Platform Engineering and Community Operations

After discussions with @mrz and a few IT employees, it’s clear to me that IT is not the right team for us to be working with. Community is not part of their goals, nor are they equipped to provide us with the support we need.

For this reason, I reached out to Laura Thomson, who, if you don’t know her, is a manager working on Platform Engineering.

Community Operations seems to be a perfect match to the Release Engineering team, which she oversees. They manage a large, critical infrastructure, and are currently looking into working with community. We’d be an ideal “community side” to the team, and they’d be able to help us build the skills we need to deploy outstanding infrastructures.

We’d be working with their team on their infra, as well as our own services. Their infra is already built, leaving us to be able to learn and not focus on deploying and maintaing servers.

Something like this is exactly what we’ve been looking for.

Please, thoughts? Questions? Not having senior people working with us is becoming a large blocker. I’d like to resolve it.

(Also, @mrz, please do let me know if I’ve missed anything/misexplained anything in this post)

2 Likes

I’ve spoken to @tad about this, and I agree that working with RelEng would be a great fit for Community IT, both in terms of resources and mentorship, assuming that they’d be able to provide us with those. We, in turn, provide a pipeline of contributors who are interested in working with infrastructure.

I don’t see any issues with this, and this is a +1 from me.

I just spoke to @tad about this as well and I think it’s awesome. It sounds like a great way to level up the team and bring some more structure to the group. Sounds like a win win and can’t wait to see it happen.

Sounds good to me.