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It’s the turn of Данило Шеган (Danilo Segan) in the second of our Launchpad developer interviews.

Matthew: What do you do on the Launchpad team?

Danilo: I am one of the Launchpad Translations (formerly known as Rosetta) developers. Launchpad Translations is a tool to help manage translations in free software projects. It’s usually considered Ubuntu-only, but that’s far from truth: Launchpad Translations is used by few tens of upstream projects as well.

Matthew: What can we see in Launchpad that you’ve worked on?

Danilo: I’ve worked on many bits of Launchpad Translations: notable things are large improvements on the suggest-review workflow, tracking of translations changed from upstream, native KDE 3 PO format support, and searching through translations in PO files. Basically, whenever you are on any page on translations.launchpad.net, you are bound to be on a page which I have almost surely worked on.

I also spent a lot of time working with rest of the team behind the scenes help make Launchpad Translations perform well enough to not be a bottleneck of translation efforts (anybody here remembers infamous timeouts on +translate pages?).

Matthew: Where do you work?

Danilo: I either work from home or from an office shared with a few of my friends in Belgrade, Serbia: a combination of designers and web developers who it’s always fun to chat with. In the future, I want to make better use of advantages working from home have, and that means exploring different parts of the world for longer periods of time.

Matthew: What can you see from your office window?

Danilo: Some sky, and a few buildings, along with the small park. When at home, I can see bigger part of New Belgrade and Zemun (parts of Belgrade) from my window on 11th floor. This makes for a wonderful view during night, so it’s always a good way to impress girls. 🙂

Matthew: What did you do before working at Canonical?

Danilo: I did a lot of free software development, especially in GNOME, where I provided lot of i18n and l10n infrastructure (like l10n.gnome.org, developing xml2po, and maintaining intltool).

Just before joining Canonical, I also did a short stint working for a mobile software development company and worked on kick-starting their VoIP software development for Linux mobile phones equipped with WiFi chips as well.

Matthew: How did you get into free software?

That’s a tricky question if I am to be completely honest. So I won’t be completely honest. 🙂 In short, I never got to like Windows, and kept developing DOS applications during Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 days. Terms like “extended” and “expanded” memory became too familiar concepts, and then suddenly I just stumbled upon a copy of Slackware 3 (or something) on floppy disks. After a few years of using it, I just wanted to contribute more, and in 2001 I started actively participating in free software communities.

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

Danilo: Most important are pragmatic principles. In essence, I feel principles are more important, but pragmatism is the shortest way to them (even if that sounds contradictory).

Matthew: Other than what you’ve already mentioned, do you contribute to any free software projects?

Danilo: Apart from the localization tools (gettext, intltool, xml2po, Serbian translations), I’ve also spent some time recently on OpenStreetMap which I readily recommend to anyone (OpenStreetMap is not a free software project per se, but it is in the same spirit 🙂 — and I even submitted a patch for JOSM to fix some login issues.

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

Danilo: Launchpad Translations is available as a translation collaboration tool, for every project, even upstream ones which have separate translation procedures. To properly set this up, we restrict access only to actual upstream translation teams who are aware that manual submission of translations is still necessary.

But, if you are willing to do some of the administrative work yourself (at least until we make that automatic), you can easily make use of the Launchpad Translations collaborative translation features today!

Matthew: What was the last song you listened to?

Danilo: Whatever thing a friend at the table next to mine is actually playing. It’s not too loud not to mess anyone’s concentration (so hard to figure out which song was it), but still provides some enjoyable ambient noise.

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

Danilo: Most likely, I am checking it’s still there (the wallet!).

I know my debit card number by heart since I’m regularly using it to buy different services and products online (I even pay for my Internet access with my debit card)—and I would be using it more if more web sites would ship to Serbia.

This entry was posted by Matthew Revell on Sunday, November 9th, 2008 at 10:15 am 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.