Xisco Fauli works for The Document Foundation as a quality assurance engineer, helping the QA community handle bug reports, triaging and bibisecting. We talked to him about projects he’s working on, and how everyone can get involved:
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At FOSDEM this year, we made video interviews with members of the LibreOffice community and staff at The Document Foundation. We’ll be editing and uploading them regularly to the blog, so stay tuned! We start with Heiko Tietze, who is The Document Foundation’s UX (user experience) mentor and works with the design community:
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Our native language projects benefit enormously from volunteers around the world, who help make LibreOffice a success in many different locations. In our latest contributor interview, we talk to Lera Goncharuk who is active in the Russian community, helping out with translations and documentation.
What is your IRC nickname, nationality and current location?
I am “tagezi” in the IRC channels on Freenode, as well as The Document Foundation (TDF) wiki, but my friends call me Lera – that is a short version of my full name, Valerii. I was born in the USSR and lived in the Russian Federation the biggest part of my life. Now I live in Finland.
Do you work for a LibreOffice-related company or just contribute in your spare time?
I have been using Linux as my primary operating system since 2004 on a daily basis. And I started to use LibreOffice since the early days of the project’s formation, which came to replace OpenOffice.org.
What areas of the project do you normally work on? Anything else you want to tackle?
My main goal is translating documentation, wiki articles and news for the Russian community. But in addition, I have made a few patches for the Help system, and I have been trying to improve the formatting and navigation of the wiki pages. I am also a TDF wiki administrator and moderator of Russian-speaking communities in Google+ and Facebook, and I sometimes write articles about LibreOffice on my blog.
What was your initial experience of contributing to LibreOffice like?
At that time, I was working in Calc, visualizing data using charts. And I saw that I couldn’t find good Russian articles about using charts in LibreOffice. There is a proverb: “If you want something done well, do it yourself.” So I did that, starting to write articles myself, and now there are several available – not only about charts in Calc, but also on general topics related to LibreOffice.
In 2014, one member of the Russian-speaking community asked me for help with finding mistakes in the Russian interface of LibreOffice Calc 4.3. I began to help, and in the process found out more about the needs of the community, its concerns, and its hopes. And my next step was to start translating the TDF wiki. So I came to global LibreOffice community.
Which is your preferred text editor? And why?
I can use any text editor. Even if I have never worked in it, I can master it quickly. But I prefer to work in either Vim or LibreOffice Writer. I use Vim when I need to write or edit low-level texts such as source code or documents in markup languages like XML and HTML. Perhaps this is just a habit. When I switched to Linux, Vim was the first editor I used, and at the beginning I experienced significant difficulties – but about a week later, I was able to deal with simple tasks, to make templates and write simple scripts.
A month later, my skills improved, and now I cannot imagine how I could get along without it. For higher-level texts, when the text needs to be edited and printed by other people, I use LibreOffice Writer. I really like its implementation of the style concept, which helps to quickly create and edit documents with a complex structure. I use other editors and IDEs when necessary – when a problem requires a specific editor. But that happens less and less.
How much time do you spend on the project? What do you do when you’re not working on LibreOffice?
I devote myself to the LibreOffice community at least a few hours a day, typically four to six hours per day. In addition, I also often use LibreOffice on a daily basis. I have a radio-amateur database, several calculators for fast computations, and I often use Calc for data processing. Based on it I take notes and gather thoughts, which then grow into ideas and articles for my blog. Therefore, I can say that LibreOffice is an essential part of my life. The rest of the time, when I am not engaged in LibreOffice-related activities, I devote myself to my family or to learning new stuff.
Do you have any hobbies or interests you want to mention?
I am a radio-amateur and I like history and hiking. Especially the latter, because it lets me get distance from everyday routine, to refresh my mind and to come back to the project being full of energy and with new ideas. The rest are just ways to relax, to switch activities, when there is no opportunity to go to mountains.
What would you advice to people considering joining the LibreOffice community?
First of all, welcome. Do not be shy, but try instead. Many people think: “I’m not a developer. I don’t know programming languages, so how can I be useful?” In fact, developers constitute the community core, but the community is much bigger. There are many people around them: teams of documentation, localization, QA and marketing. All these people play important roles in the community.
Who will write documentation and translations, or spread the word about LibreOffice, if not these other people? There are a variety of tasks and jobs that satisfy any taste. Even if your English isn’t perfect and you don’t know programming, you can contribute to your local LibreOffice community. So, there is work for everyone, waiting for to come and do it. In my experience, the LibreOffice community is like a big family. You always can get support and help if you have difficulties. So welcome – the doors are open for you.
Thanks Lera! And as he says, there are so many ways to get involved with LibreOffice – so join us today and help make the software better for millions of users around the world. We look forward to meeting you!
Next up in our regular series of interviews with LibreOffice developers and contributors is Stanislav Horáček, who helps with localization in the Czech native language community.
Where are you from, and what is your nickname on IRC?
I am from the Czech Republic, and you can find me on IRC using the nicknames “horacek” or “strepon”.
Do you work for a LibreOffice-related company or just contribute in your spare time?
Just in my spare time – and that’s why there is a gap between my plans and reality 🙂
How did you get involved with LibreOffice?
Several years ago, I tried to set up custom page numbering in Writer, which was described in the built-in Help – but the Help page was written in half Czech, half English. Because I was glad that I discovered the solution of my problem, I decided to complete the page translation. As I found translating quite relaxing, that page was just a beginning…
What areas of the project do you normally work on?
Czech localization mainly; plus some corrections or bug reports for issues that I find when translating. Some time in the future, I would also like to go deeper into coding of extensions. They can be extremely helpful and it’s a pity that they are not widely promoted currently. For instance, I see a nice opportunity to use LibreOffice as a convenient front-end to another tools.
