Ubuntu Wiki

A Short Introduction

I come from a small town called Brest, located at the very west end of Brittany, in France. If you've ever read any of the Astérix novels, I come from the same region, but even further west. I graduated in computer science in 1994, in another small French town called Nancy, about an hour away from the German and Luxembourg borders. I eventually ended up moving to London in 1998 and I still live here today.

Ubuntu and Me

How I Came to Ubuntu

I got introduced to computers at a time when a home computer was called Amstrad CPC 464, Commodore 64 or ZX Spectrum and when Windows and the Internet didn't exist. Home computing was fun then. At uni, I learnt the ins and outs of UNIX and software design on green text terminals. By the time I got my first job, Windows was already dominant on the desktop and I hated it. I didn't hate it because it was bad or proprietary. I hated it because I am the sort of person who learns a lot better when I can understand how things work rather than learn stuff by heart. And for me that was the difference: I could understand UNIX, it made sense but I couldn't understand Windows, its logic escaped me.

I tried a lot of things at home in order not to use Windows: as I knew Sun Solaris well, I had a refurbished Sun Sparc 10 at home at some point; then I tried Red Hat but being more a developer than a sys admin, I found that it was too difficult to get Red Hat to work as I wanted. I eventually bought a PowerMac G5 on the grounds that it worked out of the box but it was UNIX underneath.

Eventually, the company I was working for ended up being wound down and we all got made redundant, with our work laptop given to us as part of the redundancy package. This was a very nice IBM ThinkPad T42, with specs meant for heavy-weight Java/J2EE development. Unfortunately it was running Windows XP. I had heard of this new distro on the block called Ubuntu, I downloaded an ISO, burnt a CD, booted the CD and lo and behold, 30 minutes later my ThinkPad was running Feisty Faun without a glitch! The Windows install CDs were never seen again. I still use the ThinkPad today and in fact it's my main machine from which I am currently writing this page.

My Contribution So Far

I haven't contributed to Ubuntu quite as much as I would have liked, mainly because I have a day job that doesn't normally involve Ubuntu. That said, I work as a freelance contractor and whenever I do work for a customer, I do it on that Ubuntu ThinkPad so the little guy finds itself in hostile environments a lot. This regularly results in me filing bugs against one piece of software or another, mostly OpenOffice as I use it all the time.

I am a member of the Bug Squad team and try to help with triaging when I can. I am also part of the Nautilus adoption team started by Sense, who has been great in mentoring me on bug triaging.

The Future

There are a lot of things I would like to do and get involved with in Ubuntu:

• As a contractor, I have my own business and I would love for it to have a larger Ubuntu component;

• I am a developer at heart but my experience is with Java, which is why I find Jono's opportunistic developer initiative a great idea: I am exactly the sort of person this is aimed at; hopefully that will be a good spring board to get me started in producing code for Ubuntu;

• And anything else that can help Ubuntu grow and that I can fit around my diary.

Random Bits and Bobs

Here are all the other things about me that didn't fit above:

• I have a weblog that I fill sporadically with random stuff, generally technology related;

• I am a keen photographer so you can find my photos in my flickr stream;

• I have a LinkedIn profile;

• I love travelling and have visited nearly 40 countries but none in Asia so far.

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