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We’re back in New Zealand for today’s Launchpad developer interview with Tim Penhey.

Matthew: What do you do on the Launchpad team?

Tim: I lead the team that works on the Bazaar code-hosting side of Launchpad. This includes all the pages that are under the “Code” tab, the linking of branches to other parts of the Launchpad system, the services and scripts behind the scenes that allow the hosting of branches, and the branch browser (Loggerhead).

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

Tim: I’ve touched probably every page visible under the “Code” tab. A large amount of work is going into the work flows around code reviews, and that is where I’ve been spending a lot of time recently.

Matthew: Where do you work?

Tim: I work from home, and home for me is currently Dunedin, New Zealand. I turned one of the bedrooms in the house into an office, which contains my desk, a nice comfortable leather chair, and too much computer equipment.

Matthew: What can you see from your office window?

Tim: Our deck, and beyond that our back yard which is mostly grass with a trampoline for the girls and part of the garden which currently has several pumpkin plants doing extremely well.

Matthew: What did you do before working at Canonical?

Tim: I worked as a contract developer in London, UK. I primarily worked at investment banks working on their back office risk systems. I had worked for Lehman Brothers (RIP), Royal Bank of Scotland, Barclays Capital, and Cantor Fitzgerald. Prior to that I had a stint at Reuters working on their stock exchange connectivity software.

Matthew: How did you get into free software?

Tim: Sometimes I wonder if I am “into” free software. As far as using free software, I’ve had an aversion to paying for Microsoft software when perfectly good free alternatives were around for a while. I toyed with Linux a couple of times back with Red Had 7.1, and some SUSE version shortly after that, but I didn’t make the switch until I came across the Hoary Hedgehog release candidate. I’ve been using Ubuntu since then.

I’ve been meaning to get into actually contributing to free software for so long. Every time I looked into it I got put off by the massive leaps into a group’s culture and code base. I use KDE and have it as my main desktop almost exclusively, and I’d love to contribute to KDE, but it seems that there are always the “KDE” or “QT” ways of doing things. I had a background in C++, but they don’t use what I’d consider “pure” C++, so there is always a huge learning curve, and I don’t have the time right now to invest in that. I have a three girls, 8, 6, and 3 and a half (don’t forget the half), and they take up a lot of my non-work time. I’ve had the opportunity to contribute a few small patches to Bazaar, and I’d still like to contribute to other projects.

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

Tim: That’s like saying: What is more important? Food or water? They are both important. Particularly when developing code if you don’t have one tempered
with the other you end up unreadable spaghetti or gold plated code. I lean towards more principle as it tends to give cleaner code, but sometimes pragmatism wins out to actually get code out and useful. Code that isn’t used might as well not be written.

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

Tim: I’ve got a couple of small patches into Bazaar. I use aliases a lot with bash, and also with Bazaar, but didn’t like that I had to edit the configuration file to add aliases, so scratching my own itch, I added the ‘alias’ command to Bazaar. I’ve also done some work on the PQM project, but most of my work is on Launchpad.

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

Tim: Code reviews. We are actively working to make them better, but the coolest thing about code reviews in Launchpad, is that you can do them entirely through email. Not only can you go to the web page and add a comment, and that comment gets emailed out to all interested parties, but you can reply to the emails using your mail client, and those replies are parsed, added to the review, and emailed out to the interested parties just as if you had entered them through the web interface.

A lot of work has also gone in recently to expose the code review functionality through launchpadlib as well. This will allow people to integrate Launchpad’s review functionality into other tools.

Matthew: Is the film Eagle v Shark an accurate picture of life in New Zealand?

Tim: To be honest, I have no idea as I haven’t seen the film. It has been on my list of something to get on DVD at some stage, but I don’t have it yet.

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

Tim: Getting my credit card to pay for books from Amazon. Books are very expensive in NZ. On my coffee scale, it is almost twice as expensive as the UK. Three coffees in the UK for a paperback, whereas it is closer to five or six coffees in NZ.

Matthew: Thanks Tim!

Today it’s Brad Crittenden‘s turn in Meet the devs.

