rn-82: add interview with Randall S. Becker

Author: sivaraam

rev_news/drafts/edition-82.md

@@ -29,9 +29,97 @@ This edition covers what happened during the month of November 2021.
 ### Support
 -->
 
-<!---
-## Developer Spotlight:
--->
+## Developer Spotlight: Randall S. Becker
+
+* Who are you and what do you do?
+
+  I am Randall S. Becker, president of Nexbridge Inc. I have been a
+  software developer and architect for many decades. Aside from the
+  obvious SCM domain knowledge, my interests are around data structures,
+  performance, computability, and languages. About 10 years ago, I joined
+  the ITUGLIB Technical Committee, which is an Open Source group that
+  maintains code for the HPE Nonstop community - the platform was
+  originally called Tandem Computers Inc.
+
+* What would you name your most important contribution to Git?
+
+  I have been maintaining the code associated with the HPE NonStop
+  platform for the past six years and was key to its successful port to
+  both the x86 and ia64 variants of the platform. In addition, I keep an
+  eye out for changes that may put the port at risk and run the CI/CD
+  environment that builds and tests Git on the platform.
+
+* What are you doing on the Git project these days, and why?
+
+  I am currently working on the `.git/config` `includeIf` function for
+  worktrees, planning a threaded version of the port, which is challenging
+  considering the nature of the platform and community. We have to
+  maintain compatibility with some old versions of the operating systems
+  that lack some more modern capabilities. The platform is an MPP
+  architecture without kernel level threads (yet) and the port to POSIX
+  threads is very messy with the operating system wrappers we have to use.
+
+* If you could get a team of expert developers to work full time on
+  something in Git for a full year, what would it be?
+
+  There are really three areas where I would want to work. The first, most
+  important, is improving multi-level signing capabilities in Git to
+  support the software supply chain. I could leave it at that, but the
+  full set of requirements in various countries are not yet fully fleshed
+  out. Another two, purely to support the NonStop community is converting
+  the code written in Go (Git LFS) into C and making it part of the standard
+  product. The other is migrating the interpretive code to a c99-standard
+  code base.
+
+* If you could remove something from Git without worrying about
+  backwards compatibility, what would it be?
+
+  I would move directly to SHA-384 or SHA-512 and toss both SHA-1 and
+  SHA-256 as soon as possible. The same applies to any signing
+  capabilities to support 8K or higher key sizes in defense against future
+  hacking using the capabilities quantum computers.
+
+* What is your favorite Git-related tool/library, outside of Git
+  itself?
+
+  This is a bit of self-promotion for my company and I apologise for that.
+  We build façade-style interface facilities that allow legacy platforms,
+  including HPE NonStop and IBM's TSO/ISPF environments to have full Git
+  experiences despite the native file systems not supporting POSIX-like
+  hierarchies. These are Git clients that map file system attributes and
+  structures to and from what Git can understand. Our NonStop product was
+  recently added to the HPE price book. These products allow older
+  codebases to share in the benefits of real DevOps capabilities without
+  having to rely on proprietary knowledge and processes. I am the chief
+  architect of those.
+
+* Do you happen to haveany memorable experience with respect to contributing
+  to the Git project? If yes, could you share it with us?
+
+  I think the most satisfying experience was the few months it took to
+  contribute all the code associated with the NonStop port. It was a huge
+  pain to maintain the separate fork even with Git's awesome merge
+  capabilities. Being allowed to be lazy is a dream of many developers and
+  cutting down the time and effort spent on each release to a simple push
+  of the Jenkins "Build Now" button freed up a lot of time.
+
+* What is your advice for people who want to start Git development?
+  Where and how should they start?
+
+  Learn about Merkel Trees and general data structures.
+
+  I am still learning when it comes to general functional contributions.
+  Watching how others contribute is really crucial if you have any hope of
+  your contribution being accepted.
+
+* If there's one tip you would like to share with other Git developers,
+  what would it be?
+
+  For every change you make, think about the security implications.
+  Think about what a hacker might do to compromise Git or an organisation
+  using Git before you move forward, no matter how good an idea it might
+  seem. The last thing you want is to have your contribution show up as a
+  Critical Vulnerability Exposure on the NIST database.
 
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