Category: Interviews

Today we talk to Buzea Bogdan, who is making useful videos for LibreOffice users – check them out below!

Where do you live, and what do you enjoy in your spare time?

I live in Romania, a country with beautiful landscapes. I like computers and I like to ride my bicycle – or, more recently, my electric scooter.

What are you working on in the project at the moment?

I am reporting bugs, verifying them, and helping with other bug reports. In addition, I created a channel on YouTube with short tutorials about LibreOffice.

With the help of Xisco Fauli (LibreOffice’s QA engineer) and others in the LibreOffice groups on Telegram, I began to bibisect bugs. Also, with the help of others in the same direction, I may learn more about finding bugs and checking for fixes. I feel there are not so many technical videos about this.

How did you get involved with LibreOffice?

I started with LibreOffice almost a year ago, following a post about how everyone can contribute to this project. At that time, I thought it was time to financially support the LibreOffice community with a small donation. But I soon returned to the software’s website, because I had a small problem with displaying menus. Xisco helped me to solve the problem at the time, and then I thought: “If it is so simple to help others like me, could not I use my time to contribute with the little that I know?”

From that point on, I began to contribute by checking bug reports, along with videos and other information to solve some other bugs. I have also been involved in the translation of LibreOffice into Romanian. And recently I started the new YouTube channel that I mentioned, with short and simple explanation about little things that people usually find hard to solve. Here is a playlist – you can switch between videos using the icon in the top-left:

Finally, what do you see in the future for LibreOffice?

A few years ago I started using LibreOffice after watching a video on YouTube where OpenOffice and LibreOffice were compared by a well-known blogger. This kind of video could help LibreOffice become more familiar, and help people to discover the features and possibilities they have with open source software.

I feel LibreOffice is more mature now than ever, but the stable version needs to be stable enough – well tested. And this is the way I can help a little bit. I also feel that LibreOffice needs more engineers to work on bugs in order to maintain a smaller numbers of unsolved bugs, relative to all bugs that are reported.

So, huge thanks to Buzea for his help in the QA community, and the videos too! Checking and confirming bug reports is a great way to make LibreOffice even stronger, and doesn’t need a lot of time – if you want to give us a hand, jump into the LibreOffice QA channel and we’ll show you what to do. Cheers!

Today we’re talking to Vera from the Russian LibreOffice community, who has been especially active in our Quality Assurance (QA) project recently…

First, tell us a bit about yourself!

I live in Obninsk, Russia – it’s one of the major Russian science cities. You know, the first nuclear power plant was built in Obninsk. At the moment I work at BaseALT as a QA engineer. I really love testing! (I’ve noticed a minor bug in LibreOffice Writer while typing these words – I will surely report it later 🙂)

I’m also mother of a teenage girl, so a lot of my spare time is dedicated to supporting her interests. Now she is really into biking and swimming, and we dream of visiting the Tokyo Olympics in 2020.

What are you working on in LibreOffice at the moment? And is there anything you’d like to try in future?

I find and report bugs in Bugzilla and check fixes. In addition, I try to reproduce unconfirmed bugs and categorize them. For the future, well, it’s really hard to choose – there are so many options! But I undoubtedly would like to have more time to contribute to LibreOffice.

How did you get involved with LibreOffice – and what was the
experience like?

When I started to work in BaseALT, one of the tasks was to test LibreOffice for KDE 5.
I took part in the Bug Hunting Session for LibreOffice 6.2 in October 2018 and had success. I was mentioned in the November 2018 QA report; it was unexpected and very pleasant!

A bit later, Aleksei Nikiforov (who works at BaseALT as well) got involved in work and fixed some KDE 5 crashes. Now we work together, thereby continuing the tradition of contributing to LibreOffice. You know, BaseALT was formed from the ALT Linux Team, which helped to localize StarOffice a long time ago.

Finally, what do you see in the future for LibreOffice?

My opinion: LibreOffice needs to be promoted more widely. Most Windows users don’t know that there is a great and free alternative to Microsoft Office.

Thanks to Vera for her time and contributions! And indeed, we in the LibreOffice project would appreciate more help spreading the word – join our marketing community today!

Today we’re chatting with Roman Kuznetsov, a Russian contributor to LibreOffice who helps out in QA and other areas:

Your nickname in the LibreOffice project is “Kompilainenn” – where did that come from?

Oh, it’s simple: one day I was trying to compile the Linux kernel for my old and slow PC. And I came up with my current nickname: Kompilainenn 😀

So tell us a bit about yourself – where you’re from, where you live, how to find you on social media, and what do you do in your spare time!

