My contributions

According to my Launchpad profile I joined the community at 2006-01-30 when my new computer that had arrived that Christmas holiday was plagued by SATAII driver problems. My efforts to get it to work were my first lasting contact with the Ubuntu community. Since then I've slowly started with contributing back to Ubuntu, first with reporting bugs and now with an increasingly broader scope.

My current focus is the Adopt-a-Package project, currently I'm launching a team which purpose is to keep the Nautilus bug reports in shape. I also occasionally contribute to Lernid and sometimes provide a small patch for other Ubuntu projects. I also review ideas for Ubuntu Brainstorm.

I've also done my share of spreading the Code; my father, some old computers at my father's work, my grandparents, uncle(s), a friend, my mother, and a friend of my mother are now using Ubuntu as well. Unfortunately I've lost my brother to ArchLinux. CDs have never stayed long in my possession as there has always been people who would like to have one.

List of contributions

• Brainstorm Idea Reviewer (since Q2-2009)

• Bug triager (since 2007, with pauses, Ubuntu Bug Control member again since 18-08-2009)

  • Adopting:

    • Nautilus

    • devhelp, dutch, guake, language-pack-gnome-nl, language-pack-nl, zeitgeist

  • Wiki pages: restructured Bugs/HowToTriage, rewrote BugSquad/AdoptPackage

• Code contributions in the form of several (very and not so) small patches to several projects (Apport hooks, Desktopcouch, Lernid, Notify OSD, Quickly) (an overview of my branches on Launchpad)

• Ubuntu NL member (since 24-03-2008)

  • Helped during the HCC!Regiodagen in Drachten, the Netherland, on 9 May 2009.
  • Member of the think-thank which had as goal to revitalise Ubuntu NL after internal problems had caused conflicts

• UbuntuWanted https://launchpad.net/ubuntu-wanted (Got an UDS-J meeting. Currently working on a new implementation with Django and launchpadlib since the Drupal version was too bloated and too hard to integrate with Launchpad. )

Future plans

The future of the desktop is uncertain with mobile devices and netbooks taking over tasks that used to be executed by desktops and notebooks. The upcoming release of GNOME 3.0 adds another challenge to the list of challenges Ubuntu will meet in the future. My goal is to keep helping with keeping Ubuntu a distribution one should take seriously.

My first focus is the Adopt-a-Package project. Currently I'm working on setting up the first AdoptionTeam, that is focused on Nautilus. We want to reduce the amount of 'forgotten' bugs and make sure new bug reports don't get thrown on a huge pile, but are handled efficiently.

When that is on track I want to focus on UbuntuWanted again. Although the project is now stalled I do believe that it could help the Ubuntu Community a lot. However, a Drupal module in PHP is too bloated. Moreover, the lack of a PHP implementation for launchpadlib really hurts and makes a lot of features (nearly) impossible to implement. Therefore a lightweight project written in Python, possibly with Zope or Djano would be a better alternative.

Ideally I would also get more involved in a regional or national Ubuntu team, but I'm afraid I don't have enough spare time for that as it is now.

Profile list

There are a lot of social networks and profile-based websites and I'm registered at a lot of them. Here a list.

A short history

The first computer we ever had at home was an MS-DOS one, which I found very intriguing and made me very interested in computers. Until my parents split up we've always used Windows -- Windows 95 and Windows XP. It was not until I got my own computer that I started to experiment with Linux. Actually, it was my twin brother who was the first, he installed KNOPPIX. I tried Debian first, but after I couldn't get it's graphical environment up and running, I ordered a free Ubuntu 5.10 CD from ShipIt.

I'm still using Ubuntu today and I even managed to convert my father, my brother, my grandmother and some other people.

The first 'programming language' I learnt was HTML. I spread fear and horror over the web with using background music, marquee, blink, capitals and at some point even FrontPage. I never continued my career as web designer -- although I have been offering my services to create web-log.nl themes for free a while later -- but instead started to learn PHP, firstly with help from the code of phpBB just after 2.x was released in 2002. Slowly my programming skills increased, but it was not until 2008 that I started to learn Python and do some basic C/C++/C# tutorials. Nowadays I still can't program in the C-family, but my Python skills are reasonable, although I do have to look up a lot still.

People say

Qense is a helpful person, he helped me testing Rapache back in the times it was in development and even contributed a few lines of code. He is also actively blogging about Ubuntu with balanced and well reasoned blog posts. -- Stefano Forenza

qense has been very active on Ubuntu, in bug-control, the Wiki, a pout-pourri of fixes, and others -- among them, his current efforts on the Adopt-A-Package programme. His contributions on bug-control have been extremely good -- well-thought, clearly stated, and useful. In other words: qense is (and has been) a very good candidate for membership, and I fully endorse him. C de-Avillez ~hggdh2

I was surprised qense wasn't a member already! He's been helping out with adopt-an-upstream this cycle, the work he's done there alone has been significant. He has always participated remotely at UDSes and is usually around during Open and Development week snagging volunteers and and helping them continue in whatever they are interested in. The enthusiasm is also infectious. ~jorge