meet the developers on Launchpad Blog

Meet Martin Packman in the Blue squad

Laura czajkowski — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 14:53:48 +0000

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.

Meet Vincent Ladeuil who works in the Blue Squad on Launchpad

Laura czajkowski — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 14:13:21 +0000

Laura: What do you do on the Launchpad team?
Vincent: Maintenance. Although I’m eagerly waiting for the sprint with gmb to get some hints on how to handle the beast :) In the mean time, I’m focusing on fixing bugs and making the udd importer more testable.

Laura: Can we see something that you’ve worked on?
Vincent: https://launchpad.net/bzr and http://babune.ladeuil.net:24842/

Laura: Where do you work?
Vincent: At home

Laura: What can you see from your office window?
Vincent: The venerable Strasbourg post office, lovely old stones.

Laura: What did you do before working on the Launchpad team?
Vincent: Developing bzr.

Laura: What did you do before working at Canonical?
Vincent:Various service/consulting work for > 20 years, including some episodes at software editors.

Laura: How did you get into free software?
Vincent: With pleasure

I think the most important event was in 1993: I encountered a blocking bug in g++ related to C++ templates (way before it was standardized). That was a roadblock, no work-around and it was Friday afternoon. In despair, I posted a reproducing case in the related newsgroup. When I came back to work on Monday I got an email telling me the bug was known and fixed and where to get the patch for the compiler.

That was a light-bulb instant: free software support could be far superior to commercial software support !

One week later, I got a second email asking me if I was out of trouble… Amazing, not only did I get a fix faster than I could have dreamed, but the guy came back to ensure I got it…

I never looked back.

Laura: What’s more important? Principle or pragmatism?
Vincent: Both are important. If you forget one, be prepared to pay the cost. Both are dangerous too if you forget the other:

being pragmatic only most often means you’re adding to your tech debt or rely on others to finish your work,
respecting principles excessively means you never deliver anything.

Laura: Do you/have you contribute(d) to any free software projects?
Vincent: bzr is my most important contributions (including a few plugins). I’ve occasionally sent patches to gtk, perl modules and various other bzr upstream projects.

Laura: Tell us something really cool about Launchpad that not enough people know about.
Vincent: Pass :)

Laura: Is there anything in particular that you want to change in Launchpad?
Vincent: Make it easier to test against for all projects that rely on it (I’m probably biased here as the udd importer severely suffer from not being able to properly test interactions with launchpad (read and write (branch creation mainly)).

Meet Jelmer Vernooij of the blue squad

Laura czajkowski — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 14:23:50 +0000

Laura: What do you do on the Launchpad team?
Jelmer: I’m one of the blue haired freaks on the Launchpad blue squad, although my hair isn’t actually blue - I’m sure we can fix this at the next squad sprint. At the moment, we are working on maintenance: fixing
critical bugs in Launchpad and dealing with incidents.

Laura: Can we see something that you’ve worked on?
Jelmer: I’ve contributed quite a bit to the code behind recipe builds. Most of my work has been on the backend though, not directly user-visible.

Laura: Where do you work?
Jelmer: Like most of us I work at home, which in my case is in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Occasionally I cowork with other teleworkers in Utrecht.

Laura: What can you see from your office window?
Jelmer: At the moment, I see just a big sad drapery made out of rain. On brighter days, I look out on a park and a canal.

Laura: What did you do before working on the Launchpad team?
Jelmer: The Blue squad, which I’m currently in, was originally the Bazaar team. Before that, I worked on the Launchpad team too. This was back in the days when there were no squads, but teams - I was in the Soyuz team. The inimitable Matt Revell interviewed me back in 2010:

Laura: How did you get into free software?
Jelmer: A long time ago, in high school, I ended up maintaining a few server machines running FreeBSD and Samba. After hitting some bugs, a dive into the source code followed to see what I could fix. I’ve been involved with various free software projects ever since.

Laura: What’s more important? Principle or pragmatism?
Jelmer: Do I really have to choose? That’s not very pragmatic.

Laura: Do you/have you contribute(d) to any free software projects?
Jelmer: Beside Launchpad, the main free software project I am involved in is Samba. There are several other projects that I have made major contributions to, such as Bazaar, CUPS, Wireshark, OpenChange, BitlBee.

I’m a Debian maintainer and Ubuntu uploader, mostly for projects I am involved in upstream. This knowledge comes in handy when working on the archive side of Launchpad.

Laura: Tell us something really cool about Launchpad that not enough people know about.
Jelmer: https://launchpad.net/builders lists all the Launchpad builders and
the mischief they are up to.

Laura: Is there anything in particular that you want to change in Launchpad?
Jelmer: It would still be really nice to have dashboards of some kind in
Launchpad. There is even a LEP.