F40 EPEL Election Interview

What is your name and what is your FAS ID?

Name: Diego Herrera
FAS ID: dherrera

What is your background in EPEL? What have you worked on and what are you doing now?

My relationship with open source started back in 2006, and I’ve been an
advocate since, both by contributing to various projects and by publishing
my own. My deep dive into EPEL began in 2013 while working in a company doing
R&D work for local industries, where I gained my first practical
experience with RPM packaging. This early work gave me a solid understanding
of what it means to build and manage software within the Enterprise Linux context.

More recently, I joined Red Hat in 2021 to work as part of the
CLE Team, where I deepened my understanding of how to become a proper Fedora packager
and contributor. I have been working together with Carl George, focusing on the
needs of EPEL by participating in steering meetings and doing work
regarding the project's infrastructure. Through this position, I was able to
participate in activities such as packaging, writing documentation and SOPs,
collaborating on maintenance work required for the infrastructure, and improving
infrastructure automation. Furthermore, during steering meetings, I have been able to
add my viewpoints and insights when they were needed, and I was also able to
take on some of the steering team's workload,
such as the Forgejo migration.

Why are you running for EPEL Steering Committee member?

Over the last few years, while spending time on the infrastructure side of the project,
I've seen first-hand the ups and downs of the project, which has enabled me to
collaborate closely with members of the community.

The EPEL steering committee is already a place where I have been able to
use my experience and knowledge to support and contribute to the project.
However, this time I want a vote on these topics. This will allow me to
collaborate further, helping to turn those discussions into a better
path for the project. I want to continue helping the community so
that the project can continue to grow into a great
platform by ensuring our governance is as solid and reliable as our processes.

For the sake of transparency, even if I wrote the text myself, I also used a local LLM (Gemma4:e4b) to iteratively fix the text's grammar and flow.