rn-79: add interview with Josh Steadmon

Author: sivaraam

rev_news/drafts/edition-79.md

@@ -29,9 +29,56 @@ This edition covers what happened during the month of August 2021.
 ### Support
 -->
 
-<!---
-## Developer Spotlight:
--->
+## Developer Spotlight: Josh Steadmon
+
+* Who are you and what do you do?
+
+ I'm a Software Engineer at Google, and I work on a team dedicated to
+ Git. Outside of work, I'm a husband and a new dad, which doesn't leave
+ me much time for anything else :).
+
+ Git is actually my first experience as a professional developer. Up
+ until I joined the Git team in 2018, my career had been in system
+ administration and reliability engineering.
+
+* What would you name your most important contribution to Git?
+
+ Probably the addition of fuzz tests. Not so much due to impact so far
+ (although it has found a few small bugs), but because of the opportunity
+ for future work in this area. If I had more time, I'd love to look into
+ having a proper fuzz tester for client/server communication, for
+ example.
+
+* What are you doing on the Git project these days, and why?
+
+ Until recently, the majority of my work has been internal performance
+ monitoring of Git usage by Google developers. Lately I've been winding
+ down my work on monitoring and starting to look into improving
+ performance and the user experience with submodules. Only the very
+ beginnings of that have started to show up on-list so far.
+
+* If you could get a team of expert developers to work full time on
+ something in Git for a full year, what would it be?
+
+ I think I'd echo my former coworker [Brandon Williams (edition 28)](https://git.github.io/rev_news/2017/06/14/edition-28/#developer-spotlight-brandon-williams),
+ and work on cleaning up the global state. For a new-ish developer who
+ doesn't have full history on all the various subsystems, it can be
+ difficult to follow the logic when there's lots of non-local state being
+ modified.
+
+* If you could remove something from Git without worrying about
+ backwards compatibility, what would it be?
+
+ Not so much to remove as change: I wish it was easier to move away from
+ SHA-1 hashes. I'm very happy that brian m. carlson has been working on
+ supporting SHA-256.
+
+* What is your favorite Git-related tool/library, outside of Git itself?
+
+ I'm a huge fan of git-annex (https://git-annex.branchable.com/) and use
+ it to keep my ever-growing pile of PDFs and ebooks synced and organized
+ across various devices. I also use it to archive primary sources in a
+ homebrew personal knowledge base.
 
 ## Releases