I’m a member of The Document Foundation from Russia, and I live in Lipetsk – it’s an industrial metallurgical city. You can find me on Telegram as @Kompilainenn, and on IRC in the channel #libreoffice-ru. I have a blog about LibreOffice in Russian: the blog has strange address with the prefix “anti”, but in reality the blog isn’t against LibreOffice 😉

I work for a large agribusiness company, as the boss of the “build cost calculation and conclusion of contracts” department. In my spare time I read books, play with my children, play computer games or walk outdoors – and of course make LibreOffice better 😉

What are you working on in LibreOffice at the moment?

At the moment I’m doing some quality assurance (QA) work – filing bug reports, retesting and sorting many old bugs. It’s huge area of activity – and also, I’ve fixed a pair of user interface bugs. I have translated my Conditional Formatting Guide into English as well.

Is there anything else you’d like to work on in the future?

First, I would like to learn C++ and I want to try to improve the management of macros in LibreOffice.

Second, there is the LibreOffice Style Guide in Russian. But it has much information about Writer styles, and very little info about styles in all another modules of LibreOffice. I want to add more info about styles for all modules, and then translate the guide to English.

Third, I want increase the number of active members in the Russian community – to involve more Russian developers in LibreOffice development. It will take a lot of work!

How did you get involved with LibreOffice – and what was the experience like?

I used OpenOffice.org from 2008, and then LibreOffice when it came to life. In 2013, I knew about the Russian forum http://forumooo.ru and created an account there.

At the end of 2014, Lera Goncharuk (aka “tagezi”) invited me to help him with translating LibreOffice’s FAQ into Russian on our wiki. And I agreed. Since then, I translate all Release Notes for new versions of LibreOffice into Russian.

Other tasks I worked on were translating the Getting Started Guide and Draw Guide. Then I began to send bug reports and some enhancements. Also, I worked on translations of Math and Impress guides. In the last year I have tried fix simple UI bugs in the source code of LibreOffice – now I have over ten simple bug fixes aready!

I got valuable experience communicating with a worldwide community, along with some practice in English, working in Bugzilla and making good bug reports. Now that I know more about how LibreOffice’s user interface is created, I like to make new dialogues in Glade and create UI mockups in Pencil.

Finally, what do you see in the future for LibreOffice? What does it need most?

First, I fully agree with Khaled Hosny, who was interviewed recently. LibreOffice needs to have a more clear vision and development agenda.

Second, every month I see about 600 new bug report and only 150 bug fixes. Our project need more developers and needs to pay more attention to attracting programmers to the project.

Third, it need to have more marketing materials about LibreOffice in various world languages – things like stickers, posters, etc. People should know about alternative software in the office world.

But to finish: thanks to everyone in the LibreOffice community for their work!

And thanks to Roman for his time and contributions! Our project and community is always open to newcomers, in many areas: marketing, design, programming, documentation, QA and more. Learn new skills, meet new people and get involved today!

India has 23 official languages according to the country’s constitution, but over 750 other languages are spoken there as well. Today we talk to Biraj Karmakar, who helps to translate LibreOffice into Bengali, and is a passionate supporter of other free and open source software projects:

Where do you live, and can we follow you on social media or IRC?

I’m based in Kolkata, India, and I’m active on Twitter: @birajkarmakar. I always try to help people through social media. Other than that I am available on IRC (biraj) and Telegram (@birajkarmakar).

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

Basically I am a professional linguist – I work from my own office. Also, I am a digital marketing consultant, helping small business to grow in online markets. Other than that I run many social entrepreneur activities like Digital Literacy for Kids and Women, and I am a pure hardcore open source supporter. I have been contributing to open source projects like Mozilla, DuckDuckGo, GNOME, SaifishOS, VLC etc from 7 years. There I generally do localisation (l10n) and community events, along with quality assurance (QA) activities.

What do you do in the LibreOffice project? What are you working on?

Basically I am the bn-IN (Bengali) locale leader in the LibreOffice project, trying to complete the pending translation. Also I have done some translation for two marketing videos. I am planning to organize one translation workshop for bn-IN language very soon. Then there’s one QA event in my list.

How did you get involved? Was it a good experience?

Actually, I knew about LibrepOffice when I started using Linux. It looked good to me because we got it free for our office-related work. As I am an open source fan, I thought: why not get involved in this project? Then a few community members introduced me to the LibreOffice community!

What does LibreOffice need most right now?

I think the LibreOffice community is growing – But we don’t have much exposure in India. It would be great if we could arrange meet-ups in India where we recruit new community members, especially in colleges and university campuses, who can help us to promote the software in India.

Thanks to Biraj for his time and contributions! Learn more about localising LibreOffice here – and, of course, there are many other ways to get involved as well!