In this community member profile we highlight Chip Boling, a Routing/IP Software Engineer 5 at Ciena, who is based in Madison, Alabama USA. He has been an active contributor in the SEBA/VOLTHA community since January 2017.
“I have always had great experiences working with people at the ONF and within the SEBA, VOLTHA, and ONOS communities,” said Chip. “At my very first ONF conference, just after ONOS was released, I was at a lunch table and Guru Parulkar, Thomas Vachuska and a few others from ONF. We sat down and we had a great lunch and conversation. They made me feel very welcome and later when the opportunity for working on VOLTHA came up, that experience made it a no brainer. If I had not taken that step, I probably would not be at Ciena/Tibit having the time of my (professional) life.”
As a member of the ONF community, Chip’s very first contribution was two bug fixes to ONOS in 2016, shortly after it was published on github. Since becoming involved with VOLTHA, his contributions were first to the python OLT and ONU device adapters, OMCI, and pyvoltha. Since the release of VOLTHA 2.0, his primary contribution is the development and maintenance of the omci-lib-go library. Currently he is working on the VOLTHA omci-lib-go library and the Tibit OLT device adapter. In the past, he served on the VOLTHA TST, presented at two ONF Connect conferences in Silicon Valley, and is presently a core contributor to VOLTHA.
Chip holds a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering (BEE) with a Certificate in Computer Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. He was a member of the co-op program (early 80’s) and his first job was in early SCADA networking and eventually service implementation of networks utilizing both shared memory and Ethernet. After graduation he joined a local engineering company’s (Intergraph) newly formed networking group and over the next few years, worked on a wide range of data networking protocol and physical layers technologies (Ethernet, FDDI, Token Ring, …). After Intergraph he started his own software consulting company and had Adtran as a primary customer. At Adtran, he was the lead developer for their ATM switching group, merging data and voice over digital. The department was in charge of interoperability protocols between various networking technologies. After moving to the staff engineering group, he began to advocate for several open source projects including Linux, OpenStack, and eventually ONOS, VOLTHA, and SEBA.
During his free time Chip enjoys riding his road bike, woodworking, and genealogy. He is also an active wine collector and enjoys going on wine/culinary related trips with his wife and friends. Both he and his wife are native to Huntsville, Alabama.