Matthew: What do you do on the Launchpad team?

Brad: I work on the Registry team. We handle everything to do with people and teams, projects, series, milestones, and user communications, such as mailing lists.

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

Brad: I do a lot of behind-the-scenes work. The most prominent new feature I did, with my colleagues Edwin Grubbs and Elliot Murphy, was implement the Atom feeds. Trivially, I also set up the launchpadbugs account on Twitter which a lot of folks have found very handy.

Matthew: Where do you work?

Brad: I work from my home near Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Matthew: What can you see from your office window?

Brad: I have a nice office on the second floor of my house and have my desk in front of a large window looking out onto the woods. I rigged up a pulley system so I have a large bird feeder in a tree about 25 feet off the ground where I get a lot of gold finches and other small birds. Lately a pileated woodpecker has been visiting almost daily. A while back I was surprised to see this guy lurking near the feeder.

Matthew: What did you do before working at Canonical?

Brad: I worked for a company that made a cryptography acceleration chip for doing crazy fast random number generation and making SSL and IPSec negotiations and bulk encryption speedy. I spent a lot of my time deep in the OpenSSL code, which is a dark, twisty place.

Matthew: How did you get into free software?

Brad: All of my previous work has depended on Linux, open source libraries, and the GNU toolchain so I knew a lot about it and was able to move into the world quite easily when I started with Canonical.

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

Brad: It’s not an either/or question for me. You’ve got to get the job done (pragmatism) but within a reasonable framework that will best serve yourself and your users in the long run (principle). In some situations the stakes are so high you can’t afford to compromise on the principles even slightly.

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

Brad: I’ve contributed through the years to various projects I use by sending in code patches, filing bugs, and doing some documentation work. I have not yet gotten directly involved in any major projects but hope to do so soon.

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

Brad: Launchpad was built to support the development of Ubuntu and the open source ecosystem — everyone knows that. What a lot of people don’t know is that commercial or closed source projects can also use Launchpad. Since they aren’t directly giving back to the open source world we do ask they contribute to our operating costs by purchasing an annual commercial-use subscription. People can email me if they have questions or need help getting started.

Matthew: Which lens would you save from a house fire?

Brad: Of all of my lenses my favorite is actually the least expensive — a Nikkor 50mm/f1.4 — it’s incredibly sharp and produces an amazing bokeh. But in the event of a fire I’d ignore the equipment, it’s all insured and replaceable, and grab my 2Tb RAID drive that has my photos. (This reminds me I need to flesh out my off-site backup solution…)

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

Paying to run our test suite on ec2, of course!

Matthew: Ah, of course 🙂 Thanks Brad!

Michael Hudson is the latest member of the Launchpad team to face a friendly grilling.

Matthew: What do you do on the Launchpad team?

Michael: I work on the Launchpad Code team, which means I work on the side of Launchpad to do with hosting, finding, viewing, importing and reviewing source code. What I do personally seems to mostly involve backend stuff — I did a lot of work on the infrastructure around the code import system that allows importing CVS and Subversion branches to Bazaar, and if you’ve used stacked branches on Launchpad, you’ll have used some of my code.

I also help maintain Loggerhead, the web viewer for Bazaar branches, which we run on Launchpad but also try to keep easy to install and use for every user of Bazaar.

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

Michael: Actually seeing something I’ve done is a little hard, for reasons I’ve explained above 🙂 Loggerhead is a counter-example, and if you’ve used codehosting in any way you will have “seen” my code 🙂

Matthew: Where do you work?

Michael: Palmerston North, New Zealand.

Matthew: What can you see from your office window?

Michael: The back of the garage. It’s not a very exciting view. I can see the Tararua mountains from the end of my drive on a clear day though.

Matthew: What did you do before working at Canonical?

Michael: I worked for the Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf as part of the EU project on PyPy, the Python implementation of Python.

Matthew: How did you get into free software?

Michael: A fairly standard way, I think… I was always interested in computersand programming as a kid, and then when I got to uni and found the internet and all this activity, I also found that bugs were pretty easy both to find and (sometimes) to fix 🙂 After getting over the nervousness of sending my first patch off and having it gratefully received, it just grew from there.

