Meet Deryck Hodge
Published by Matthew Revell September 10, 2009 in Meet the devs
Recently, Deryck Hodge took over from Bjorn Tillenius as the leader of Canonical’s Launchpad Bug Tracker team. That seemed like a good chance to catch up with Deryck. I’ll post an updated interview with Bjorn soon covering his new role as Launchpad Technical Architect.
Matthew: What do you do on the Launchpad team?
Deryck: I work on the bugs application in Launchpad and am also, as of two weeks ago, the bugs team lead.
Matthew: Can we see something in Launchpad that you’ve worked on?
Deryck: I’ve been doing Ajax work on the bug page mostly. All of the inline bug subscription work is by me, and the inline description editing as well.
Matthew: Where do you work?
Deryck: I’m in Dadeville, Alabama, a very small town no one has everheard of. It’s not far from Auburn, a university town in Alabama. It’s a nice rural community around Alabama’s largest man-made lake.
Matthew: What can you see from your office window?
Deryck: The short answer is my drive way. The longer, more accurate, answer is a Barbie go-kart and two little tyke
four wheelers (of which none of them run), a pile of old lumber, some cardboard to take to recyle, and my dog, lying under the steps of my porch. I’m hesistant to tell all this as it makes me so much of a Southern cliche here in the U.S.
Matthew: What did you do before working at Canonical?
Deryck: I worked for several media companies. I worked for a company in Las Vegas called Greenspun Media most recently. And before that, I worked for the Washington Post Company and Scripps. I worked on all manner of web apps, but I had particular experiences in social applications — Facebook Platform, Open Social, iPhone, etc. I was even Emmy nominated as a developer if you can believe it (along with two colleagues) for a project I did while at the Post.
Matthew: How did you get into free software?
Deryck: Initially, a friend of mine gave me a RedHat CD. He was a Samba dev and was constanly talking with me about FOSS, so I knew a bit just from conversations with him. I was interested in learning to code and really getting into the
personal freedom FOSS granted. I tried RedHat for a while, then left it. Then, I came back to Linux as I was learning more about coding, spent some time on Suse and then settled on Ubuntu early on after it appeared.
Really, my interest in coding and FOSS are intertwined. I wouldn’t have learned to code had I not had access to free software and friends in FOSS who mentored me.
Matthew: What’s more important? Principle or pragmatism?
Deryck: I’m pragmatic in my pursuit of principal. 🙂 Seriously, though, principal drives everything for me, but I think you have to be pragmatic in achieving the goals that are derived from your principals. Some things are possible now, some in the future, and I try to be realistic about what can be achieved in the pursuit of my principals.
Matthew: Do you/have you contribute(d) to any free software projects?
Deryck: I have been a Samba Team member for a little over 5 years now. I don’t work on Samba itself, but I have done a fair amount of work in supporting the project through maintaining its web sites, web apps, and related servers. I have some
minor, older contributions to Samba itself for SWAT and a couple of the VFS modules. I also have done some small contributions to Django in the past. I wish I could get back to helping on Django more. It’s one of those projects that’s just close to my heart.
Matthew: Tell us something really cool about Launchpad that not enough people know about.
Deryck: It’s open source! Okay, so maybe some people have heard of that, but we should say it again. Launchpad is open source! Come hack on it with us!
Matthew: One of your favourite bands is Marillion. They’re about to release a stripped-back accoustic album. Are you ever tempted to take a stripped-back, simpler, almost “accoustic” approach to your code?
Deryck: I would love to be simpler, more “accoustic” as you say. But I wonder if my code isn’t more like Marillion’s Brave — a bit winding with some personal digressions, but (hopefully) a satisfying piece of work all the same.
Matthew: Okay, Kiko’s special question! You’re at your computer, you reach for your wallet: what are you most likely to be doing?
Deryck: I’m addicted to buying online. I’m an easy sell for digital work — music, books, art. Anything I can carry on my phone, ebook reader, or laptop. I’m a bit of a virtual worlds addict, too. So I probably spend too much on Second Life. I’m the poster boy for funding the web via micro payments. 🙂
Matthew: Thanks Deryck!
New guides to translating your project
Published by Matthew Revell August 27, 2009 in Translations
I’ve revamped our guides to translating your project in Launchpad, with help from Jeroen and Danilo. You can find them here:
https://help.launchpad.net/Translations/YourProject
Let me know if you think there’s anything missing or that could be better explained.
Wear your badge with pride
Published by Matthew Revell August 24, 2009 in General
Want an easy way to direct people to your pages in Launchpad? Whether it’s for yourself or your project, you can pop one of our new badges on your website:
You can choose badges from 160px wide to 250px and we even host the badge for you, so all you need is to copy and paste the image URL.
Take a look at our badge kit page for the legal details and also to see the image URLs.
