Meet Martin Packman in the Blue squad

Martin Packman

Laura:  What do you do on the Launchpad team?
Martin:  I’m on the newly created Blue squad, and we’re on the nebulous task of maintenance at present. I’m also on loan doing some juju development work.

Laura: Can we see something that you’ve worked on?
Martin:  You can see everything I’ve worked on. Well, all the things where I’ve had the convenience of using launchpad rather than having to send patches by email.

Laura: Where do you work?
Martin:  From home like most of the other developers in Canonical. I’m only a few hours away from the London office, but haven’t been there since the relocation.

Laura: What can you see from your office window?
Martin:  A weeping birch, and whatever feathered things perch atop. Sky, often blue, generally grey. Houses on the other side of the road. This time of year, swift acrobatics.

Laura:  What did you do before working on the Launchpad team?
Martin:   Bazaar! Which is still a pretty key part of how Launchpad works. In between I worked on a cloud api proxy, which has sensibly been dropped in favour of just using the native openstack api.

Laura:  What did you do before working at Canonical?
Martin:  Whatever came up, computer support and some development work.

Laura: How did you get into free software?
Martin:  Mostly from using it, having it break horribly, and getting the urge to make the code actually work.

Laura:  What’s more important? Principle or pragmatism?
Martin:  Principle is more important, otherwise you compromise all the way to  the other side. But you need some pragmatism to get anything done at all.

Laura: Do you/have you contribute(d) to any free software projects?
Martin:  I’ve tended to submit changes for anything I use heavily at the time, and to various bzr related projects. I’d use this space to hector some maintainer who’d been sitting on a patch for ages, but everyone’s been organised of late.

Laura:  Tell us something really cool about Launchpad that not enough people know about.
Martin:  It actually works pretty well in lynx!

Laura:  Is there anything in particular that you want to change in Launchpad?
Martin:  You mean apart from making it work better in lynx? I’d like bug search to suck less.

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2 Responses to “Meet Martin Packman in the Blue squad”

  1. homi Says:

    if i could suggest something for Launchpad: large lp bug pages are still a huge pita with ff…

  2. Rohit Deshmukh Says:

    Why is pic of Martin is blurred ?

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