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

Michael: Well… probably pragmatism, but… way back in 1999 Eric Raymond said “I want to live in a world where software doesn’t suck”, and for all that I don’t agree with much else ESR says, I think this is a good rallying cry. But I also think the free software approach has the best chance of producing software that doesn’t suck, so I don’t know that the question is really fair 🙂

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

Michael: I was pretty heavily involved in CPython development from around 2000 to 2004, where I did a bit of everything, reviewing and applying patches,
fixing bugs, keeping an eye on the state of trunk, being a release manager, editing bits of the website etc.

These days, aside from maintaining Loggerhead on work time, I contribute the occasional fix to Bazaar and try to do contribute a bit to Twisted — usually code reviews of late.

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

Michael: I think the display of unmerged revisions on the branch merge proposal page is pretty cool — it gives you a feel for what’s been going on in the branch that you’re about to review.

Matthew: What’s been most unexpected about your move from the UK to New Zealand?

Michael: Superlatives like “most” always scare me, so here’s two answers:

1) I was surprised by how much of New Zealand has been affected by human occupation, mostly farming and forestry, but also

2) I knew New Zealand had many famously beautiful sights, but I’ve been surprised by how much beauty there is to be found down random side roads. Kaitoke Park, Mount Damper falls, the Mount Messenger pass, Whanganui Bay — these aren’t famous places, but they’re almost as amazing as the places that are.

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

Michael: Trying to find the card I need to get past my bank’s challenge-response log in system.

Matthew: Thanks Michael!

Next in the chair for our Meet the devs series is Martin Albisetti, also know as beuno.

Matthew: What do you do on the Launchpad team?

Martin: I’m in charge of the user interface, making sure that new (and existing!) features and pages are easy to use and slick. I have been on board for about six months, so I haven’t managed to fully sink my teeth into everything yet, but we’re getting there, and the next few months will be an amazing succession of roll outs of AJAX enhancements everywhere, which should improve the overall experience dramatically.

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

Martin: Well, if you use Launchpad for a few minutes, you will inevitably encouter pages that have gone through me before landing. I don’t get to actually do much coding, although I have recently done a few improvements to the Launchpad home page, and gave shape to the in-line text editing that’s already in the wild (although it was a team work effort with Mark).

Matthew: Where do you work?

Martin: From my office in sunny Buenos Aires.

Matthew: What can you see from your office window?

Martin: A nice garden with very green grass, flowers and palm trees.

Matthew: What did you do before working at Canonical?

Martin: I have a web development company (Pentacorp), so I’ve been doing almost everything related to web development (php, mysql, design, server admin) for the past 6 or 7 years. The web fascinates me 🙂

Matthew: How did you get into free software?

Martin: Free software just had better tools for web development, and was a much nicer and saner enviroment to work in, so I started moving over until one day I woke up with no proprietary software on my laptop.

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

Martin: Oh, you and your hard questions… I’m inclined towards pragmatism, I like to get things done more than I like being right!

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

Martin: I have, it’s almost impossible not to once you start using it. I’ve done some work on Bazaar, I’ve been co-maintaining Loggerhead for 8 or 9 months, done some bzr-gtk, and have spread around patches on dozen of projects out there. You have to love the “scratch your own itches” properties of free software.

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

Martin: Launchpad developers really care deeply about users and user experience, I was amazed as to how much when I joined Canonical.

Also, merge proposals for code branches. They’re like the best thing ever.

Matthew: Is Argentine steak really the best in the world?

Martin: Yes, and probably in the known universe.

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

Martin: Moving it to my front pocket, my leg gets numb if I sit down for too long with my wallet in my back pocket.

Matthew: Thanks very much Martin!

Jonathan Lange‘s the next subject in our series of Launchpad developer interviews!

Matthew: What do you do on the Launchpad team?

Jonathan: I’m on the Launchpad Code team. Most of the time I work on the SSH server and the systems that live behind it. I don’t often do stuff with the website proper.

