attend the weekly meetings, share in the issue queue triage rotation, vote on policy or architectural issues, or review PRs. But we will still have them listed in our documentation as emeritus core maintainers, and we will continue to invite them to participate in things like the upcoming Helm Summit.
Introducing Three Emeritus Maintainers
Today I want to introduce our first three maintainers who have opted to transition to the Emeritus title.
Ville Aikas
It is indisputable to say that if not for Ville, Helm 2 would not have happened. Coming from the Kubernetes Deployment Manager, Ville profoundly shaped the Helm 2 architecture, and remains one of the top 5 committers to Helm.
Ville works on many projects, and for the last several months he has been focused on the Kubernetes service broker initiatives. Moving to an emeritus role in Helm frees up his time for continued work on service broker technologies and offerings.
Miguel Martinez
Miguel helped us bring Helm 2.0.0 into production. He was instrumental in bootstrapping the Helm Charts project, wrote the Helm linter, and influenced many UX decisions for the Helm command line. And beyond that Miguel (together with Microsoft's Jack Francis) developed Monocular, which now drives the KubeApps Hub.
Miguel's role at Bitnami has shifted, and he is now working on other exciting projects there. But we expect that his influence will still be felt on Bitnami's Kubernetes products like KubeApps.
Steven Harris
Steven joined the Helm Core Maintainers to help us handle the influx of issues and PRs. In addition to Steven's technical prowess, he has a gift for communicating deep technical information, and that has been a tremendous boon to a burgeoning project like Helm.
Steven recently made a career change, and in his R&D role at his new employer, he will be working on a non-Kubernetes technology stack. We are looking forward to seeing the cool tools that his new team is building.
Thank You!
I am proud that the Helm community continues to be a positive environment with vibrant dialog. 2018 will be a big year for us as we head into Helm 3 planning next month. We would not be in this position if not for the hard work of Ville, Miguel, and Steven. Please join me in thanking the three of them.
The Helm community remains strong and growing. Already in 2018 we have added two new core maintainers. We owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to all of the members of this community, who participate in PRs, in issues, in the Slack channel, in charts, and elsewhere. We know that when you contribute time and energy to an open source project, you are making sacrifices elsewhere, and we sincerely thank you.
