DevOps at the Haskell Foundation

Haskell Foundation
#1

Hello everyone,

The Haskell Foundation’s funding for 2024 is forcing us to rethink the structure of the DevOps role. Our current DevOps engineer, Bryan, has done a great job of getting the foundation on strong footing for our continued support of the Haskell ecosystem. The DevOps role has allowed us to push on some of the things that are hard to find volunteers for; GHC CI, Haskell.org service migrations, and most recently, the Stackage migration from FP Complete to the Haskell Foundation, as a few examples. The realities of the Haskell Foundation’s budget mean that we must refocus our DevOps efforts going forward. We appreciate Bryan’s work for the Foundation so far and look forward to working with him under the new structure.

With the Stackage migration complete, the Foundation is shifting DevOps to focus on smaller, maintenance-only, tasks. This will mean a reduction in Bryan’s time commitment to the Foundation, which will mean that we’ll likely reduce the frequency of DevOps updates to the wider community. There will be a month-long transition period where Bryan ties off any loose ends and documents the current state of affairs, after which Bryan will transition to this smaller DevOps role.

This also means that Bryan has more time as a free-agent. Expect to hear more from him shortly about his plans moving forward.

DevOps engineers are often the unsung heroes of software development. Let’s make sure that Bryan gets the kudos he’s earned.

Best wishes,

Jose Calderon

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#2

Thank you so much, @chreekat! GHC’s CI is notoriously hard to tame and a noticable source of pain for contributors and newcomers especially. You improved it to a point where it has become pretty reliable. Quite a meticulous feat!

8 Likes
#3

Hi everyone!

The last two years have been a treat for me. Thank you to everyone I’ve had the chance to interact with.

For me personally, what this news means is that I am suddenly a freelancer with a lot of availability. I hope to find other contracts, so please contact me if you know of any good opportunities. Finding other contracts (as opposed to getting full-time employment) would give me the freedom to continue working on the HF contract. Win-win!

Besides contracting, I will also try my hand at writing grant proposals for some of the Haskell DevOps projects I already had in mind. Compared to a US-based organization like the HF, there are some funds that might be easier to get as an individual and resident of Finland/the EU.

The last two years have been a blast, and I expect I’ll still be contributing in one way or another for a while yet. In any case, I’ll still be at ZuriHac next week – hope to see you there!

31 Likes
#4

Wrangling GHC’s notoriously-cantankerous CI system and still having the time to migrate Stackage - all done in only two years! I look forward to hearing about your future efforts (where you’re allowed to do so ;-)

Thank you for all your work in Haskell-space, and onwards to more amazing feats, here and elsewhere…

4 Likes
#5

Huge thank you to Bryan! Much appreciation both for your expertise, and for your kindness and graciousness. CI is mission-critical to all of us, but we tend to only notice it when it doesn’t work! These days, mostly it does, thanks in large part to you.

Stay with us Bryan!

Simon

10 Likes
#6

Thanks for all your work @chreekat. I’m also excited to hear some sort of retrospective/reflection on the past years, the HF, things concerning devops or anything else in the Haskell world.

My feeling is that you, by now, must have some insights that would be valuable to share.

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