Re: Git Project Leadership Committee

[Christian Couder <christian.couder@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Aug 17, 2018 at 12:41 AM, Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:

> So here are the nominations I came up with. If you'd like to nominate
> somebody else (or yourself!), please do. If you have opinions, let me
> know (public or private, as you prefer).
>
>  - Christian Couder
>  - Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason

Thanks for nominating both!

> Both are active, have been around a long time, and have taken part in
> non-code activities and governance discussions. My understanding is that
> Christian freelances on Git, which doesn't quite fit my "volunteer
> representative" request, but I think contracting on Git is its own
> interesting perspective to represent (and certainly he spent many years
> on the volunteer side).

Yeah, I am freelancing since October 2015 mostly for GitLab,
Booking.com and Protocol Labs as can be seen on my LinkedIn profile:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/christian-couder-569a731/

I feel lucky to be considered mostly like a regular employee
especially by GitLab and Protocol Labs. Both of these companies employ
a high ratio of remote developers from around the world, who often
have some kind of freelance legal status, so they give them as much as
possible the same kind of perks or incentives (like stock options) as
regular employees.

GitLab is a very open and transparent company. The way it works is
described in details in its Handbook
(https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/). Its informal policy regarding
Git has been to use regular released versions of Git in GitLab. If
possible GitLab should use a recent version of Git to benefit from the
latest improvements, though it should be compatible with old versions
of Git, as this can be useful for example to people who want to build
GitLab from source on top of a regular Linux distro that comes with an
old Git.

So for GitLab my work on Git has to be integrated upstream. I have
been working on remote odb related things, which I haven't managed to
get merged yet, and on a few other small things like delta islands for
which things have been going better so far.

I also do some Git support at GitLab (for Git users, GitLab
developers, customers, sales people, ...). I am sponsored by them to
participate in or give presentations at conferences (like FOSSASIA
2017, GSoC Mentor Summit, Bloomberg Hackathon, Git Merge, GitLab
Summit, ...). And sometimes I do other marketing, security, developer
relations or sales (like meeting a few French customers) related
things.

Ævar already talked in details about Booking.com and my work for them.

I have been working much less for Protocol Labs than for GitLab or
Booking.com since I started working for GitLab around 2 years ago.

As with Git I had started working on my free time on IPFS
(https://ipfs.io/) before I became a freelance working on it. So for
Protocol Labs I have been using Sharness
(https://github.com/chriscool/sharness/, which was created in 2011 by
extracting t/test-lib.sh from Git) to add and maintain end to end
tests to go-IPFS and other IPFS related projects.

Around one year ago Protocol Labs made a successful ICO (Initial Coin
Offering) for Filecoin (https://filecoin.io/) and since then things
have become a bit more like in a regular company (which is not
necessarily bad).

I have also had a few consulting contracts from various French
companies for a few days each about consulting or teaching Git/GitLab.