LibreOffice developer interview: Krishna Keshav

In our next developer interview, we talk to Krishna Keshav, a new contributor to the LibreOffice project who is currently working on Easy Hacks and plans to expand into more complex bug-fixes in the future…

Where are you based, and do you work for a LibreOffice-related company or just code in your spare time?

I am currently pursuing my Bachelor’s in Computer Science and have just entered my final (fourth) year of study at PES College of Engineering. PESCE is located in the small town of Mandya in the state of Karnataka, India. I use LibreOffice for individual purposes. I mostly use Writer as my requirements are limited to it, but I also use Impress for creating presentations whenever needed. The best thing I like is its availability for every system, and it loads faster than its counterpart.

How did you get involved with LibreOffice?

Earlier I was just aware of open source software and used to see it in articles on the internet. So I decided to start with open source during the month of March 2016. Eventually, I found out that people here in India are not familiar with open source involvement and programs like the Google Summer of Code (GSoC). Anyway, getting back to how I started: I found LibreOffice as the most familiar organization while looking for open source organizations in the GSoC 2016 list.

Since the day I started with LibreOffice, the steps I took towards contributing to the software made me explore other open source software like Gerrit, Jenkins, GDB and much more. The LibreOffice community is very well organized and has appropriate documentation and a wiki page for every step, which helped me a lot while getting started. Additionally, I would like to say that LibreOffice has some very nice people on the IRC channels.

What areas of the code do you normally work on? Anything else you want to tackle?

So far I have worked on small bugs and tasks which LibreOffice refers to as Easy Hacks. You can visit my patches via this link. I am currently trying to tackle more complex bugs, and learning the user interface design of LibreOffice. In future, I would like to be involved as a more active and significant contributor to LibreOffice.

What is your vision for the future, or what would you most like to see improved in LibreOffice?

Libreoffice already seems to be a very stable product, with enough features for any end users. However, since things can always be better, I will definitely talk to the community if I find something to improve. Moreover, I would like to see LibreOffice replace its proprietary counterpart.

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

Apart from looking for something to code, I like to read tech articles whenever I find time. I love bike rides, playing table tennis and sometimes exploring music. I can be found on Facebook, LinkedIn and GitHub.

Thanks Krishna! And to any other interested developers reading this: join our community and help to make LibreOffice even better.