I, David Henningsson, apply for upload rights for package PulseAudio.

Who I am

I'm a software developer from southern part of Sweden. Born in 1980, and I've been programming since I was nine. My special interest is in music/audio software, and I've been working for Canonical with audio infrastructure and enabling hardware for more than a year now.

I also enjoy playing the piano.

My Ubuntu story

• 2007: Switched to Linux/Ubuntu for real. Gutsy was the first release I tried, and I've stayed with Ubuntu since.

• 2009: I became involved with the FluidSynth project (upstream), of which I now one of the lead developers (in my spare time)

• 2009: I also started more and more to be involved with Launchpad work, triaging bugs and so on. I focused on audio bugs for two reasons; 1) out of interest and 2) because the area needed more manpower.
• 2010 (July): I got employed by Canonical, to work with hardware enablement and audio infrastructure full time. With an interest in both software, Linux and audio, this feels really like the place to be!

With my work at Canonical, I'm able to travel to conferences and meet both Ubuntu people and upstream ALSA and PulseAudio people. For the PulseAudio upstream people, I'm usually the person they go to if they have a question about ALSA or Ubuntu. (And for the ALSA people, I'm one of those who know Ubuntu and PulseAudio...)

...and somewhere along the road I also became a Ubuntu Bug-Control member, Ubuntu member (i e contributing developer), and Ubuntu Audio Dev Team member. If that matters.

Examples of my work / Things I'm proud of

The stuff I'm most proud of is probably all bugs I've tracked down and fixed. Especially the complex ones.

Also; I believe most people both in the Ubuntu community, upstream, and within Canonical, see me as both friendly and knowledgeable. Being able to cooperate with people of different personality types isn't always trivial either, but I believe I've been mostly successful in that area as well.

Areas of work

Well, feel free to have a look at the changelog, but in short:

• Together with Luke Yelavich, we worked on packaging of the new PulseAudio version in Oneiric.

• Over the past cycle or two I've been working a lot with Jack detection (see my blog for more info)

• I also maintained daily builds for PulseAudio to help upstream to find Ubuntu testers of the new version

• In addition, I'm maintaining some daily builds for ALSA modules, I recently updated some wiki pages, and just trying to spread knowledge about how the audio stack works by helping people out in a friendly way.

Things I could do better

• Prioritizing tasks
• There are so many bug reports I've had my hands on these days, it's easy to forget to follow them up.

Plans for the future

General

I want to make sure we have a tip-top release of PulseAudio and the rest of the audio stack in 12.04, which will be easier if I'm able to upload PulseAudio as well as just being able to commit to the branch, instead of bugging sponsors to do it for me.

What I like least in Ubuntu

Ouch, this is difficult. And controversial. But I think we need to shift the balance between Canonical and the community a bit; so that the community gets more power and Canonical gets less power. As Canonical has employed more people, but the number of community people doing similar stuff has not grown in the same pace, the balance has shifted a little too much. To solve bug #1, we can't do what Windows or MacOS does - we need to do something far better. And I think the best chance we have of being far better, is to make better use the power the community has. I would like the resources and time spent by volunteers on Ubuntu to far outweigh the resources and time spent by Canonical, and I would like the influence on decisions making to reflect that (im)balance. I can't say I have figured out a master plan of how to actually accomplish this, but there were some good signs in the community track at last UDS, of how to improve the relationship between Canonical and the community, so I'm hopeful.

Btw. If we could toss the "crossing the chasm" expression in the trash, that'll be good. While I understand that the best decision for the average developer is not necessarily the best for the average user, it also tends to make us think of developers and users as we and them. And that is harmful: we shouldn't pretend there are any chasms to cross to *become* a blogger, bug triager, documentation writer, developer, spreading-the-word:er, designer etc. There is no we and them, there's just us.

Comments

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Endorsements

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Martin Pitt

I only sponsored a package or two for David, so I cannot vouch for his packaging skills. However, I have followed David's work for several months now, and he is a very active and skilled developer in the sound area, and I had good discussions with him about patches and other sound related issues. He certainly left a rather large footprint in the pulseaudio package already. I would welcome him to become able to upload it directly. Thanks for your great work!

-- pitti 2012-01-06 12:02:33

TEMPLATE

== <SPONSORS NAME> ==
=== General feedback ===
## Please fill us in on your shared experience. (How many packages did you sponsor? How would you judge the quality? How would you describe the improvements? Do you trust the applicant?)

=== Specific Experiences of working together ===
''Please add good examples of your work together, but also cases that could have handled better.''
=== Areas of Improvement ===