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

Jonathan: Sure! Every time you go “bzr branch lp:some-project“, you are touching three or four subsystems that I’ve worked on. The biggest thing that I’ve worked on recently is stacked branch support for Launchpad. Finally, Launchpad can host Bazaar branches for large projects!

Matthew: Where do you work?

Jonathan: I work in a flat on the North Shore of Sydney.

Matthew: What can you see from your office window?

Jonathan: I can see a petrol station, the oxymoronically named Pacific Highway, joggers near-dying from heat exhaustion and Jacaranda trees.

Matthew: What did you do before working at Canonical?

Jonathan: Directly before, I worked at Divmod on their webmail software, Quotient. They were great people.

Matthew: How did you get into free software?

Jonathan: During a quest to rescue the true king from the sorcerous clutches of an evil duke, I ingested an ancient Tibetan philtre that granted me the ability to walk through walls, and compelled me to give away Python code every so often.

Actually, what happened is that a company I used to work for seconded me to the Australian Federal government. The work was so dull that at the end of each day I found myself with stacks of mental energy. For some reason, I channeled this energy into writing a unit testing framework for Twisted.

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

Jonathan: Principle. It comes first, giving scope, boundaries and purpose to pragmatism.

That said, one of my most deeply held principles is that things that you do a lot of should be really, really convenient. This often takes shape as a kind of pragmatism.

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

Jonathan: Yes!

I work on Twisted, although less now that Launchpad keeps me so busy. I also work occasionally on bzr-loom, and dabble with a bunch of projects that enhance unit testing in Python — see https://launchpad.net/pyunit-friends

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

Jonathan: If you are working on a Bazaar branch, and do “bzr commit --fixes lp:12345” and then push that branch up to Launchpad, Launchpad will make a link between that branch and bug 12345.

This could be a lot cooler. Martin A and I have some ideas about how we can integrate this more tightly with the code review system, for example.

Matthew: Have you ever seen Harold Bishop in the flesh?

Jonathan: I don’t know who he is. Oh wait is he that guy from Neighbours?

I haven’t seen him, but once I got served at a bar by Will from Home and Away — does that count?

Matthew: Yes. Yes it does.

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

Jonathan: Most recently, it’s been because I signed up to EC2 so I could run tests without buying another computer. Normally though, I’m buying books. Generally non fiction ones, because I’d hate to deprive myself of the pleasure of walking around a bookstore for hours.

Henning Eggers is the most recent member of the Launchpad Translations team, working with Danilo and Jeroen. Let’s find out a bit more about him.

Matthew: What do you do on the Launchpad team?

Henning: I am a software developer on the Translations team. So far I have worked a lot on the importing and approval code. As of last week I am also the QA contact for our team.

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

Henning: Not yet, unless you are a member of the rosetta-experts team … 😉

Matthew: Where do you work?

Henning: Pinneberg, 30 km north-west of Hamburg, Germany. Hamburg is close to the North Sea, which is about as far away from Bavaria and Munich as you can get in Germany. I do not own any Lederhosen nor do I know anybody that does.

Matthew: What can you see from your office window?

Henning: I am on the fifth (or sixth, depending on where you are from) floor and I see a tree with a magpie’s nest in it (no birds currently). Beyond that the “skyline” of central Pinneberg (population of 35000).

Matthew: What did you do before working at Canonical?

Henning: I was self-employed doing free-lance work for several customers but I had one big customer that also let me have a desk in their building. I’d been working there for 6 years (with a break) until I came here. I programmed in C, C++, Java, PHP and Python (of course), mostly network-related stuff and also some real-time data-processing lately. I was also one of the Linux experts in the company.

Matthew: How did you get into free software?

Henning: As a Linux user, really. Kernel 0.99pl13 was my starting point when I used several computers in my universities data center to copy Slackware onto a pile of floppy disks. Compiling the kernel was an over-nighter back then although I had an excessive 16 MB of RAM on my 386…

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

Well, obviously that depends on the matter involved. My principles are there to form the basis for any decision in my life but they don’t give me an answer to all of life’s possible situation. That is when pragmatism kicks in. With regard to free software, it is definitely pragmatism.

