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Community Member Monday: Kira Tubo

Kira Tubo

Tell us a bit about yourself!

I live in San Jose, California, USA. I’ve lived around the Bay Area my whole life, after my parents moved away from the Philippines when I was about a year old.

I have had experience as a CRM (customer relations management) administrator, which partially functioned sort of like an internal tech support position, and I’ve also done crowdsourced testing and a11y (accessibility) testing as a side hustle. So I’ve had a lot of experience with troubleshooting and manually testing software.

My hobbies/interests are: reading, walking, video games/board games, and my dog.

What are you working on in the LibreOffice project right now?

Right now, I am attempting to write C++ unit tests in LibreOffice. As someone with rudimentary coding skills, it is quite challenging but interesting to learn.

Why did you choose to join the project, and how was the experience?

For the longest time, I’ve been wanting to contribute my technical skills to an open source project and learn about test automation. I saw some forums that suggested LibreOffice, and I thought it may be a good fit because I have also used the product (albeit lightly) in the past. What I like about the LibreOffice project is that there is a dedicated wiki for those interested in QA (not just development). Because of this, it is fairly easy to get started with contributing.

Since I’ve joined the project, I’ve helped the QA team with bug triaging, regression testing, bibisecting, etc. I’ve also submitted patches to Gerrit for some easy code fixes and updated the LibreOffice help documentation. I’ve learned so much and picked up a lot of new skills along the way. But there is definitely a lot more to learn, which is exciting!

I’d also like to say that the people working on the LibreOffice project are fantastic. They acknowledge the work that you do and are more than happy to help you when needed (shoutout to Ilmari Lauhakangas for taking the time to explain how things work to me). So for anyone feeling overwhelmed or hesitant about joining, don’t be! We are all friendly here 🙂

Anything else you plan to do in the future? What does LibreOffice really need?

One of these days, I’d like to look into writing UI unit tests with Python, and maybe also unit tests for a11y (accessibility). As for improvements, I think perhaps it would be great if the wiki would be a little more beginner-friendly for those who want to get into writing unit tests, especially if they don’t have much development experience yet.

Many thanks to Kira for all her contributions! Every LibreOffice user is welcome to get involved, find out what they can do in our community, and learn new skills along the way 👍

Community Member Monday: Adam Seskunas

Adam Seskunas

Tell us a bit about yourself!

My name is Adam Seskunas and I currently live in San Diego, California. In my free time I enjoy outdoor activities, hiking, backpacking in the Sierra, rock climbing and surfing with my daughter Sofia. I have a degree in Computer Science from the University of Maryland Global Campus, and I’m an open source software enthusiast.

What are you working on in the LibreOffice project right now?

Currently I’m working on my first “Difficulty Interesting” Easy Hack, a nice description of which can be found on this page.

The Easy Hack involves the ASCII filter for LibreOffice Writer and the way it handles the output of tables. True to its name, the Easy Hack has been interesting! It’s been challenging and rewarding at the same time. I’d like to thank Hossein Nourikhah for providing the code pointers and background information, and Michael Weghorn for help in code review.

Why did you choose to join the project, and how was the experience?

I’ve been using LibreOffice ever since I became interested in using Linux, when I was studying for my Computer Science degree, but I never had considered contributing. It’s such a large project, and I had no experience with C++. I just happened to see an advert on VolunteerMatch for bug testing, and answering the ad got me in contact with Ilmari Lauhakangas.

Ilmari would meet with me bi-weekly and he taught me how to verify bugs in Bugzilla and eventually got me into developing. Overall, joining the project been a fantastic experience, from Ilmari’s mentorship to all the people involved – everyone’s been great. I’d highly recommend it to anyone.

Anything else you plan to do in the future?

My plan is to apply and hopefully get accepted to do Google Summer of Code for LibreOffice. I’ve been talking to Hossein about ideas and I’m excited to get my application written and submitted.

What does LibreOffice really need now?

I’d say more contributors. There’s a robust community of contributors, but any project could use more. It’s a great way to meet people and gain some experience. I’d encourage anyone reading this and thinking about contributing to check out the wiki. There’s great information there and you can help in many different ways, not just development.

Many thanks to Adam for all his contributions! Every LibreOffice user is welcome to get involved and find out what they can do in our community 👍

Community Member Monday: Dione Maddern, LibreOffice docs team

Dione Maddern

Today we’re talking to Dione Maddern, who helps out in LibreOffice’s documentation team…

Tell us a bit about yourself!

