Ubuntu Wiki

About Me

My name is Jan Sprinz, also known as NeoTheThird. I study informatics at TUM, where I also work as a student associate for the chair of scientific computing on ls1-mardyn. In the Ubuntu Community I nowadays mainly work in the UBports project to support the continued development of Ubuntu Touch.

Contact Information

Meet me

I will be at Chemnitzer Linux Tage, the Munich UBports get together and Ubucon Europe 2018 in Xixon to present Ubuntu Touch and chat about Ubuntu, Linux and FOSS. Come say hi, I'll be the tall guy. You'll know when you see me.

Positions in the Ubuntu Community

• Member of the UBports Foundation Board of Directors
• UBports Trustee
• Head of Ubuntu Touch QA

Contributions

UBports & Ubuntu Touch

• Joined UBports community in August 2016

• Member of the Board of Directors of the upcoming UBports Foundation

• Organizational work towards the endowment of UBports as a Foundation under German law (Write statutes, communication with government authorities, sponsor acquisition, etc.)

• Head of QA; contributed Ubuntu Touch bug reports and tests since the Canonical days

• Maintainer of the UBports app and co-maintainer of the Installer

• Worked on moving, improving, creating and preserving Ubuntu Touch documentation

• Worked on the old UBports website and the upcoming Ubuntu Touch website and associated infrastructure

• Regular appearances on the UBports Community Q&A

• Managing the UBports Patreon page

• Contributions in various other areas of the broader project

App development

• Created 8192, a clone of 2048.

• Took over Mines, Logviewer and uReadIt after they were abandoned.

Ubucon Europe Paris 2017

• Helped setting up various things around the venue

• Worked at the UBports booth

• Speaker

Ubuntu brand and community

• Throwing proverbial rotten eggs at Marius Quabeck for switching to Solus (probably my most valuable contribution)

Ubuntu Desktop

• Translations to German (less today)
• Bug reporting (less today)

• Support on AskUbuntu

While I'm not employed by the UBports Foundation, I'm sometimes reimbursed from community donations for parts of my expenses (eg. travel, accommodation, development hardware).

Future Goals

Of course I want to keep up my contributions to Ubuntu Touch! The dream of convergence and being able to run the exact same code on your phone and laptop is still alive, so the desktop-side of Unity 8 is probably my next field of contribution. With Mir-Wayland support improving a lot in recent releases, being able to actually use it for production does not seem that far away any more. The Phone, Mir and Unity 8 team did so much amazing work, it would make me really happy to see it being used more widely!

I'd love to learn more about snaps. I'll try to snap my own apps soon to get some more experience. It's an exciting technology, especially since it could allow us to get more traditional desktop applications on Ubuntu Touch in the future...

Another big priority for me is to make sure, that the UBports community does not diverge too much from the general Ubuntu community. That's why I'm lobbying in various parts of the Ubuntu Community to acknowledge the existence and relevance of UBports, and I hope to see that situation improve.

In the long run, I would really like to get into low-level- and kernel development, but so far I have been lacking time to really dive into that topic.

Testimonials

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