User:Willb

William Benton

I'm based in Madison, WI, and I work for Red Hat on distributed computing. Before I joined Red Hat, my professional experience included teaching undergrad computer science, compiler and VM hacking, static program analysis, and music technology R&D.

I've been a Fedora user since the beginning (the first Linux distribution that I ran full-time on my personal computer was actually RHL 3.0.3), but got in to packaging for Fedora several years ago to help out the communities around some grid-based upstreams I've been involved with. My first Fedora packages were the Wallaby configuration service and its dependencies, which came to Fedora 15 from Red Hat Enterprise MRG Grid.

These days, my focus for Fedora is packaging and reviewing others' packages for the Big data SIG. Some of my more notable efforts have included packaging Apache Thrift for Fedora, bringing more of the Scala ecosystem into Fedora (including fixing the once-abandoned Scala compiler package and packaging sbt), and reviewing big data and machine learning packages. I've proposed Fedora's improved support for Scala and the inclusion of Apache Spark as changes for F21.

I'm happy to review Fedora packages, especially if they're related to my interests or expertise or if they're far enough from what I know to introduce me to something new. Here are the packages I'm currently maintaining. I'm also a packager sponsor and am happy to help bring new Fedora contributors on board.

• Blog: http://chapeau.freevariable.com/
• Personal web site: http://web.willbenton.com/
• GitHub: https://github.com/willb/
• IRC: willb on freenode; I'm usually hanging out in #fedora-bigdata, #distcomp, and other Fedora or project-specific rooms depending on what I'm working on
• Email: willb redhat com
• Time zone: UTC-6 in winter, UTC-5 in "summer" (broadly construed; from March through early November in the US now)