There are many hundreds of developers who contribute code to the open-source OpenStack cloud platform. For the recent OpenStack Havana release, the top developer as measured by the volume of code commits was Monty Taylor, distinguished engineer at Hewlett-Packard.

In a video interview with eWEEK, Taylor explains what he actually does at HP and how his team is contributing to making OpenStack the best it can be.

The bulk of Taylor's efforts are in the development infrastructure for OpenStack.

"I work on the common build libraries that we use to make things consistent," Taylor said.

OpenStack is written in the open-source Python language, though currently multiple versions of Python are used, including Python 2.x and Python 3.x. Over time, Taylor said that there is a movement to have as much as possible of the OpenStack codebase in Python 3.

From an HP perspective, Taylor said that the way he works isn't necessarily focused directly on the needs of HP, but rather his focus is on the OpenStack project itself. Taylor said that his development team talks with other teams within HP all the time to learn about things that need to be done to make OpenStack better.

"A lot of the people that work for me are focused on just making OpenStack that best thing that it can be," Taylor said. "If there is a thing that is causing HP problems, then clearly OpenStack isn't the best it can be and so we need to go and fix that."

Watch the full video interview with Monty Taylor below:

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.