I will be completing the fourth and final semester of my coop at Red Hat as a Software Engineering Intern at the end of summer. It has been an exciting opportunity to learn and develop my skills as a software developer in a real-world environment.

Over these 16 months, I was given the chance to work on a wide variety of challenges. I began with little to no knowledge about programming in Java. The OpenJDK team, which I joined in my second week, was about to begin working on a tool for JVM performance monitoring. The tool, JDK Mission Control (JMC), was open sourced by Oracle in early 2018 so my team was still wrapping up their old project.

Since the tool was recently made available for our company to use and to be able to provide it to our customers, it had yet to be packaged for release. I was tasked with building the installable RPM package for Fedora. Roughly half a year later, the software I had packaged, was released to the public. The lengthy process had begun with learning the basics of the Maven, Tycho, RPM packaging tools and the requirements for packaging the software. There were aspects of the upstream build that were incompatible with Fedora packaging guidelines and those had to be re-worked for the package to get approval. Just before the Christmas break, the RPM for JMC was made available for installation through the official Fedora repository.

Interspersed between my packaging work, I worked on upstream JMC. I contributed bug fixes and new features. I helped update documentation and verified bug reports.

In late September, my teammates and I presented the project we had been working on to another team at Red Hat. In late October, we presented JMC at the Free Software and Open Source Symposium (FSOSS) at Seneca @ York.

During my internship, some big changes came to Red Hat. After nearly a year of deliberations, town halls and expert advising, Red Hat revealed its new logo at Red Hat Summit in May. Shadowman was replaced with a simple red fedora. Of course, there was also the US$34 billion acquisition by IBM, but you probably already knew that. The acquisition was announced in October and finalized in July. Red Hat remains an independent unit as stated in the initial October announcement. So, for all intents and purposes, I am still a Red Hatter.