I, Łukasz 'sil2100' Zemczak, apply for core-dev.

Who I am

My name is Łukasz Zemczak, going by the nickname of sil2100. I am employed by Canonical as a Software Engineer, part of the Ubuntu Desktop team (previously part of Product Strategy Integration). I help maintaining the Ubuntu daily-release infrastructure, work with Ubuntu upstream developers on Debian packaging and help in development of some Ubuntu related projects. I work closely with the Unity ecosystem. In the past I was also heavily involved in the development of the Haiku operating system, as well as application development for the BeOS original.

My Ubuntu story

I have had contact with the GNU/Linux platform in my high-school years, while using Red Hat and Slackware distributions when experimenting with my local home network. My first real Ubuntu experience was around 2006, when I tried Ubuntu and then Xubuntu 6.06/6.10 - making Xubuntu my main operating system for the next year. The funny thing with my Ubuntu user-experience was that I never really used Debian before Ubuntu, so I learned all Debian-concepts indirectly. I have been contributing format-support to the once-used XArchiver archive manager.

My involvement

Currently I am a MOTU and the release manager for Ubuntu Touch. I have been partaking in patch piloting sessions once a month, although most of the time I'm busy with touch development. I am the current LandingTeam lead and one of the maintainers of the CI Train, additionally doing daily trainguard duty. We are publishing many many packages every day, signing-off their packaging changes (for universe packages) and cooperating with core-devs for main packages. I have worked a lot on the ubuntu-rtm derived distribution. I had a short +1 Maintenance shift at one point of time, but due to touch landing-team duties I didn't help out as much as I would want.

Packages that I prepared:

• python-evdev
• zmqpp
• appmenu-qt5

Non-Ubuntu-upstream packages I released:

• capnproto
• lucene++

Packages that I am/was involved with:

• appmenu-qt5
• ubuntu-keyboard
• ubuntu-system-settings
• autopilot
• unity/compiz

Examples of my work / Things I'm proud of

Areas of work

Let us know what you worked on, with which development teams / developers with whom you cooperated and how it worked out.

I had many experiences with dealing with the Ubuntu archives. Most of my work was done on the ubuntu-rtm/14.09 distribution and series where I handled the upower 0.99 transition. In ubuntu/utopic I helped a little with the libav11 transition. I added multiple-distribution functionality to the CI Train functionality, enabling landings for both ubuntu and ubuntu-rtm packages. I formalized a lot of the landing team processes.

The main programming language of my choice is C (sometimes C++). Throughout the last year I was also working a lot with Python code and the Launchpad API.

Things I could do better

I would like to re-do my +1 maintenance shift once again in a calmer period of touch-development and this time concentrate as much as I can. I would also like to work more closely with Debian, as till now I only have selective occasions to upstream my work there.

Plans for the future

General

My main plans generally revolve around Ubuntu Touch, making sure that we are able to release stable images for each of our milestones and that this time the 15.04 main vivid image we release has sufficient quality. I also plan working tightly with the archive admins on the next vivid-based branch-off to ubuntu-rtm. I want to further improve the touch development processes and get rid of many CI Train's short-comings, working with upstream developers, core-devs, archive admins and other stakeholders to get a process setup that would satisfy everyone.

What I like least in Ubuntu

Please describe what you like least in Ubuntu and what thoughts do you have about fixing it.

The current divergence of Touch from Desktop. Currently it seems that there are two fronts where each works in their own container, while we should be aiming for convergence. Even though it is not possible to align all schedules to be the same (due to touch being typically customer-driven), there multiple places where a common process can be used. Both desktop and touch should use the same mechanisms and have the same quality standards.

Comments

If you'd like to comment, but are not the applicant or a sponsor, do it here. Don't forget to sign with @SIG@.

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 ===

CategoryCoreDevApplication