I’m 44. Originally from Brisbane, Australia but I currently live in Baltimore, on the East Coast of the USA. I’ve worked in a variety of administration, document production roles in the engineering and insurance industries.

Most of my technical writing experience has been writing procedures, instructions, and other documentation for Health Safety Environment and Quality (HSEQ) systems. This is my first software project.

In my spare time, I like to bake, draw, and play video games and tabletop RPGs.

What are you doing in the LibreOffice community at the moment?

I’m working on the Offline Help (F1) function of LibreOffice, fixing broken links and updating instructions and terminology.

How did you join the community, and what was it like?

I saw the banner on the user guide page asking for volunteers to work on Documentation Team. I’d been looking for a volunteer opportunity where I could use my skills in document production for a while and this seemed perfect. So I followed the link and posted my bio on the Documentation forum.

Banner to join the Docs team

I felt a bit daunted at first because a lot people had more experience than me, or were from a software development background. Everyone has been very welcoming and I feel like I’ve been able to make a contribution to the project. I’ve learned a lot too, including a crash course in XML and Gerrit.

What advice would you give to others who want to join the documentation team?

Dive in! It can seem a bit daunting at first, but it’s easier to get started than you think.

Thanks so much to Dione for all the help! Indeed, everyone is welcome to dive in, help out, and pick up valuable experience along the way. Who knows – perhaps it could lead to a career in technical writing…

LibreOffice QA help from CSUMB students – Steven Casey

Steven Casey

The Document Foundation – the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice – recently teamed up with the California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB) to encourage students to learn about LibreOffice quality assurance (QA) and help out. A few days ago we chatted with Keldin Maldonado, and today we’re talking to Steven Casey…

What did you work on in your 25 hours?

During my 25 hours, I was primarily tasked with working on bug reports for LibreOffice. At the beginning of my service, I was simply testing unconfirmed reports and retesting confirmed reports to ensure the bugs were still present in the up-to-date version of the software. I would leave comments on those reports about my findings and follow up later if needed. Once I got a better understanding of Bugzilla, the software, and my duties (and I sure did make my fair share of mistakes), I moved on to binary bisecting. Binary bisecting was more advanced than what I was doing before, but it was also quite a bit of fun!

It was common for me to spend hours digging deep into a report to figure out which commit was causing the regression and more importantly, why. As a student studying computer science with an intention of becoming a software engineer, it was important to me to try and figure out why these bugs were happening. Often times, I came up with a theory and happily appended it to my comment on the report, but sometimes I would run into a roadblock and not be able to figure it out.

What was the experience like?

Honestly, the experience was a lot better than I initially expected. I think a large part of that was due to my mentor during my service, Ilmari Lauhakangas. Ilmari was both understanding and extremely helpful, not to mention just a great individual. I was often pretty loaded with work during my service and I really appreciated the no commitment, work on your own time whenever approach. There were some days I would work 5 hours mid-day, and other days where I would work for an hour between 1 and 2 in the morning!

LibreOffice also has a fantastic wiki with a lot of info for beginner bug triagers on getting started which helped a lot, as it was a little overwhelming in the beginning. Thanks to the wiki along with the tutorial videos Ilmari provided, I was able to mostly get a grasp on things pretty quickly. However, the wiki, while holding great information, feels a little scattered. There were a couple of times where I would search for something on the wiki, and end up not finding it to have Ilmari send me a link to a slightly different page I just happened to miss.

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For example, there is a GetInvolved page and a BugTriage page, which have very similar info, but some small differences which can be important. While it wasn’t an issue for me, time zones can also be a slight issue for someone who is interested in volunteering. Being based in California in the United States, available meeting times would either be around 10pm or 9am or so. Luckily, I am often up late at night, so 10pm was great for me!

What are you planning to do next?

I still plan to contribute to bugs here and there very casually. I genuinely mean it when I say that this experience was “life changing” no matter how silly that may sound. I graduate in August of 2024 so I plan on focusing on that the most. I do need to be career ready, and secure a position for graduation. With that being said, Ilmari has asked me to email him if I’m interested in LibreOffice development after the holidays. I don’t know what that will entail quite yet, but I plan on taking him up on that offer. Maybe I will be the one accidentally introducing the regressions soon!

