Note: This isn't an UbuntuContributingDeveloper application, for the correct page: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/itzswirlz/Applications/UbuntuCinnamonPPUApplication

I, Joshua Peisach, apply for upload rights for (source) packages:

• ubuntucinnamon-artwork
• ubuntucinnamon-environment
• ubuntucinnamon-meta
• ubuntucinnamon-wallpapers
• yaru-cinnamon-theme

Which are all locatable within the Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix PPA.

I am applying because:

• I'd like to eliminate delays in getting my work sponsored.
• I'd like to be more recognized in the Ubuntu community.
• I'd like to be able to have more management in transitioning/moving my and the Cinnamon DE packages into Ubuntu Repositories.
• I’ll be able to have more benefits to the project and my future life.
• I’d like to be able to have more and better connections to highly skilled developers to increase my knowledge.
• I’d like to help assist people in their work.

Who I am

I’m Joshua Peisach, or commonly known on my internet alias as “ItzSwirlz”. I first began playing with Windows 7, and through virtual machines, thanks to my Dad who works at a university, I discovered the world of Linux, and in 2014 (I estimate, I can’t remember an exact date) for the first time I launched Ubuntu 14.04 LTS in a Virtual Machine running Unity DE. Later on I came back to the Ubuntu Community and began developing by:

• Creating an “Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix (UCR)”, in hopes to make an official Ubuntu Cinnamon flavor.
• Helping with bug squashing and patching.
• Helping with ISO and QA test assurance.
• Helping on Improving Features

My Ubuntu story

My main knowledge of computer programming came from, I kid you not, Minecraft. I joined when Minecraft Java Edition 1.6.3 came out (2013). It was such an amazing game, but more could’ve been extended to the actual game. Due to the Forge Mod Loader, you can add mods which can add items, or literally anything to Minecraft if you just refer to it as a new (Minecraft reference) item in a new mod.. Using tutorials I learned how to open eclipse and I began programming the Obsidian Diamond Ores Mod. Yet it still stands on Planet Minecraft, a Minecraft Community Forum today.

I wanted to use Linux for programming-but the Rutger’s had an old Dell Latitude E6500 that I used-4 GB RAM running Windows 7. I didn’t have the disk space (only 100 GB) to dual boot anything.

October 30th 2018 I got a better Dell Inspiron 15-3567 that I began distro hopping from Fedora Cinnamon (I wanted Semi Code OS but people said it was basically Fedora), and went all over the place until I settled back home, to Ubuntu. During the process I learned about what differentiates Desktop Environment’s from Distro’s. Later on I’d come to the Ubuntu Discourse Community, suggest an Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix idea, and make one with the initial release on December 4 2019 (19.10 Eoan Ermine)

My involvement

Examples of my work / Things I'm proud of

I've been working hard on getting sponsors. See:

• https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cinnamon-session/+bug/1887312 (Focal, Complete - ginggs)

• https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cinnamon/+bug/1882375 (Focal, Complete - sil2100)

• https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/muffin/+bug/1888169 (Focal, Complete - sil2100, racb)

• https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cinnamon/+bug/1895020 (Groovy pre-release, Complete - sil2100)

• https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cinnamon/+bug/1901344 (Focal, Groovy - Complete - racb)

• https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/groovy/+source/caribou/+bug/1912060 (Security patch, in progress)

My involvement has been through Cinnamon, other DE’s and other main Desktop-side features.

I haven’t had many sponsors since I don’t requestsync much or have any patches, but Rik Mills has sponsored some of my packages in the past.

Mostly, you could say my main work for this Ubuntu Application would be the packaging I’ve done and helped for in Ubuntu and Upstream Cinnamon or the Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix. Otherwise it would be patching things and bug reporting. I’ll link all of my work here.

Debian Cinnamon Bug Reports

Debian Cinnamon Pull Requests

They were either closed, done by the maintainers or rejected, but you can take a look at it here.

https://salsa.debian.org/groups/cinnamon-team/-/merge_requests?scope=all&utf8=%E2%9C%93&state=closed&author_username=ItzSwirlz-guest

Debian Packaging

I have packaged handful of Nemo Extensions. Here are the WNPP reports:

These have been relocated to https://salsa.debian.org/cinnamon-team repositories. However they haven't been uploaded as some needs patches to clean up lintian which I want to fix upstream, and also the Debian Bullseye Freeze.

Other in Debian

I've also tried to package Pantheon (stopped, not worth effort at the time and should do it with a team) and joining the Deepin Packaging team, you can view everything including the Cinnamon and Deepin stuff here:

https://salsa.debian.org/users/ItzSwirlz-guest/activity https://salsa.debian.org/users/ItzSwirlz-guest/contributed

Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix

I used to host the repos and commit on a separate GitHub account/root account for UCR but later made it an organization-you can see my organization which I pretty much to do everything there here:

https://github.com/Ubuntu-Cinnamon-Remix

Here is our launchpad team. We have four repos-stable (all), unstable, backports, and an archive repository. Feel welcome to swoop around.

https://launchpad.net/~ubuntucinnamonremix

To view any other commits-they may not all be Ubuntu-related or what not, but if you want to see my development, checkout my GitHub.

https://github.com/ItzSwirlz/

My Contributions to Ubuntu and it's flavors

I've filed about ten launchpad bugs-you can breeze through them: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bugs?search=Search&field.bug_reporter=itzswirlz

