Community Member Monday: Adolfo Jayme Barrientos

Today we’re talking to Adolfo Jayme Barrientos, who has been active in the LibreOffice community for many years. He helps out with translations, design and documentation…

To start, tell us a bit about yourself!

I live and work in Mexico. I grew up in a home where we didn’t have video games or a computer, but it was filled with books; I developed a liking for reading, typography, typesetting and book design.

I was mesmerised when I got my first computer: reading also gave me an edge for learning languages, and when it came to choosing a university major, I went straight to linguistics. I work as an EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teacher with 12 to 15-year-old pupils.

I started translating software eleven years ago, and started doing it professionally some five years ago, to finance my university tuition. I am now trilingual, and continue reading books in various Romance languages whenever I have free time.

What are you working on in LibreOffice?

As well as providing Spanish translations for the different products developed under The Document Foundation, I collaborate with the design and documentation teams.

How did you originally join the community – what was it like?

When the news broke that Oracle was buying Sun, I became concerned. I had been using Linux for a year; I feared that the main productivity suite available for Linux, OpenOffice.org, would gradually die as a result of bad leadership. Fortunately, the project’s community took the reins of it and avoided a negative fate for people like me who worry about having to store our life’s work in proprietary formats that may be deprecated in the future.

What else do you plan to work on? What does LibreOffice really need?

It’s great that TDF’s leadership has produced such a healthy ecosystem of companies who contribute developers to LibreOffice, without monopolizing power. Its community is very equitative as a result. However, investments are needed in the front-end. We can’t rely so much on volunteers to develop that kind of user interface enhancements that signal progress to end users. Papercuts like SVG icon rendering and touchscreen scrolling are long-needed, but haven’t yet found their funding.

As for my plans, I’d like to spend time learning about the best ways to market our products and attract contributors from my area.

A huge thanks to Adolfo for all his contributions and support over the years! And to all users reading this: find out what you can do for LibreOffice, to build your skillset, meet new people, and have fun in our worldwide community!