Category: Interviews

Coding LibreOffice to relax a bit from studying tough mathematical problems? Read why and how Markus Mohrhard works on LibreOffice!

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

I’m a third year math student and have always been interested in computer science(which is even a subsidiary subject for me). I’m always interested in anything new in math, physics and computer science and try to learn as much as possible in these areas.

In what other software projects have you been involved ?

I’ve been working on a university project for about one year now. This project is mainly about model to model transformations.

Where do you live (and study)?

I live at Karlsruhe and study at the Karlsruhe Institute for Technology (formerly know as university Karlsruhe)

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

Mainly studying, but in my free time I do sports or just do something with my friends.

Ah sports means healthy people in the project 🙂 …so, what type of sports?

I’m jogging and playing football. But since university I have no more time for doing this in a club only with friends and in my free time.

When do you usually spend time on the project ?

Mainly in the evening and during nights. Mostly when I have some math problems which drive me crazy and I need to think about something else for some time.

Working on LibreOffice code to relax – could be worse 😉
Do you have a preferred text editor for this relaxing work? And why?

Notepad++, Vim and Gedit. Depending on what I’m doing. Notepad++ is my prefered editor at Windows and sometimes I miss it in Linux. I think for developing in Linux there is only the choice between Emacs and Vim and I just prefer Vim(even if it sometimes drives me crazy). And I like Gedit for its simplicity.

How did you hear about LibreOffice ?

I’m following a tech news site and they report regularly about Libreoffice and the Documentfoundation. I liked the idea of an independant foundation behind LibreOffice that would not force developers to sign a CLA.

Why did you get involved ?

I’ve always wanted to contribute to an open-source project. After I discovered the Easy Hacks page my decision was made and the community made it really easy to get into the development. Especially Kohei helped me a lot to understand the code around calc.

What was your first contribution to LibreOffice ?

It was a one line change to fix a problem showing the right shortcut. Nothing special but I learned a lot about the structure of LibreOffice there. It was about the crasher bug (fdo#37429) and listed and the most annoying bugs. As soon as I found the problem (which took a lot of time) it was just a one line change.

What was your initial experience of contributing to LibreOffice like ?

It was amazing how positive the core developers react to someone new and how much they encourage someone to go on. Even when I started working on my autofilter patch and made some really bad design decisions, they helped me every time with some hints how I can improve my code.

What have you done since then ?

I’ve written some code to support one autofilter per sheet in calc and the corresponding import and export filters(thanks a lot there for Kohei’s help). Since then I’ve fixed several bugs and started working on supporting an unlimited number of sheets in calc together with improving the performance in some situations.

What do you think was your most important contribution to LibreOffice so far ?

For me it is the support for one autofilter per sheet, but for others it might be one of the bugs I fixed.

How will that improve things for users?

This was a long requested feature and improves the compatibility to Excel a bit. There was a workaround for this this but it was extremely uninitive, so I hope that a lot of people can benefit from this feature.

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

It would be amazing if more people would help in the QA and help the developers to find bugs much earlier. I broke some minor things with my patches but they were not detected before RC1 and I think our quality could improve if there were more people testing the nightly builds or beta builds.

Anything else interesting you get up to when not hacking ?

I’m playing chess and doing sports regularly. But I’m always open to new things and try something different. I’d like to travel to other countries more but that will not possible as long as I study.

Thanks a lot for your answers and time!

By: Clóvis Tristão

Today, we have the pleasure of interviewing Web Designer and Computer Science Student in the Federal University of São João del-Rei, Paulo José. He has been outstanding with his work in LibreOffice, specially in the Design Team. Hope you enjoy the interview with this promising Artist.

Now, tell us a bit about yourself:

It’s a bit weird to talk about myself in a interview, since I’m just a student. But first all, I want to thank you and the BrOffice Magazine for this invitation. I’m very glad in taking part on it.

