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Jelmer Vernooij recently joined the Launchpad team at Canonical, so I caught up with him to give him the usual Meet the developers interview.

Matthew: What do you do on the Launchpad team?

Jelmer: I work in the Soyuz team, where I hack on the build system, package management and archive publishing in Launchpad.

Matthew: Can we see something in Launchpad that you’ve worked on?

Jelmer: Come to think of it, there aren’t yet a lot of visible things that I have worked on in Soyuz so far. However, some of the work that I did on Bazaar is indirectly visible in Launchpad. For example, the Git, Mercurial and (some) Subversion code imports are done through the foreign branch plugins, of which I am the main developer.

Matthew: Where do you work?

Jelmer: I work from home, and at at the moment that’s in Utrecht, a city with about 300k inhabitants in the center of the Netherlands.

Matthew: What can you see from your office window?

Jelmer: I look out over a canal and a small park in front of my apartment. It’s looking nice at the moment, covered in snow.

Matthew What did you do before working at Canonical?

Jelmer: Before joining Canonical I was working on my bachelors degree in Computer Science at the University of Utrecht. I also did part-time work for hacking on Windows software, small device firmware as well various free software projects.

Matthew: How did you get into free software?

Jelmer: In high school I used to help maintain several FreeBSD and Linux servers with Samba. We had a complex script that kept the Samba database in sync with the master database of students (in MySQL) and since this script kept falling over, I decided to add support to Samba to allow it to access our database directly.

Unfortunately the abstractions for Samba’s user database API needed some work and one thing led to another. Before I knew it, I was deep down in Samba development — almost ten years ago now.

Matthew: What’s more important? Principle or pragmatism?

Jelmer: They both have their place. Principles are important, but pragmatism might be necessary to get closer to a point where you can conform to your principles.

I’m certainly a free software pragmatist; I’ll use non-free software as long as there are no viable free software alternatives. The only non-free packages left on my system are skype (there just isn’t anything free that works as well) and the flash plugin for Mozilla (gnash isn’t there yet).

Matthew: Do you/have you contribute(d) to any free software projects?

Jelmer: When I can and where time permits I fix my pet bugs myself, so I’ve contributed a lot of small patches to a variety of projects.

Aside from that there are a few projects I work on on a regular basis. Samba was the first project I worked on and (apart from Launchpad) it still remains the project I spend most of my time on. I seem to have a thing for trying to figure out proprietary protocols — I’m also a developer on the OpenChange (Microsoft Exchange/Outlook) and BitlBee (MSN/AIM/ICQ) projects.

A couple of years ago I became interested in distributed version control systems and started playing with Bazaar. Since Samba was maintained in Subversion I started working on the bzr-svn plugin and later the bzr-git plugin so I could work on Samba with Bazaar, but I’ve also contributed to other areas of Bazaar.

For most of the projects I’m active in I’m also involved in the packaging for Debian and Ubuntu.

Matthew: Tell us something really cool about Launchpad that not enough people know about.

Jelmer: The upstream report gives a nice overview of the state of Ubuntu and how well upstream projects are tracked in Launchpad.

Matthew: Is there one developer who has been an inspiration to you? If so, why?

Jelmer: There are quite a few developers that have inspired me over the years.

I much appreciate the encouragement, mentoring and patience from Andrew Bartlett, Andrew Tridgell and Jerry Carter when I first started contributing to Samba. Without them I probably wouldn’t be involved in free software as much as I am today.

Pair-programming with Robert Collins and John Arbash Meinel during the first few Bazaar sprints taught me a lot about extreme programming and got me hooked on test driven development.

While I occasionally get annoyed by what seems like nitpicking in code reviews for Bazaar, I also realize that it’s great to get so much high-quality feedback. It has definitely made me a better programmer.

Matthew: Okay, Kiko’s special question! You’re at your computer, you reach for your wallet: what are you most likely to be doing?

Jelmer: I’m probably reaching for my credit card to pay for something online, most likely CDs or books.

Matthew: Thanks Jelmer!

This entry was posted by Matthew Revell on Friday, February 19th, 2010 at 12:01 pm and is filed under Meet the devs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.