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

Henning: I never got to be involved much in writing free software before joining Launchpad, I am sorry.

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

Henning: You don’t have to do your translations on-line. You can download them, edit them off-line and then re-upload them. Although, once our user interface is all ajaxy, nobody may want to do that any more…

Matthew: What is the deal with German people loving David Hasselhoff?

Henning: David who?

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

Henning: Using my credit card to buy tickets, memberships, software or something like that. I also use it to mange my bank account and transfer money after a successful eBay hunt.

Our previous Meet the developers interview was with a man known by his irc nick rockstar.

On the Launchpad team we have another rock star, the bass playing Mr Barry Warsaw!

Matthew: What do you do on the Launchpad team?

Barry: In general, it is my life’s work to see Zawinski’s Law fully realized in everything I touch. To that end, most of my Launchpad work has been to add spam vectors, er, I mean mailing lists to Launchpad. I don’t know why anybody would think I know something about mailing lists, but there you have it.

These days, the basic mailing list features are working pretty well, so I’ve been concentrating on other things, though often email related, such as the recent “Contact this user” feature.

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

Barry: If you’ve used the Launchpad mailing lists, you’ve used stuff I’ve worked on. If you try out the new “Contact this user” feature in Launchpad 2.1.11, you will be using my stuff. Well, that’s only if you like those features. If you hate them, someone else did it.

Matthew: Where do you work?

Barry: I work out of my home in Silver Spring, Maryland USA. Well, I did up until about a week ago, when I moved into a temporary rental house while we’re doing some work on our real house. I live about a mile walking distance from Washington DC.

Matthew: What can you see from your office window?

Barry: Right now, not much other than the side of my neighbor’s house, but when I’m back in my real home, I have a somewhat less boring view of the neighborhood. I can see all the way up the street leading to my house, so I’m always prepared when the Fedex truck drops off the latest awesome mugs and hoodies from the Ubuntu store (/me waits for his endorsement bonus check).

Matthew: What did you do before working at Canonical?

Barry: Directly before coming to Canonical I worked at a company called Secure Software, incidentally with Mailman’s original inventor John Viega, though we were not working on Mailman. Secure built products around static analysis of C, C++, and Java code for security vulnerabilities. It was very cool software and allowed me to do a lot of C, C++ and Java hacking as well as the usual big pile of Python. I also did more Windows development than I’d ever done before, and let’s just say it’s nice to be working for the makers of Ubuntu now! Unfortunately — or maybe fortunately — Secure did not overwhelm in the market and, here I am!

I’ve been pretty lucky to work at some great places, though my career has been pretty eclectic. I’ve been able to do a lot of open source and free software, both officially and incidentally in my career. I won’t bore you with the ten page resume though.

Matthew: How did you get into free software?

Barry: Well, I’m an old timer so I’ve actually been into free software probably before the term was even invented! My first real software job was as a summer intern at the National Bureau of Standards (now NIST), a US Federal research lab in suburban Maryland. I was hacking on homebrew graphics systems for robotic real time control and visualization, and most of the work was in FORTH. There was a pretty vibrant FORTH community and we shared lots of code, often by 8″ floppy disks, 9 track tapes and over the original ARPAnet and uucp. I continued with NBS/NIST after I graduated college and our lab eventually migrated to early SunOS systems. By that time I was learning C and hacking Unix, Emacs, window systems, etc. Back then at least, the software that US federal employees wrote was not subject to copyright (because it was taxpayer funded), so it was easy to give away, and it’s always seemed very natural for me to share code.

A few years ago I searched some of the various Usenet archives for early postings of mine. I think my first public post was of some Emacs trinket I wrote in 1985. It was probably what eventually became Supercite. In any case, tapping into that culture and its social interactions really got me hooked. I made a lot of friends online and I’ve been very luck to keep many of them and even meet some of them in the real world.

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

Barry: The Zen of Python says “Practicality beats purity”.

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

Yes, quite a few actually.

