Self-Introduction: David Lawrence

[Dave Lawrence]

== Full legal name ==
David K. Lawrence

== Your IRC nick on irc.mozilla.org ==
dkl

== City, Country ==
Raleigh, North Carolina USA

== Profession or Student status ==
Software Engineer, Part-time College Student

== Company, School, or other affiliation ==
Red Hat, Inc.
http://www.redhat.com
https://bugzilla.redhat.com

== What do you want to help out with? ==
We are using a heavily customized version of 2.18 for most of our
internal development bug tracking. We just recently moved from a 
PostgreSQL based backend to a MySQL backend mainly for the more robust 
replication ability. We hope to continue on our plan to migrate to the 
3.x codebase in the next few months. Currently we are working on some 
performance optimizations in our current code base to address some 
usability concerns with the UI. We are currently pushing some of 
Bugzilla's limits in number of products, components, etc. and are 
testing new features utilizing Ajax to help speed some parts of the UI. 
We host the Fedora project in our instance of Bugzilla and just that 
product alone has over 5500 components.

We also utilize a custom XMLRPC API pretty heavily within the company. 
Using the API, many of our departments have written custom applications 
to help manage their bugs and processes. We are planning on converting 
all of our XMLRPC code to the new 3.x WebServices code during our 
development and to submit patches for the changes for review.
Also the Ajax functionality will be ported over. We will be working very 
hard to make all of these changes as generic as possible and submit all 
patches upstream so that they might be incorporated into the mainline 
3.x codebase.

We also hope to improve our interaction with the Bugzilla community in 
the coming months. We have several people to help out with Bugzilla now 
full-time whereas in the past it has been hard due to resource 
restraints to help out as much as we wanted.

== Historical qualifications ==
I have been maintaining our company instance of Bugzilla on and off for 
the last 8 years. I originally converted our instance to work on Oracle
for a while in hopes of integrating with our corporate support database.
Then when we came out with our own database product called Red Hat 
Database based on PostgreSQL we decided to convert Bugzilla to work with 
that where we stayed until recently. I also created our current
Hardware Certification database (https://hardware.redhat.com) which is 
using Bugzilla as it's backend with heavily customized templates on
the frontend. I have worked with other departments as well to help 
Bugzilla communicate with their tracking tools. Many of our internal
applications also communicate with Bugzilla for single sign on 
authentication. I have also spent some of my time working on RHTS ( Red 
Hat Test System) which is our automated testing framework for the 
distribution. For a stretch I headed up our QA efforts in testing a RHEL
update release which took me away from Bugzilla for a while.

I look forward to working with my team and the Bugzilla community
in the future.

David Lawrence
Red Hat, Inc.