Developer Interview : Rob Snelders

LibreOffice can only exist because people are working on it: so please, tell us a bit about yourself.

I am Rob Snelders, a 28 years old Dutch guy. I am a programmer at a manufacturer of household equipment. I have studied Computer Sience at the Fontys University in Eindhoven.

In what other software projects have you been involved ?

I am also involved in T-Dose (www.t-dose.org), Ubuntu-NL.

What do you do when you’re not working on LibreOffice ?

Work, hanging out with friends and gaming.

When do you usually spend time on the project ?

Mostly a few late evenings a month.

Which is your preferred text editor? And why?

Currently I’m using VIM to edit on LibreOffice, but for programming I also use Eclipse a lot. I like Eclipse the best but it takes a while to correctly create a workspace with the correct settings.

How did you hear about LibreOffice, why did you get involved ?

I heard about it at FOSDEM. I went to some of the talks about LibreOffice and found it a good move, appealing.

What was your first contribution to LibreOffice ?

Translating some comments in the code from German to English

What was your initial experience of contributing to LibreOffice like ?

Positive. When I send the patch to the list it was added fast and the feedback was enthusiastic.

What have you done since then ?

Mostly translations and then recently the possibility for more default chart-colors.

Why did you work on that specific feature?

We had a LibreOffice HackersEvent and someone mentioned a request on the users list, if it was possible to define more colors than the 12 available in Tools>Options>Chart>…
It was not too difficult to find and to work on the code, also since some other developers were around 😉

So that feature could well be your most significant contribution to LibreOffice so far?

Yes, definitely.

How will that improve things for users?

When you have a chart with more than 12 series, it is much easier now. The number of colors is made with a variable, so you can make as many as you need.

What is your vision for the future and/or what would you most like to see improved ?

There are a lot of annoying little bugs. These will need to be removed.

Any change that you will jump in that ..?

Well… I’ll try to help with this.

Thanks for the interview Rob, and for being with LibreOffice!