I, Michael Terry, apply for MOTU.

Who I am

I'm a long-time open source developer. I work for Canonical in the OEM Services group (customizing images for OEM customers that want to pre-install Ubuntu). I maintain various upstream packages (xpad, gmult, deja-dup).

My Ubuntu story

My involvement

I've used Ubuntu since Warty, but not terribly seriously until Edgy. I considered myself an upstream man and never got involved in the packaging side of things until Canonical hired me in the spring of 2008.

Since then, I've immersed myself in packaging and gotten involved in all manner of things.

I also continue my Ubuntu work in my spare time, fixing bugs that I find in the development release and filing merges. I attend LoCo meetings and help out there.

I've attended UDS events since UDS Intrepid.

Examples of my work / Things I'm proud of

I maintain a list of packages I've worked on.

Areas of work

My work in the Canonical OEM group has led me all over the stack. From acpi events to installer fixes to resolution fixes for applications that don't fit on netbook screens.

I've also spent some time on the Foundations team. I've worked with them to simplify acpi-support, switch the default system logger to rsyslog, and re-architect the installer ubiquity.

But I'm more of a jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none kind of developer. I've spent a lot of time early in the Karmic cycle doing merges and syncs for all sorts of packages.

I watch a few packages in particular for bugs and push updates if applicable: deja-dup, duplicity, librelp, rsyslog, ubiquity.

Things I could do better

I think I could be better with testing. Which seems like a blocker for MOTU, but... What I mean is that I'll test something in one situation and assume it works in others all too often. This is why I love test suites. I just need to let myself slow down.

Plans for the future

Continue rocking. I think I have my work cut out for me, I just have to do more of it.

Eventually core-dev.

Get deja-dup (my pet user-friendly backup program) into the default install.

General

What I like least in Ubuntu

It's still too technical! Some very common consumer-oriented stacks like Bluetooth and audio are often in flux and have bad user interactions. I'd like to see their UI rock harder. It's happening (we've decided to start porting audio abstraction libraries to pulse by default for example), it will just take time.

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