Ubuntu Wiki

About Me

My name is James Henstridge, and I have been using and working on Ubuntu since 2004. I currently work on Ubuntu One for Canonical. Prior to that I was a member of the Launchpad development team, and over the years I have made various contributions to Ubuntu in both roles.

Prior to my involvement with Ubuntu I was quite active in the GNOME community, having started projects such as the PyGTK bindings, which has been used by many Ubuntu desktop tools over the years.

Contact Information

Contributions

• I wrote some of the GNOME customisations for Ubuntu 4.10, making the battery status applet more compact, some changes to display of volumes in Nautilus, abd a rewrite of portions of the Trash Applet to make it work reliably.

• I performed the migration of Ubuntu's bug tracker data from Bugzilla to Launchpad, as detailed here and here.

• I wrote the first scripts used to produce schedules for Ubuntu Developer Summits based on blueprints registered in Launchpad (e.g. schedules for Ubuntu Below Zero). Maintainership of these scripts was taken over by Scott James Remnant and they eventually morphed into the much more powerful summit scheduler in use today.

• I helped develop the OpenID Provider features of Launchpad, which gave community sites a secure and supported method of using the same Launchpad login credentials as Canonical run sites were using. This code eventually morphed into the current Ubuntu Single Sign On site, which is a Django rewrite of the original Zope site.

• Other contributions to various areas of Launchpad, including the translations system, code hosting and PPA handling.

• When starting on the Ubuntu One project, we needed a way to tie the OpenID based login used by Ubuntu sites to Django's native account system. The result was django-openid-auth, which has also been reused by a number of community sites.

• I have had a few sponsored package uploads accepted into the archive as part of my work on Ubuntu One.

• I rewrote much of the Bindwood package (Ubuntu One's bookmark synchronisation package; since discontinued) for Natty to make it compatible with Firefox 4+.

• I have been helping out by answering questions on the Ask Ubuntu site.

Future Goals

I will continue to help improve Ubuntu One and find new ways for users to as part of the Ubuntu One team.

I would also like to improve my packaging skills, partly to help keep my software up to date in Ubuntu as a prospective developer.

Testimonials

If you know me and have something nice to say, please leave a comment here.