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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.

This entry was posted by Matthew Revell on Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008 at 3:34 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.