I’m a 20 year old Brazilian guy. I’m becoming a programmer now, but I’ve always worked with Blender, GIMP, Inkscape and many other open-source and proprietary graphic apps. Since my childhood, I love to draw, read about design and computer related things, so the university course’s choice was an actual challenge.

Since I began Computer Science, I tried to join these two universes – sometimes too diverse – on my curriculum. Among my projects, I helped on the redesign of the faculty’s website, took place on an usability and accessibility research group, and created the visual identify for a national Bio-Engineering congress. On a personal note, I’m a huge fan of the singer Shania Twain, so most of my high-school artwork is Shania-related. I love music and science too.

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

I became a LibreOffice member just one month ago, so in our (southern hemisphere) summer break, I just stayed with friends and family enjoying this moment. Now I’m back in class, so in my “spare time” from LibreOffice, I study, trying to finish my research with my class colleagues, having fun with my room mates, and even running or biking some kilometers to try to thwart the almost inevitable sedentary inherent to the full time computer driven life style.

When do you usually spend time on the project ?

Some times during the day I read and send some emails and before sleep. On the hollidays, I could dedicate much more time to this project, and I did, since I really enjoyed to work on this team.

Being a student, how do you reconcile this with your classes?

Well, actually I realize now this is not a trivial task… I think it is not a question of just correctly managing how much time you spend on each task, but actually manage how you spend your time every day. Spending 10 minutes effectively on a less important task is much better than spending some really unproductive 60 minutes on a important task. Start with the easy tasks, be productive on this time and you’ll be calm to totally complete the harder things. And probably you’ll get even some spare time for an ice cream after work.

Which is your preferred design program? And why?

Hard question… For 3D creation, video edition or graphic post-production tasks, Blender with no doubt. For vector graphics, web design and text-related stuff, Inkscape for sure! And I’m not talking about open-source software, but on general software. I’ve used Photoshop, Corel Draw, Adobe Premiere and such for years. All these are great pieces of software, except by Corel Draw of course. But the true seems to be: today, the open-source software are equal or better than theirs proprietaries alternatives. Not just in functionality, but usability, flexibility and constant updating.

But if it’s an one-answer question, I’d say I prefer Blender, because its fast in development and it has some awesome features.

About GIMP: I don’t like the program by itself – mainly because the lack of updates and its no-answer policy to user feedback. But its third part plug-ins like GIMP Registry or G’MIC are incredible and very professional. They made me an ex-user of Adobe Photoshop a long time ago.

How to get involved with the LibreOffice, tell us a little about that?

I was a little bored in my summer vacations and also trying to find some nice computer-related project to join, for personal reasons. Then I saw the Microsoft’s ribbon mock-ups to LibreOffice on OMG Ubuntu and WebUpl8 blogs. They caused many waves on the user sea and I just thought “Well, maybe I can do something like that, but not taking the whole idea from a particular app. So I did some Blender UI-based mock-ups for LibreOffice and they were posted in OMG Ubuntu, WebUpl8 and other places and the feedback was so cool that I felt the urge to join the LibreOffice team and maybe help/be helped in someway. But I’m learning much more than I could imagine!

What was your first contribution to LibreOffice ? Tell us your impressions about the feedbacks?

My first “actual” contribution to LibreOffice was the 256px version for the mimetype icons, now they are called the file type icons (Open Text Document, Open Presentation Document and so). The icons up to 128px already had been done, mainly by Christoph Noack, with additions from the hole community. When I joined the team, Christoph and Bernhard Dippold helped me so much, guiding my eyes and focus on what I should do. I perceived the mimetype icons deadline was coming close and so tried to finish the 256px icons.

When I presented they to community, the feedback was great. When Christoph Noack said he didn’t think the icons could not look so good at 256px, It made my day. Now the icons are basically a finished work for the current branding and I’m very glad I took part on it. I actually never thought it could happen to me. But as everything in my life, I’m trying to do my best and enjoy each second of this awesome experience.

Paul, thank you for sharing some of this brilliant work in Art Work. You are one of those that can contribute greatly to the community, and we are proud to have a Brazilian as a part of this team.