Danny Angus, Infra VP

Posted on: 2025-10-09 00:00:00+00:00

Danny Angus became VP-Infra in 2025, succeeding Myrle Krantz

What is your technical background?

I have no relevant qualification. I'm basically self taught; From books initially, then the internet. Participating in ASF projects has been a very important part of my learning, and that continues today.

I have been a tinkerer since i was at school. I had a physics teacher when I was about 17 who retrieved a large computer from a scrap yard (it took three trips) in the early 80s, welded it back together and then we learned how to program it using punched cards and teletype. Imagine our joy when he upgraded it to punched tape.

So when the dot com thing happened I wanted to be part of that, and with a good friend we found our way to interviews. I won the toss and went for a developer role with Perl skills. The interview was a week away, so I bought Learn Perl in Seven Days. I got the job.

I have kept on learning and doing, getting to Principal Engineer and moving to engineering manager. Learning and following my curiosity.

When you are not doing ASF stuff, what do you do?

I enjoy baking (and eating baked goods. I learned how to bake so I can eat the things I love.), the outdoors, cycling, hiking, boats, cars, and I am a tinkerer. I'm always tinkering with something, or learning new skills. I've reached the point where I choose to buy old and poorly maintained things instead of new ones, because that gives me more to learn about and tinker with. On the electronics front, I have found a rich seam of tinkering in hand-rolled home automation. Right now my lights have a habit of coming on unexpectedly when the connection is lost to the EC2 instance that I have set up to run it all. (and you thought I wasn't eccentric!)

How did you find your way into open source, and then to The Apache Software Foundation?

It was 24 years ago, and I worked for a startup that wanted to do stuff with natural language processing and email. We needed a mail processor that could use a database for storage and I found Apache James. Of course, the database layer didn't work well enough, so I fixed it, learned a lot, made friends, stuck around.

What attracted you to working with the Infrastructure team?

I recently came off my bike and had concussion. I think I may have been unconscious when the handover plan was pressed into my hand. No, actually, I have a load of relevant experience from work that I can bring to this: experience like managing jira instances, email processing, cloud products, security, CI/CD all help me understand the work we do and the needs of our user. Skills like people management and budget responsibility are what I can give back. In short, it seemed like I was a good fit, and as workaholic I couldn't resist!

What are the biggest challenges Infra faces at the moment?

The same challenges the Foundation has always faced: How do we keep our core services up to date? How do we meet the expectations of new generations of builders and innovators? How can we pay for it all? Plus one trending new one: How do we embrace the rise of gen AI?

Have there been any surprises once you became VP-Infra?

Only good ones, I have been surprised by how nice everyone is, how well everything is run, and best of all how positive and supportive our 'users' were when we met them in real life at Community Over Code. That encouraged me a lot. There is always a risk that Infra, because we have a bunch of paid roles, could be seen as a separate entity paid to serve the volunteer community.

The ASF I joined was a place where eveything was figured out and done by volunteers, often with no better qualifications than curiosity and enthusiasm. I'm keen we continue to encourage volunteers to come and help us do cool things.

With the Tooling team taking on many of the tasks that had fallen to Infra in the past, what do you see the team focussing on in 2025 and 2026?

It makes a lot of sense to me that we would separate these things. I think Infra, particularly the part that costs money, has to be laser-focused on operations. The challenging and interesting work comes about because our users are innovators whose expectations change with time, while the needs of the Foundation remain somewhat stable, and as a non profit we need to operate on donations of various kinds.

Our archive of historic activity needs to be durable and accessible, we have to support new ways of building software, we are not here to pick winners, and we aspire to give our users the flexibility to truly innovate, not only in the software they invent and build, but also in the way they choose to organize, build and distribute it.

The tooling team are building some of the tools builders need, but Infra are the ones who will scale and operate it. We all want ASF Infra to be a tailwind to world class innovation.

Has the team assigned you an emoji yet?

NO! OMG is that an option?