About Me

My name is Marcus Tomlinson. I'm a qualified BSc Software Engineer from Durban, South Africa, with well over a decade of experience in embedded and non-embedded software development. When I'm not writing software, I'm usually writing music or books. Sometimes I may even write a book about software, or software around music.

Contact Information

Contributions

I’ve been contributing significantly to Ubuntu since 2013. As of October 2019, I’ve touched over 1500 bug reports and initiated more than 300 merge proposals across a wide range of Ubuntu projects.

Projects I’ve contributed significantly to (i.e. features added / bugs fixed) include:

Highlights

Unity APIs

• Heavily involved in designing and developing Ubuntu’s Unity Shell features and APIs from 2013 to 2017 (as you can tell from the list above).

• Co-created (w/ Michi Henning) the middleware layer and API behind Scopes.

• Created a C++-to-JS binding library called: "V8-cpp", to provide JavaScript APIs for the team's many C++ APIs.

• Recognised as Technical Lead for my considerable contribution to Scopes and broad experience across much of the Unity API suite.

• Presented at a number of Ubuntu Online Summits.

Ubuntu Desktop

• Improved desktop-launch (snapcraft-desktop-helpers) cold run time by 20%-30%.

• Developed the first set of GNOME build- and platform-snaps, aimed at greatly simplifying GNOME-based snap packaging.

• Took over maintenance of the LibreOffice Ubuntu packages (deb and snap) in early-2019.

• Reduced the backlog of LibreOffice bugs from > 800 to < 400 in the first 6 months by staying on top of triaging, releases, SRUs, and CVEs.

• Merged the libreoffice-l10n meta package into libreoffice and introduced libreoffice-help-common.

• Reduced the overall size of the LibreOffice snap by ~20%, and its cold run time by ~45%.

Future Goals

• Continue to develop my experience with a wide range of technologies and domains.
• Find opportunities to work with different languages, on different projects, and at different layers.

Testimonials

If you have something nice to say about me, please add it below along with @ SIG @ (no spaces) - The @ SIG @ command will sign your name and date/time it after you "Save Changes". Thank you!

pstolowski

I worked with Marcus on Unity API and Unity Scopes for a few years and he contributed a lot to the project. He is a great software engineer, highly skilled, versatile and passionate about all aspects of software development. He is a good and dependable team player, very honest, open and easy going, working with him was a pleasure!

-- stolowski 2019-09-25 15:19:17

mdeslaur

Marcus has been preparing the LibreOffice security updates that I release for a while now. They are always well done, well prepared, and well tested. He is attentive to detail and an excellent engineer. I wholeheartedly recommend Marcus gain LibreOffice PPU rights.

-- mdeslaur 2019-09-25 18:08:49

jamesh

I have worked with Marcus on both the Unity API Team and the Ubuntu Desktop Team. He is an excellent software engineer with strong C++ skills, and an attention to software quality. On the Unity API Team, all team members were responsible for maintaining the Debian packaging of the software we developed, and Marcus had no trouble here. On the Desktop team, Marcus has been doing great work maintaining the LibreOffice packages (no small feat), and has quickly mastered snap packaging.

-- jamesh 2019-09-25 19:21:35

osomon

After two years maintaining the libreoffice packages and snap in Ubuntu, I passed the torch to Marcus in April this year, and he has been doing a great job of understanding all the intricacies of the packaging and preparing updates for all supported Ubuntu releases in a timely manner. His updates are always well prepared and carefully tested, he responds to bug reports promptly and responsibly, and on top of that he has done a lot of triaging to clear the backlog of untriaged bugs in Launchpad. I strongly support his application for LibreOffice PPU rights, and until then I'll happily continue sponsoring his uploads. I also think the Ubuntu Contributing Developer role fits very well with Marcus's skills and proven track record.

-- osomon 2019-09-25 20:17:01