I, Luke Faraone, apply for MOTU.

Who I am

I'm a high school Junior in Arlington, Virginia. In addition to my work in Ubuntu and Debian, I am a contributor to the One Laptop per Child and Sugar Labs projects.

When I graduate, I plan to major in Computer Science or Computer Engineering.

My Ubuntu story

I've been working with Ubuntu for four years, and contributing in a technical capacity for two. At first, I helped primarily through advocacy, but in 2008 I moved towards packaging. What interested me most about Ubuntu was the democracy of it: anybody can contribute a fix, and, after a review by a sponsor, have it make the next release of Ubuntu. I submitted my first debdiffs in late 2008, which were all kindly sponsored by JamesWestby.

At my school, I use and administer Ubuntu every day in our Computer Science lab, which is powered by LTSP with over 30 clients.

My involvement

My first package was python-gasp, which I now maintain in Debian. I've spent some time working on miscellaneous fixes to the variety Ubuntu Sugar packages, and worked with upstream to integrate fixes in a timely manner.

Examples of my work / Things I'm proud of

In the most recent development cycle, I handled the migration of autokey, a GTK text replacement utility, to the packages autokey-common and autokey-gtk, allowing users to also choose autokey-kde if they so choosed. The split was particularly complicated, since they were all in one Python package, and the -gtk, -qt versions both depended on a daemon from -common.

I also submitted an SRU for a locale-dependent crashing bug, and coordinated a security fix for a data corruption / local denial of service vulnerability across Debian, Ubuntu, and upstream.

I also packaged groundcontrol, a distributed-development plugin for Nautilus, and was able to identify several bugs that we were able to squash before it was included in Lucid.

Areas of work

I try to push my changes through Debian whenever possible, so that it can benefit all distributions. On Ubuntu, I usually interact with the release team and Archive Administrators after the various freezes, when I need approval to get my work synced.

When I worked with the SugarTeam, I collaborated with MorganCollett and JamesWestby on fixing broken Sugar packages imported from Debian, along with some from earlier (divergent) Ubuntu releases.

I work to eliminate the low-hanging, but often monotonous/time-consuming fruit, so that the more difficult tasks can be tackled by people brighter than I.

Things I could do better

Often, my work slips past the Ubuntu release schedule; in the future I should work towards fixing things sooner rather than waiting for the proverbial "last minute".

Plans for the future

General

When I get more free time, I hope to become more involved with the Ubuntu Sugar team, which I have been busy for lately.

I'm also interested in adding more applications I find useful to Ubuntu, as well as lowering the barrier to entry for packages with predictable structure (for example: DocBook documentation) into Ubuntu.

What I like least in Ubuntu

The visual and user-visible distinction between KDE and GNOME application is greater than I would like. Ideally, we should implement themes on the desktop that allow each to look "native" in each others' environment, since people often mix and match based on which accomplishes the task best, not which toolkit they come from.

What I like most in Ubuntu

I'm excited about the work being done to applying DistributedDevelopment to Ubuntu packages, through the work on bzr-builddeb and opportunistic-developer-enabling software like groundcontrol.

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 ===

CategoryMOTUApplication