Mitchell Hashimoto Joins Engine Yard OSS Community Grant Program

Engine Yard is trying to find new ways to help Open Source. Our current thinking is that you help an OSS project by helping its core developer(s) get in front of audiences via conferences, documentation, our own Engine Yard blog, webinars, and more. Especially so with conferences, when you see and meet the person behind a project you’re more likely to give it a try, become a user or contributor, and to help that project thrive. This is our idea for how we can help, and this is the goal of the Engine Yard OSS Community Grant program.

There is some very important work to be done in the virtualization space, particularly as it’s a key building block for scalable cloud infrastructure. To help pave the way, Engine Yard is very excited to offer an OSS Community Grant to Mitchell Hashimoto.

Mitchell Hashimoto has two important Ruby projects you may have heard of: virtualbox and vagrant. He’s also started work on a third: a quality Ruby wrapper for a C-library libvirt (a library to interact with VMs & virtualization capabilities in an operating system).

The quality of Mitchell’s contributions can be quickly seen from:

i) http://vagrantup.com/ ii) the 4 line example on this page to get a fully configured local VM up and running:

$ gem install vagrant
$ vagrant box add base http://files.vagrantup.com/lucid32.box
$ vagrant init
$ vagrant up

(assumes you have Oracle’s VirtualBox installed).

The Engine Yard OSS Community Grant package for Mitchell is intended to help him, his projects, and the larger community. His grant will help fund things including: attending speaking engagements and conferences, marketing and documentation assistance, and more. We’ll also help him spread the word about all the cool work he’s doing, so don’t be surprised if you see him pop up on the Engine Yard blog or at an upcoming technical webinar!

Our aim with the Engine Yard OSS Community Grant program is to help critical projects and OSS contributors to gain traction while growing their user base and contributor base, and ensuring these OS projects have long-term, healthy lives.

Mitchell is now the 2nd member of the Engine Yard OSS Community Grant program after Yehuda Katz.

It’s been wonderful meeting and working with Mitchell, and we are happy to support him and his work. We look forward to continuing to work with him and seeing him speak at many Ruby conferences next year!