What was your initial experience of contributing to LibreOffice like?
From the beginning, I met helpful and encouraging people and I really appreciate that most of the discussions are constructive, with facts more important than feelings. I think these are the most precious properties that the community has; they made LibreOffice become my number one open source project. On the other hand, whenever I see a lack of them, I image that one more potential contributor could be demotivated…
Moreover, LibreOffice has a great advantage in that it is so widespread. I was – and still I am – impressed that you can really easily make improvements which will appear on screens of millions of people.
Which is your preferred text editor?
For LibreOffice related stuff, I use a universal text editor called Geany. But in general, I like also specialized editors or IDEs.
What do you do when you’re not working on LibreOffice?
I would say my hobbies are typically Czech, like beer drinking 🙂 You can also see me during the holidays in some of the European mountains, amongst lots of other Czech tourists. And who knows, maybe one day contributing to free software will be our national interest as well…
Thanks Stanislav. And to anyone reading this who wants to help out with translation and localisation of LibreOffice, get involved! Your contributions can make a huge difference, and will help to bridge digital divides across the globe.
LibreOffice developers, testers, translators and documentation authors are working hard on LibreOffice 5.3, which is due for release in early February. One contributor to the project, Tamás Bunth, has been helping to improve Base, the database front-end of the suite. We caught up with him to ask how he got involved with LibreOffice and what the community is like…
Where do you live, and are you active on IRC channels or social media?
I’m Hungarian, and I live in Budapest. My IRC nickname is Wastack (the name comes from the game Heroes of Might and Magic, one of my favourite games from childhood – Wastack is a barbarian hero). I’m on Facebook too: https://www.facebook.com/btomi96.
Do you work for a LibreOffice-related company or just contribute in your spare time?
I did some work for Libreoffice as a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) student last year. In the future I’ll contribute in my spare time.
How did you get involved with LibreOffice?
One of my roommates in my student hostel suggested that we should try GSoC. I was searching for an end user application written in Java or C++, since these are the languages I’m comfortable with. As I looked at the Easy Hacks I realised that I may be able to solve some of these, and the developer community was helpful as well.
What areas of the project do you normally work on? Anything else you want to tackle?
My GSoC project was to upgrade the internal Firebird database management system, which is used by LibreOffice Base, and solve related bugs, which makes Firebird an experimental feature. Therefore, I got to know the drivers in some detail, and I think I’ll stick to this area in the future.
What was your initial experience of contributing to LibreOffice like?
When I first looked at the C++ code in the repository, it was scary, since even a simple string is called OUString. After that I found some UNO interfaces, and I really don’t know what was going on there. Of course, after some time and guidance from my mentor things got much clearer.
Which is your preferred text editor – and why?
Vim is my favourite. Well, I don’t now many other editors, but Vim is highly customisable. I like the recording feature too.
What do you do when you’re not working on LibreOffice?
I am a 2nd year Bachelor of Science student of Budapest University of Technology and Economics. In my free time I go rowing. This year I got 4th place on the National Championship of Hungary in eights crew. I’ve achieved two first places there, but I’ve never been in an international race. It is one of my future goals.
Any other hobbies or projects you’re working on?
When I still have some free time, I like writing little computer games. I started with a simple snake game using Flash several years ago, which was followed by a Tetris with Java Swing and a multiplayer Tron game using TCP (still Java). Currently, I have an incomplete project of a browser game, where you have to move simultaneously with figures on a map. It is written in JavaScript, with Node.js on the server side.
Thanks Tamás! And thanks to everyone else who’s working on making LibreOffice 5.3 the best release yet. If you’re reading this and want to join a friendly and busy community promoting open standards and document liberation, get involved!
A new year begins, and we kick off with our first LibreOffice contributor interview of 2017. This time we’re talking to Hazel Russman who helps out with documentation and translations…
Where do you live, and are you active on social media?
I’m British and live in North London. I don’t do social media but I have a web page at www.hrussman.entadsl.com.
Do you work for a LibreOffice-related company or just contribute in your spare time?
I’m retired. I help out the documentation team mainly as a translator and proofreader.
How did you get involved with LibreOffice?
I wrote a novel some years ago and used OpenOffice.org to get it into shape for self-publishing. I wanted to give something back, and the OOo site suggested that time might be more valuable than money. When LibreOffice forked off, I moved over to their team.
What areas of the project do you normally work on? Anything else you want to tackle?
I’ve done quite a bit of translation from German into English, especially for Base, which has an excellent German handbook. Until I translated it, there was hardly anything on Base in English. English is my native language, but I grew up in a German-speaking home. My parents were refugees from Hitler. I’m also quite well known on the team as a proofreader.
What was your initial experience of contributing to LibreOffice like?
Interesting and very satisfying. But I’ve never been much interested in socialising online.
Which is your preferred text editor, and why?
For plain text, I like gVim. It has all the Vim keyboard commands but also graphical controls. The best of both worlds, you might say. I do a bit of coding in my spare time and for that I use Geany. Both Vim and Geany do syntax checking, which is a great help.
What do you do when you’re not working on LibreOffice?
Lots of things! I have a dog who takes up a lot of my time. I am active in my local church and play the cello as part of an instrumental group attached to the church’s gospel choir. I am also quite active on Linux Questions, which is the only social networking that I can be bothered with.
Thanks Hazel! We’ll be posting more interviews over the coming weeks and months, so if you want to join the LibreOffice community, pop over to tdf.io/joinus and choose how you want to get involved. We look forward to your input and contributions!
