Author: Mike Saunders

The Document Foundation, the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice, has a new developer in its team. Neil Roberts started work this month and will initially focus on LibreOffice’s scripting support. Let’s hear from him…

Tell us a bit about yourself!

I’m from the UK but I escaped to France after the Brexit vote and I’ve been living here in Lyon ever since. I got into programming when I was little, mostly by programming in BASIC on an Amstrad CPC. At the time I thought it was cool that you could sometimes see the source code in BASIC of software that you bought on cassette tape. Later my older brother got me into Linux and I loved that you could see the source code of absolutely everything. I’ve been a big fan ever since, and I always have some programming side project on the go.

I started my career at a small open source consultancy working on Clutter – which at the time was a project meant to bring revolutionary animated user interfaces inspired by the iPhone into the GNOME space. It is still used inside GNOME Shell today. Eventually that small consultancy got acquired by Intel where I moved onto working on the graphics drivers in Mesa.

I got into LibreOffice development last year after I was trying to help proof-read my wife’s master’s thesis and I ran into a small user interface bug. I made a patch to fix it and it gave me the opportunity to interact with the amazing LibreOffice community. I was very pleasantly surprised with the warm welcome and the encouragement to continue making more contributions. I have been hooked on it ever since.

Aside from tech, I like to ride my bike around the city and complain about cars. I usually have a knitting project with me at all times for when I want to relax. I’m also quite active in the Esperanto community.

What’s your new role at TDF, and what will you be working on?

I am in the scripting role, which means I will be helping to make life easier for people writing macros and extensions using the UNO API with any of the supported languages such as Python, JavaScript, Basic, C++ etc. Aside from BASIC, which has a very nice built-in editor and debugger, I think it’s still quite awkward to develop macros in the other languages – so I think one of the main tasks would be to improve the UI and user experience when writing in Python.

How can all users of LibreOffice help you in this work?

I think that filing bugs in Bugzilla to report issues that people are having with macro and extension development would be really helpful, including wish-list ideas of things that would be nice to have. I am very happy to discuss ideas on Bugzilla, the mailing list or in the Telegram group.

Otherwise, code contributions are very welcome of course. I hope to be able to give back the same warm welcome with code review and mentorship that I received when I made my first contribution.

Thanks Neil, and welcome on board!