Many thanks thanks to Steven and Keldin for their help! All LibreOffice users are welcome to join our QA community and keep the software strong and robust.

LibreOffice QA help from CSUMB students – Keldin Maldonado

Keldin Maldonado

Recently, The Document Foundation – the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice – teamed up with the California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB) to encourage students to learn about LibreOffice quality assurance (QA) and help out. Let’s hear from one of the students, Keldin Maldonado:

What did you work on in your 25 hours?

I worked in the QA team for LibreOffice. I was tasked with looking over bug reports and providing feedback on these reports by either confirming the bug, asking for more information, or providing my feedback if I wasn’t able to replicate the bug.

Later in my volunteer time, I learned about finding the specific commits that caused the bugs through bibisecting that made life for developers a lot easier. I must say, it was honestly really cool seeing the open source model in action. I was able to witness the community effort to resolve these issues in LibreOffice and see how this product was consistently improving.

What was the experience like?

This was the first time doing any sort of work like this, so I had a hard time getting used to some of the tooling, specifically Bugzilla with its infinite options. Luckily, I had Ilmari Lauhakangas to mentor me through this. He provided search queries that definitely made life easier. Apart from this, I also had issues with my working environment because of backward compatibility. I was able to use Distrobox, however, on a Linux box I built specifically for bug hunting that I then SSHed into from my main machine to be able to run older versions of LibreOffice, and my compatibility issues disappeared.

Bugzilla logo

In terms of the good things, I genuinely think that the last couple of mentoring meetings that I had with Ilmari taught me things that will stick with me for life, and for that, I have to give him a huge thanks for being patient and a good mentor. Specifically, I think learning about bibisecting was a great skill to be taught. I will definitely continue to use this going into my professional career and participating further in the open source community.

I also think that having a chance to work in this community maintaining LibreOffice, a product that many people rely on a day to day basis, was great. It might sound a bit cliche, but it genuinely felt really good knowing about the impact I was making, albeit small on the grand scheme of things. I know that my efforts made people’s lives a bit easier in the long run.

What are you planning to do next?

In terms of my professional plans, I am still enrolled in my undergraduate computer science program, which I will finish in the summer of 2024, and then I hope to go into software engineering. Currently, that is what’s taking up the majority of my time. In regards to The Document Foundation and LibreOffice, I will continue to provide help. Last I spoke with Ilmari, he asked me if I wanted to continue with the development side of things, which I think is a great opportunity for me to further develop my skill, and it will give me a chance to continue helping with The Document Foundation’s efforts.

Big thanks to Keldin for his contributions! But he wasn’t alone – Steven Casey also joined the QA community, and we’ll talk to him in our next interview on this blog…

Community Member Monday: Dominique Prieur

Map of LibreOffice community members

Today we’re talking to Dominique Prieur, who recently became a member of The Document Foundation, the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice…

Hi! Tell us a bit about yourself…

I’m French (and my English is too poor and too bad). I live in Orléans, 120 km south of Paris. I was in the army for 18 months and then a civil servant for 44 years. I’m now retired. I read a lot, listen to music, play with Python and look at the sky and the stars 🙂 Oh yes, I take a lot of photographs.

What are you doing with LibreOffice right now?

I used to work for the Direction générale des finances publiques (French Treasury). We used LibreOffice exclusively. I managed the finances of large hospitals and had lots of very large CSV files to reprocess. Today, I only do basic office automation. Occasionally, I give free courses on LibreOffice, particularly on styles and regular expressions. I’m working with the Orléans prison to develop office automation workshops with prisoners.

Why did you choose to join the LibreOffice project?

I wanted to join the project to find out how it works “from the inside”. I don’t have much experience of it yet…

What does LibreOffice need for the future?

LibreOffice needs to listen to its users again and again. It must remain open source.

Many thanks to Dominique for the support in our community! And LibreOffice will always be free and open source software, so no worries about that 😊

Press Releases

The Document Foundation announces the simultaneous availability of LibreOffice 26.2.2 and LibreOffice 25.8.6

Berlin, 26 March 2026 – The Document Foundation today announces the simultaneous release of LibreOffice 26.2.2 and LibreOffice 25.8.6. These…

Open Document Format

ODF is the future, OOXML is the past

Whenever a user, a government, a school or a business chooses the format in which to store and exchange its…