Community Member Monday: Kira Tubo
Tell us a bit about yourself!
I live in San Jose, California, USA. I’ve lived around the Bay Area my whole life, after my parents moved away from the Philippines when I was about a year old.
I have had experience as a CRM (customer relations management) administrator, which partially functioned sort of like an internal tech support position, and I’ve also done crowdsourced testing and a11y (accessibility) testing as a side hustle. So I’ve had a lot of experience with troubleshooting and manually testing software.
My hobbies/interests are: reading, walking, video games/board games, and my dog.
What are you working on in the LibreOffice project right now?
Right now, I am attempting to write C++ unit tests in LibreOffice. As someone with rudimentary coding skills, it is quite challenging but interesting to learn.
Why did you choose to join the project, and how was the experience?
For the longest time, I’ve been wanting to contribute my technical skills to an open source project and learn about test automation. I saw some forums that suggested LibreOffice, and I thought it may be a good fit because I have also used the product (albeit lightly) in the past. What I like about the LibreOffice project is that there is a dedicated wiki for those interested in QA (not just development). Because of this, it is fairly easy to get started with contributing.
Since I’ve joined the project, I’ve helped the QA team with bug triaging, regression testing, bibisecting, etc. I’ve also submitted patches to Gerrit for some easy code fixes and updated the LibreOffice help documentation. I’ve learned so much and picked up a lot of new skills along the way. But there is definitely a lot more to learn, which is exciting!
I’d also like to say that the people working on the LibreOffice project are fantastic. They acknowledge the work that you do and are more than happy to help you when needed (shoutout to Ilmari Lauhakangas for taking the time to explain how things work to me). So for anyone feeling overwhelmed or hesitant about joining, don’t be! We are all friendly here 🙂
Anything else you plan to do in the future? What does LibreOffice really need?
One of these days, I’d like to look into writing UI unit tests with Python, and maybe also unit tests for a11y (accessibility). As for improvements, I think perhaps it would be great if the wiki would be a little more beginner-friendly for those who want to get into writing unit tests, especially if they don’t have much development experience yet.
Many thanks to Kira for all her contributions! Every LibreOffice user is welcome to get involved, find out what they can do in our community, and learn new skills along the way 👍