Ubuntu Wiki

About Me

My name is Stuart Langridge; I've been an Ubuntu user from the first days, and I've been writing code for longer than that; all my code these days is to do with Ubuntu I spent a few years as part of LugRadio, a podcast which was fairly well known for advocating Ubuntu at the expense of rivals, and was part of the initial team for the Jokosher project. In 2009 I started work for Canonical, and I'm now the technical architect for the Ubuntu One project. I maintain a personal website at kryogenix.org.

Contact information

Contributions

As mentioned, I was part of the LugRadio podcast and the Jokosher project. I've also run and moderated many sessions at UDSes since Mountain View in 2008. The majority of my work for Ubuntu these days is related (either tightly or tangentially) to my job working for Ubuntu One; obviously my work time is spent on things to improve Ubuntu's online services, but I've also given a number of talks as part of various Ubuntu online tutorial weeks.

I'm one of the two original coders for the Ubuntu One music store, which means that I have a fair amount of knowledge about how that store fits into Rhythmbox and Banshee. I also designed and have consistently hacked on desktopcouch, a personal database for Ubuntu applications which allows apps to share data both on an individual machine or across machines.

Talks for Ubuntu tutorial weeks

• Adding Ubuntu One support to your applications, Ubuntu Open Week, January 2010

• Hooking your app into your desktop CouchDB, Ubuntu Developer Week, September 2009

• The Ubuntu One App Developer Programme, Ubuntu Developer Week, March 2011

• Adding Ubuntu One support to your applications, Ubuntu Developer Week, January 2010

• Building Rhythmbox plugins, Ubuntu App Developer Week 2010

Future plans

I'm working on constructing the Ubuntu One app developer programme: this will be a set of documentation and guidance on all the Ubuntu One APIs and features that are available to developers to make their apps better, and a community in which apps for both Ubuntu and to bring other platforms closer to Ubuntu can thrive.

I also plan to keep on hacking on fun things, outside my actual job.

Recent Ubuntu-related hacking

At the time of writing (early 2011), things I've hacked on in the last couple of months for Ubuntu include

• textmockuptool, a miniature app to help build window mockups in ASCII

• Packaging web games written in Flash/Flex for Ubuntu by adding a new project type to Quickly

• Documentation for how to work with the Messaging Menu from code

Testimonials

I had been working on a project called cheers which was a trophy awarding framework. Stuart proposed the idea of using desktopcouch for the storage. He helped me and the cheers team a lot during our experiments with a totally unrelated technology. I am very glad to have been helped and worked with him. I have learnt a lot from his talks on Ubuntu during Developer Week and Open Week which helped me a lot understanding desktopcouch. His Lug Radio days were the days which can be bookmarked as a standard of how you can make people excited about Free Software. I can see he has great technical abilities and loves community work which makes him well deserving as an Ubuntu Member. We should be proud to have him aboard --- Manish Sinha

Stuart's development areas are some of the most exciting parts of the Ubuntu platform infrastructure, getting desktopcouch as part of the default install integrated with the U1 back end is a really key part of Ubuntu being a platform for collaborative applications. Throughout this development Stuart has been great at communicating the technical details with rest of the community through the various classroom sessions, at UDS and in the IRC channels. I certainly think he should be an Ubuntu Member. -- alanbell 2011-04-04 12:44:24

Stuart is one of Ubuntu's good cookies. I've known Stuart since his days of Lug Radio; as crucial member of the team he did a wonderful job of getting people excited about Free Software. The events they organised were possibly some of the first amateur organised (*with fun*) Free Software events in the UK. Many of the events now I think are somewhat modelled on their success. I've regularly witnessed him try to help community members with all kind of wacky UbuntuOne configurations with enthusiasm. He has an interesting blog, which Planet Ubuntu could really benefit from having it syndicated. I've previously had interesting technical discussions with him, and found his input to be valuable. Most importantly of all, he has a wonderful jumper which makes him look like a cuddly polar bear. -- davewalker (Daviey)

I first met Stuart back in 2007 when I invited him to give a talk in Ireland at SkyCon. He has always been helpful and obliging when it comes to giving presentations on Ubuntu. Since then when ever I have asked him to give a talk or point me in the right direction of who to ask he always obliged. He has an online presence in core channels and is there helping people with their queries and he takes the time to explain reasons for the way things are done. He blogs and tweets useful information that helps others and has taken part in many Ubuntu related online events helping others in areas they are less experienced. His helpfulness and enthusiasm makes him a great candidate for Ubuntu membership. czajkowski 2024-04-19 11:53:16

Stuart is awesome, a force of nature, really. desktopcouch is awesome and is a fantastic solution to what I consider the most important problems: sync and offline. desktopcouch and CouchDB are the key enabling technologies for dmedia and Novacut, and as I've learned desktopcouch, Stuart has helped me time and again, on IRC, Skype, and at UDS-N. Stuart is an excellent representative of the Ubuntu project and spirit. Ubuntu, as a community of helpful doers, would be amiss without Start as a member. -- jderose 2011-04-05 19:23:35

+1 from me. Stuart is always making himself available for community events like Open Week and App Developer Week and is constantly answering user questions, which is important to me since we depend on developers being user- and developer accessible. He's also acted as a tech consultant on two community-run projects, chromify-osd and the Ask Ubuntu Lens, where he's pointed out to contributors how exactly to implement things in a smart way so that we don't waste time. -- jorge 2011-04-05 21:26:00

I've been friends with Stuart for rather more than ten years now, and was very pleased when he got involved with Ubuntu. His enthusiasm for free software knows very few bounds and he's been doing great things with Ubuntu One. He's made sterling efforts to integrate his work with the Ubuntu community, displaying a great deal of dedication. I'm thoroughly comfortable with advocating him as an Ubuntu member. -- cjwatson 2024-04-19 11:53:16