These days I’m most active in Python and GNU Mailman, though there are probably a dozen or so FLOSS projects I contribute to in various ways. I used to contribute a lot to Emacs and XEmacs, but these days I prefer to just be a (l)user. I also tend to scratch my own itch, and hosting projects on Launchpad and using Bazaar makes that just incredibly easy. For example, I needed an email robot on some of my public email addresses, so I wrote ‘replybot‘ which tries to do that totally anti-social job in the most standards-compliant way possible. Even though the package is published on the Python Cheeseshop, all the project management happens on Launchpad. In fact GNU Mailman itself is hosted on Launchpad now too.

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

Barry: Merge proposals are my latest kick. We use them a lot on the Launchpad project, and I think they’re a great way to manage branches, review code, and link them to bugs, milestones and releases. I’m not yet sure how useful all that stuff is for smaller projects, but for a large complicated beast like Launchpad, merge proposals are really great.

Matthew: Four string, six string or fretless?

Barry: Ah, what a great question, but those are not either/ors! 🙂 I firmly believe that if you can’t play a 4, you have no business with more strings. Guitar players would be wise to heed that advice. 🙂 I played bass for almost 25 years before I got my first 5 string, and it’ll probably be another 25 before I get a 6. My grandkids will have to slap and pop that hi C string for me though.

Fretlesses are very cool, and I played a 4 fretless (with a hipshot) almost exclusively for many years, though I am no Jaco. A good “mwaahh” just makes me so happy. My main axe these days though is a fretted MTD American 535. Having that gut rumbling low B string is just too much fun, though you have to use it tastefully. I’m still saving up for a fretless 535 to match my main axe, but it’s much harder to sneak those things past my wife these days. 🙂

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

Barry: Okay, this is a family show, right?

I do purchase a lot of stuff online. I hate going to the malls and I really hate shopping so if I can get through the holidays without getting in my car, it’s a success. One of our favorite places is Zappos because you can just order like $10,000 worth of shoes, keep the one pair you like and send them all back for free. I do buy the occasional software, but not too much ongoing services, though I’m currently looking at encrypted, secure online backups. I do tend to like to roll my own though, since hacking is so much fun.

Thanks for listening!

Now it’s time to speak to Paul Hummer — the man known as rockstar — as he spills all about his life in the Launchpad team.

Matthew: What do you do on the Launchpad team?

Paul: I help integrate Bazaar into Launchpad. Basically, anything under code.launchpad.net is where I am.

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

Paul: Much of the layout for Launchpad 2.0 was work I did. I’m currently working on making the import system better and exposing much of Launchpad’s merge proposal functionality through the API.

Matthew: Where do you work?

Paul: In the basement office of my home in Fort Collins, CO, USA.

Matthew: What can you see from your office window?

Paul: There’s currently a squirrel looking down the window well, teasing Choco (my dog).

Matthew: What did you do before working at Canonical?

Paul: Early on, I helped write a social networking webapp in PHP for the Bakersfield Californian newspaper. After that, I did a lot of independent consulting for everything from managing virtual machines and mobile payment processing to RFID research and embedded Linux development.

Matthew: How did you get into free software?

Paul: In a nutshell, I would dig old computers out of the trash when the Colorado State University students would throw them away at the end of the school year. Usually, none of them had a ton of guts, so Windows wouldn’t run well on them. I discovered Red Hat 4, and it was just momentum after that.

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

Paul: I think it’s quite possible to have both. I’m very much against extremes in either direction, but I think it’s good to have a good set of pragmatic principles.

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

Paul: It depends on your definition of “contribute.” Advocacy? Too many apps to count. Bug reporting? Quite a few.

As far as actually writing code, I think my first contributions were when I was 16, to apps that apparently aren’t around anymore. Recently, my contributions include loggerhead, cscvs, many Django apps, and a pretty new media center application called Entertainer.

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

Paul: Ooh! Ooh! I have two things. First, merge proposals are AWESOME. We’ve been using them in Entertainer since very early on. They’ve come a long way, and I think they have an obvious role to play in increasing the quality of free software. I pity free software projects that don’t have a formal code review process.

