RobertCollins
Robert Collins
I was the second employee of Canonical back in 2004 (at 4 days a week Scott, yes), and very privileged to work there during the rapid growth and ramp up of the early days. I left in mid 2012.
While at Canonical I worked on "arch", then "bazaar" (baz), then recommended the hire of MartinPool to lead the "bazaar-NG"(bzr) project, which I joined as it approached alpha level and we put baz on life support. For a while I was Technical Architect for Launchpad, and then for the CDO business unit. And a few other odds and ends in between - all in all a varied and fascinating set of projects to work on, with a wonderful team of individuals, all of which I still look back on fondly.
However, this wiki page is really just historical now; Work stuff is now https://www.linkedin.com/in/rbtcollins/ ; social https://twitter.com/rbtcollins . I've recently resigned to emeritus status as a DD, and I expect to let my motu status expire at the next renewal as well - I do not do enough packaging work to have it make any sense keeping those privileges or responsibilities alive.
I've kept the content below as-was at the time I applied for MOTU status; it was kind of a rite of passage and I think consigning it purely to the changelog of history is a bit sad.
Robert Collins (history)
Email: <robert.collins AT SPAMFREE ubuntu DOT com>
I work for Canonical coordinating the combination of Bazaar-NG and Launchpad (which we hope will provide a fantastic feedback loop to any community using Bazaar-NG), and am a Quality-Czar - I rove between Bazaar-NG, Launchpad and Ubuntu providing input (and Code!), aiming to make it easier to make high quality creations across all our efforts.
I am a DebianDeveloper, I currently maintain 4 packages:
- bicyclerepair
- fl-cow
- opensync (in a team with azeem and ajmitch)
- testresources
I also provide an upstream debian/ tree for the bazaar package, though Rob Weir does the actual debian specific packaging.
I report bugs when I find them https://launchpad.net/people/lifeless/+reportedbugs, and help out as much as I can - for example with small test cases (i.e. https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/gawk/+bug/35571) or patches (i.e. https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/pornview/+bug/2397)
I am passionate about Ubuntu, being the second joiner to the project I've been privileged to see it grow and mature from before the SSDS label to now, where we have a fantastic presence worldwide, and are tackling some of the real nutty distro issues. It was very interesting being an UbuntuDriver at Ubuntu Below Zero - we actually did scheduling in under an hour a day, and by the end of the conference it was just about automatic. Much more important was the continual review of specifications to help ensure all questions and angles have been thought through. I want to see Ubuntu or derivatives become the distro of choice from the low end - devices like the Nokia N770 tablet all the way up to enterprise environments like IBM S/360 machines in mission critical business. Almost as important is keeping Ubuntu accessible to all comers to use and modify as they desire.
I am known as lifeless(https://launchpad.net/people/lifeless) in Launchpad, where I do bugfixing for my packages, and for Bazaar, Bazaar-NG, PQM and ConfigManager, all of which I am 'upstream' for (The first three primarily as a Canonical employee, but not limited to work hours - they are a passion for me).
Talks
I give talks upon request about Ubuntu, Launchpad, Bazaar[-NG] and anything else I'm compentent to talk on ;). My most recent talk was at the NSW Chapter of the Australian Computing Societies Free and Open Source Software SIG, on Thursday 24th Nov 2005. I talked about Launchpad, the challenges we are having developing it, and the huge benefits we hope F/OSS Community will be able to reap from it - from the extra connectivity between upstream and upstream, upstream and distro, and even distro and distro that Launchpad offers.