Screencast: generating and adding a PGP key to Launchpad
Published by Matthew Revell August 21, 2009 in General
You’ll need a PGP key registered in your Launchpad account if you want to use the bug tracker’s email interface, sign a Code of Conduct or upload a package.
There’s a guide in the help wiki and also now this screencast!
MySQL at Facebook on Launchpad
Published by Deryck Hodge in Projects
I spotted this link in my Facebook news feed yesterday: MySQL at Facebook is a Launchpad project to which Facebook publishes its patches for MySQL. There is also a Facebook note announcing the new project.
Surely Launchpad’s social networking credentials are in order now, and it’s just fun to point to a Facebook page on Launchpad rather than a Launchpad page on Facebook.
Screencast: sharing translations between releases of the same project
Published by Matthew Revell in Translations
Danilo blogged recently about Launchpad’s new feature which shares translations between releases of the same project.
Here’s a screencast showing how it works!
Screencast: exporting translations to a Bazaar branch
Published by Matthew Revell August 19, 2009 in Translations
As a follow-up to yesterday’s screen cast on importing translation template files from a Bazaar branch, here’s how to get Launchpad to regularly export your project’s translations to a Bazaar branch of your choice.
New design, out in the wild
Published by Martin Albisetti August 18, 2009 in Coming changes
Yesterday, our new design has started to roll out on the edge servers. This will be an incremental and iterative process, as all the pieces come together, where our best ideas and speculations meet production data.
One of the conversations we had when re-designing the Launchpad UI, was that projects should be more on the foreground. They are what make Launchpad great, and the more projects that use it, the more powerful the tool gets. While breadcrumbs are still being worked on (they will look more like breadcrumbs and be more detailed), project pages now highlights the project’s logo and name:
New changes being rolled out on a daily basis. Exciting times!
Screencast: importing translation templates from a Bazaar branch
Published by Matthew Revell in Translations
Here’s a screencast showing just how quick and easy it is to set up a continuous import of a translation template from your series’ default Bazaar branch!
Zim and the art of wiki development
Published by Matthew Revell August 13, 2009 in Projects
Zim is a desktop wiki that use both Launchpad and Bazaar. I asked Jaap Karssenberg, its founder and main developer, about the project.
Matthew: How does Zim compare with something like Tomboy?
Jaap: I really don’t know as I never used Tomboy for an extensive amount of time — it wasn’t around yet when I first started with Zim. From interface design I get the feeling Tomboy is designed as a replacement for sticky notes while Zim was designed as a replacement for an outliner. I think Zim is more tailored towards structuring notes. But Tomboy is moving fast as it has seemingly more developers and of course it gets traction from being included in Gnome.
Matthew: Do you think desktop wikis will eventually take over from larger applications, such as OpenOffice.org Writer, now that we’re increasingly producing documents for distribution online rather than via paper?
Jaap: I don’t think so, both serve different purposes. Wikis are very useful for storing information and building a knowledge base. Websites to some point have the same use cases, so a program like Zim can be used to build a website (in fact the Zim website itself is maintained in Zim). Office applications on the other hand are used when the focus is on layout and presentation of the data (e.g. writer and presenter) or do specialized calculations (e.g. calc). In my own workflow, I use Zim to collect notes about all my ongoing projects and this changes from day to day. When I need to produce a document these notes are the raw material, but I use an office application to produce a polished document. When such a document is finished itis published and does not change anymore.
Matthew: One of the great advantages of web-based wikis is collaboration. Does Zim have any features to enable collaboration?
Jaap: Zim has plugins to use version control like Bazaar or Subversion on the wiki data. My take on collaboration is that it can be done for a wiki the same way it can be done for code. Obviously you would need some betteer graphical interfaces for non-programmers to use it, but why not. This features doubles as backup mechanism and as synchronization. I especially like Bazaar for this due to it’s decentralized nature which fits a document concept real well.
Matthew: Are you looking for contributors?
Jaap: Always. Now it is just me on two nights a week and one or two irregular patch submitters. But we do have a lot of translators contributing already and
someone working on windows packages, which is very good. Still I feel the project is to much driven by a single developer.
Matthew: Why did you choose Launchpad and Bazaar?
Jaap: Bazaar was a logical choice as I was an avid Arch user before subversion and other modern version control systems arrived on the scene.
In the past I hosted projects on Sourceforge because I didn’t have my own hosting and needed centralized CVS etc. After some frustration I moved to Gnu Arch for version control and started hosting myself. But I started using Launchpad to allow translators to contribute and gradually discovered more useful features. I still have my own hosting contract for the website and put the bazaar branches there, but Launchpad is useful for contributers of other branches, translations and the bug tracker. Also running the mailing list there since my hosting provider doesn’t offer one. In short it spares me the work of setting up and maintaining those services myself.
Matthew: Thanks Jaap!