The second is code imports. I feel like LP users have this wonderful opportunity to work on patches for other open source projects without having to do the “prove yourself” dance to get commit access. Hacka hacka on a bzr branch until your patch is ready, and then submit it to the core devs. This way, you get all your work versioned, instead of having a checkout of the svn or CVS from core, and just having one version of your patch (the one created with svn diff).

Matthew: Have you experimented with alternative keyboard layouts?

Paul: Yes. I’m a Dvorak user, although my netbook is still on Qwerty. One thing I’ve noticed is that more often than not, you get typo’d words that make other words. For instance, ‘r’ and ‘l’ are right next to each other, and so when I try to type ‘whole’ I often type something offensive by accident.

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

Paul: Let me just say that the most evilly genius thing Amazon.com does is SAVE my credit card number, so it’s too easy to spend money there. I buy A LOT of technical books, and recently, a lot of fiction books.

Now it’s time to speak to Ursula Junque in the latest of our Launchpad developer interviews.

Matthew: What do you do on the Launchpad team?

Ursula: Well, my job title is QA Engineer. Each day I watch the OOPSes you sometimes see when using Launchpad, and try to find out what the problem is, then I open bugs, try to get people to fix them and the like. Besides that, I work on assuring that Launchpad versions will be well tested before released. Also, I love doing python scripts to enable my work. I love my job. 🙂

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

Ursula: Since I work with solving bugs in Launchpad, if everything went fine you won’t notice the object of my work. 😉

Matthew: Where do you work?

Ursula: I work from home, that is at the moment in Recife, Brazil.

Matthew: What can you see from your office window?

Ursula: I can see lots of other buildings, some windows already with Christmas decorations, and a school.

Matthew: What did you do before working at Canonical?

Ursula: Right before joining Canonical, I was in a Brazilian telecom company called AsGa, developing the embedded system of a network switch. Before that, I worked at IBM’s Linux Technology Center, in a project that was an overlay of Ubuntu.

Matthew: How did you get into free software?

Ursula: It was when I started my Computer Science graduation at UNICAMP. They had Windows and Linux in there, and also a free software enthusiasts group called GPSL (Pro-Free Software Group, in Portuguese). So, I had the opportunity to use Linux and learn about free software. Well, actually I tried to use Mandrake Linux before that (a really long time ago), but my PC was too slow at the time for KDE, and my family (the PC wasn’t only mine) needed a UI-clicky thing. 🙂

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

Ursula: Hmm, great question. I guess this is the point where Open Source and Free Software people disagree.

I’m more a pragmatic person than one that sticks to principles. I think we have to start somewhere, and having to follow a lot of “rules” sometimes stops you from starting something that would be really great – not perfect, but a start – and that could be “adjusted” with the time. I guess it’s important to have principles to help you to trace the path where you want to go, but being inflexible, in my point of view, is not such a good thing.

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

Ursula: Yes, but not with code. All code I produced were scripts to help me (and people around me) to make life easier. I should have created one project or two from them, but thought, at the time, that it was not worthy to do so. Shame on me, lost pieces of handy code! 🙂

I did translations in Turbogears project documentation to Brazilian Portuguese, and also for a related project called Kid, but I think the major contribution is to stay online on Freenode’s #ubuntu-br and #launchpad trying to help people to get along with stuff. 🙂

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

Ursula: Well, I think the whole of Launchpad is great, but to talk about something related to my job, I’d like to talk about dupefinder. It’s that small piece of Launchpad that is there when we’re about to file a bug. After you fill in the bug summary, it smartly tries to find the most similar bugs, giving us a list of them so we can be sure that we’re not filing a duplicate. It’s simple but extremely useful. 🙂

Matthew: How do you take your coffee?

Ursula: In the first mug I can find among the clean dishes in my kitchen. 🙂

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

Ursula: It’s been a while since I started buying things online, so I’m almost sure I’d be taking out my credit card. 🙂

I always buy things from online stores such as eBay, Mercado Livre (an Argentinian, but huge in Brazil, version of eBay), and local online department stores, where I buy books, CDs, DVDs, eletronics and stuff. Also I have an account on Dreamhost, where I host my blog, that is the only actual online service I pay for.

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.