I, Elliot Murphy, apply for universe-contributor rights and Ubuntu membership.

Who I am

Tell us a bit about yourself. I am me! I have been learning to program since I was 8 years old, and at 32 I'm wondering how long it is going to take. I've contributed in small ways to several open source projects, and am determined to get more involved in Ubuntu development. You can see a bunch of code I touched on my Launchpad page. I've hacked on six different operating systems in a dozen languages, ranging from kernel/system software to backup to databases to web systems. I love solving HARD problems and I'm not afraid to be wrong (or to be right!). I believe in people over process, continuous code review, and building solid multifaceted test suites and tools with safety checks to reduce stress. I spend a lot of time managing people, and on my own time I mostly program in Python these days, though I've got a lot of C/C++ history, and I'm enjoying dabbling with Erlang.

My Ubuntu story

Tell us how and when you got involved, what you liked working on and what you could probably do better. While I switched to using Ubuntu years ago, I first started learning about Ubuntu development when I joined the Launchpad team in December 2006. I've been learning about packaging and Ubuntu development in fits and starts, and am determined to get more involved during Jaunty and Karmic!

My involvement

So far most of my involvement has been in upstream projects, and I want to get a lot closer ties with Ubuntu itself, and help bridge the gap between the two worlds.

Examples of my work / Things I'm proud of

Launchpad lists 2 uploads that are credited to me, python-coverage and protobuf. I'm proud of python-coverage because it was my first package ever, and because when it turned out that Lars Wirzenius had packaged this module at the same time in Debian, my package was able to be deleted/overwritten by syncing Lars package from Debian, and reducing the delta from Debian is a good thing.

I'm proud of the protobuf upload because it helped a bunch of my colleagues who were doing work with protobuf, both on the drizzle project and on internal projects at Canonical.

I also gave Ken Vandine, Rodney Dawes, and Facundo Batista some advice on how to get patches into Ubuntu, and I try to always educate people about how it's not so tough to become involved in Ubuntu development, just ask for a patch to be sponsored.

For the last year and a half, I use the alpha versions of Ubuntu. For both Jaunty and Intrepid, I started using those right when the repositories opened, and reporting bugs and trying to learn as much as I could about the different phases of development - I felt like I needed to live through the full dev cycle in order to understand it.

Areas of work

Let us know what you worked on, with which development teams / developers you cooperated and how it worked out. I already mentioned the python-coverage patch, I got fantastic help from people on REVU. Something I didn't mention yet is how I provided bugfixes for some of the bluetooth related packages in my PPA while those were undergoing some transitions in Intrepid, and several users thanked me in the bug reports for making those available until the real fix went into Ubuntu. Last week I had questions about python-pygraphviz rebuilds needed in Jaunty, and doko helped answer my questions, I also provided a debdiff for bug https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/paste/+bug/336935 in the python-paste package, and Scott Kitterman gave me some good feedback that I forgot to change the maintainer field. Recently I was coaching the RabbitMQ team on getting their package into Ubuntu, and both DanielHolbach and JorgeCastro saw my efforts there, and also provided answers themselves. I was instrumental in getting the MySQL project converted to Bazaar (and subsequently Launchpad, and PPAs), this work then carried over to the Drizzle project. I currently run the ~bzr-nightly-ppa nightly builds of bzr and bzrtools, and plan to do the same for CouchDB.

Things I could do better

One thing that I could do better is to be more regular about finding some way to contribute to Ubuntu development each week. Currently, I'm doing this by trying to help as much as I can with testing python libraries under python2.6, reporting bugs, and then trying to fix those bugs. I would also like to have a sponsor, who can answer my questions and get to know me a bit better, to try and stay motivated to get regularly involved.

Plans for the future

General

I want to help with maintenance of python and erlang projects and libraries in Ubuntu. I'll continue keeping an eye on protobuf, I've signed up as a bug contact for RabbitMQ, and I plan to help with Drizzle and CouchDB. I'm intrigued by the project to make all the source packages available as bzr branches, and I hope to find a way to help get a much smoother workflow for updating packages. I also want to finish

What I like least in Ubuntu

Please describe what you like least in Ubuntu and what thoughts do you have about fixing it. I don't like the disconnect in workflow and skills from working on an upstream project to working on a package in Ubuntu. Most of my experience is in contributing to upstream projects, and it's frustrating that many of the developers I encounter on upstream open source projects consider Ubuntu/Debian to be mysterious and out of their control to influence what their packages look like. It's especially frustrating to see how sometimes people who identify as Python/Ruby developers sometimes feel alienated and lack of sympathy from Ubuntu/Debian, and I the complicated situations around python eggs and ruby gems vs. .debs makes me sad. How will I address this? Two things: 1) become a skilled Ubuntu developer myself, so that I can more effectively serve as an ambassador/coach/advocate. 2) Supporting and giving feedback to projects like bzr-builddeb, bzr, Launchpad PPAs. All these projects take us a tiny step closer to a smooth workflow from proposing a branch to a project till getting the bugfix into an Ubuntu release. If I knew how to solve the eggs/gems/debs tensions I would be doing it already, but I don't know how.

Comments

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Endorsements

As a sponsor, just copy the template below, fill it out and add it to this section.

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 ===

CategoryUniverseContributorApplication