Ubuntu Budgie

If it weren't for fossfreedom, UCR would not exist. He taught me a LOT and I always periodically give back to him. I haven't done much but this is my scoop on budgie-welcome:

https://github.com/UbuntuBudgie/budgie-welcome/issues/created_by/ItzSwirlz

Ubuntu MATE

I periodically talk with Martin (flexiondotorg) and show up at his live streams. I like to see what he does but on the track of Ubuntu MATE, I found out about their Color Selection tool and wanted to add wallpaper support for it. I was not really at Python and shell work but I learned a lot. Thanks to Luke Horwell, we managed to scrape it just in time for 20.04. Always good to see that MATE colourized wallpaper on the Linux News Articles!

https://github.com/lah7/ubuntu-mate-colours/pull/20

Ubuntu Kylin

Kylin is interesting. It doesn’t get enough attention. For an elegant desktop it is so underrated. However, they don't get all the bugs they need and they have issues periodically… in my Launchpad bugs you can find about a little less than half are Ubuntu Kylin related bugs. Others were also reported on the ISO QA tracker I’ll mention later.

Ubuntu Studio

As I sadly don't have any contributions to Ubuntu Studio, I do talk with eeickmeyer and we are pretty good pals together. Otherwise he helped design the original UCR wallpaper, based off of his "glow" design.

Ubuntu Kylin

Kylin is interesting. It doesn’t get enough attention. For an elegant desktop it is so underrated. However, they don't get all the bugs they need and they have issues periodically… in my Launchpad bugs you can find about a little less than half are Ubuntu Kylin related bugs. Others were also reported on the ISO QA tracker I’ll mention later.

Ubuntu Studio

As I sadly don't have any contributions to Ubuntu Studio, I do talk with eeickmeyer and we are pretty good pals together. Otherwise he helped design the original UCR wallpaper, based off of his "glow" design.

Lubuntu

tsimonq2 is a cool guy. I’ve known him since he reached out to me and has helped me through quite a bit and I’m lucky to have him in the community. I don’t contribute much to Lubuntu but I have recently helped a bit with their Continuous Integration by making some patches, adding build dependencies. A little something always helps, I guess.

https://phab.lubuntu.me/P75

https://phab.lubuntu.me/P74

ISO and QA Testing

Have I done a lot with ISO and QA testing! I've done well in my opinion, and placed in decent spots on the testcase leaderboard. Here's the scoop.

Yes I know that this is not a competition.

Bionic isn't much due to me actually using Ubuntu when Cosmic was out. Focal Daily results were mainly before release and Groovy is so far, when I originally wrote the draft.

That sums it up here!

Areas of work

I’ve worked mainly through the Ubuntu Community, to summarize it up briefly.

More in-depth, I work mainly around the cinnamon packages, the Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix, Debian’s Deepin Packaging Team/Cinnamon Package Maintainers, and anything Ubuntu-related for flavours, remixes, and my friends.

But with a gaming heart in mind, I also will work on areas of my choice including Discord Bots and much more. But for now, gaming, desktop, and community is my expertise and where I like to stay.

Things I could do better

It is especially my fault that I don’t exactly stick with programming goals often. Sometimes when I have trouble with things, I sort of just leave it to the side and never come back. When I learn a programming language too, I also likely end up not knowing how to do actually good things that could benefit me in development. I could personally learn programming and better scripting more as it would help me stabilize my code and have a better understanding of everything.

Socially-not much to say, but I want to try to continue diversely helping everyone regardless of what the problem is so I can try to become a better maintainer for packages. I feel great helping people and I’m sure I’d like to help even more as time goes on.

My Mistakes

I am all about making mistakes. For example, instead of syncing from Debian latest or going to Ubuntu unstable for building the latest version of Cinnamon, I’d just rebuild everything for no reason.

I did read the Debian Policy Manual, but I didn’t take an actual deep-through look of it until May 2020.

Plans for the future

General

Continue packaging what is best for me, other people, and the rest of society and become a better programmer.

What I like least in Ubuntu

There is nothing I don’t really like in Ubuntu. What I do wish was a thing was more support for how people like to customize. For example, a better rainbow color scheme for people to choose what they want. Also after installing, you get so used to the current default layout you don’t become fond of changing things because unless you can get used to it it feels messy and unclean, and you can’t choose what you want. But default theming colors of your choice through an external installer or something for the Yaru theme would be nice.

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@.

ItzSwirlz has been leading and managing Ubuntu Cinnamon really well, with regular releases and following the Ubuntu release schedule. Kudos to him! I'm sure he'll be an excellent Ubuntu Contributing Developer. -- rs2009 2020-09-29 17:02:07

ItzSwirlz has taken on the challenging task of not only building a community but a remix. Spinning up, developing and driving a project like this can be very challenging. I see passion like this as something we in the Ubuntu community can always do with more of. While that endeavour can be a full-time job, seeing the attempt to give back to the broader community shows a "one for all" vs an "all for one" attitude. We need this, as well as new people entering the larger community. A welcome addition. -- bashfulrobot 2021-01-15 19:20:16

I'm not just commenting because ItzSwirlz' work enabled me to have a beautiful teal Ubuntu MATE experience! He has been a dynamic developer and remix lead, who has stayed remarkably hard-working and consistant, even with his responsibilities outside of the community. Someone with this sort of "can do" attitude who embraces a broad community spirit, in my opinion, is exactly the kind of developer we should be supporting. He has my earnest and enthusiastic support. -- -- madhens 2021-03-03 21:33:35

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.''
## Full list of sponsored packages can be generated here:
##  https://udd.debian.org/cgi-bin/ubuntu-sponsorships.cgi
=== Areas of Improvement ===