Proposing Willa For dev/5

Hello devs, I am hereby proposing @willa for dev/5. Willa has been working to support several OpenMRS implementation over the years. I believe he fulfills the criteria in 2021 Stage Development Worksheet - Google Sheets for dev/5.

The following are some of the things Willa has been involved with over the years.

  1. Supporting AMPATH which was once the biggest OpenMRS implementation (probably still is) where he lead the efforts to develop a state of the art POC application. (@jdick can tell stories about this). While at AMPATH was also part of the effort for original implementation of ETL system. Lead the OpenMRS upgrade twice (For the AMPATH database at the time, it was no simple task).

  2. Contributed to several core modules. including rest webservices, legacy UI, HTML Form Entry.

  3. Contributed to other non core modules such as DHIS connector

  4. Created custom modules for supported implementation.

  5. Possess a deep understanding of OpenMRS ecosystem.

  6. Customized and deployment OpenMRS system in Nigeria. (Based on reference application 2.6)

  7. Supporting OpenMRS implementation at FGH in Mozambique.

  8. Created a NodeJS tool to combine two disjoint OpenMRS database.

I am probably forgetting a lot more stuff here :slight_smile:

Okay time to decide @dev5, @dev4, @dev3, @dev2

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@willa with evidence provide above, I for one has no objection. Congratulations for the work done!!!

cc @dkayiwa, @jdick, @mogoodrich, @mksd @isears am sorry for tagging you in this issue but I believe you can be of help.

@willa, I have no doubt that your skills are in the /dev/4-/dev/5 range. From the stage development worksheet, we currently have nine items to distinguish between a /dev/4 and /dev/5. You clearly meet at least six of them and likely meet the 2-3 others:

/dev/4 /dev/5
Can deal with setting maven up in a complex project Manage the project using Maven :white_check_mark:
Knows how to handle merging of pull requests and dealing with complex git-related tasks. Git guru. :white_check_mark:
Knows how to leverage open source communications to maximize collaboration & cooperation on projects. Strong communicator, can share a vision
Can direct conversations and answer or find answer for complex problems Has voice and seen as an authority in IRC/Telegram, Talk, Slack
Can organize sprints and spike with little to no direction Can come up with sprints and spikes that need to be done :white_check_mark:
Able to deal (resolve?) with complicated ORM mapping issues (inheritance, etc.) Strong hibernate skills :white_check_mark:
Set up a proof of concept ETL solution Provide working ETL solutions :white_check_mark:
Assess ETL technologies that can be used by the community Advise on the design and architecture of ETL solutions :white_check_mark:
Can perform complex SDK commands Can contribute to SDK improvements

I was thinking we could acknowledge you as at least /dev/4 and challenge you over the coming months to flex your dev & leadership skills such that multiple people are touting your /dev/5 skills… but it seems like you’ve already been granted /dev/5, so… congratulations! I hope you’ll find ways to bring others along with their dev skills (and maybe help us get more objective criteria for granting dev stages).

Cheers,

-Burke

3 Likes

Congrats @willa

@burke am so glad this issue is handled and finally it has come to pass. This clearly shows we have members in the community who have done great work in development and since they are not known to the community they are not promoted on time. @willa congratulations upon this mile stone.

@burke all this makes sense overall but there is not much good at ticking all the boxes if there is not enough community engagement for all those skills to serve usefully.

I know plenty of Hibernate experts, but that doesn’t make them /dev/5, if you know what I mean.

While it is 100% clear to me that @willa’s history makes him a /dev/5 and beyond (if there was such thing), I am more interested in what this upgrade brings to the community moving forward.

For instance there is not much point in listing all those projects being supported out there if those projects do not feed back to the community. So when someone says “I did xyz for whatever implementation in this or that region/country” they hopefully should add “and we committed xyz back here or there in the OpenMRS repositories”, that would make their point very strong.


The paragraph below is not about @willa anymore btw, but I would like to vent it out anyway as a thematic follow-up to what I just wrote.

Feeding back can be as lightweight as filling bugs in Jira, but feeding back nothing actionable is problematic. Then we are left only with publicity. It is nice to know that OpenMRS is being used here or there. That part, if you want my opinion, is a well known fact: the community of use of OpenMRS is large and we should be proud collectively, however… the community of development is thin. Too thin in relation to the community of use, and we need to keep raising the alarm on this. Unfortunately it will be no consolation to know that the problem is ten folds with Bahmni.

Cc @jennifer @pradiptakundu

3 Likes

A post was merged into an existing topic: Stage upgrade process improvement

@willa Have you taken a look at the OMRS stage, both on our Wiki and on the Stage Advancement worksheet that you used?

@mksd & @jwnasambu You both make some really great points - so much so that I’m going to copy/move them over to the conversation that’s currently going on about how we can improve the stage upgrade process.

1 Like

Congrats @willa !

I strongly believe it’s great to have a criteria for dev stages but let’s not get into a situation where we over vet the process otherwise sometimes I wonder if I still deserve to be a dev/5, I feel like I’m a dev/4 based on the criteria, I hope I don’t get demoted.

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:rofl:

A dev/5 is always one .

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One of the reasons I proposed myself for dev/5 is to start this conversation. I for one do not really care much about what dev stage tag is associated with me even though I feel and understand that there is some value in it. This is especially because people being people sometimes these badges may carry some weight on how someone is taken seriously during discussions and more so when people do not know each other well.

That being said, I do believe it is a good idea to have dev stages in order to help people advance in their career and also helping someone to gauge themselves over time. So, overall it is a good initiative. I do agree with a lot of points put forward by @mksd even though, my impression about the dev stages is more about skill set than what someone contributed back to the community. We obviously can explicitly make this a requirement because, one way to gauge skills transparently is gauging one’s contributions to the community.

Hopefully my proposal will be a catalyst in further improving our dev stages and ways to achieve them.

Lastly thank you all who have taken time to contribute to this thread. It is indeed an honor. We should party sometimes :smiley: (Obviously, post covid)

7 Likes