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Interview with Hossein Nourikhah

Which is your perception of the project, as seen from the outside world?
I see LibreOffice project as an alternative path. The road to office productivity suites doesn’t have to end up in proprietary office applications and file formats. LibreOffice project is a way out, trying to provide freedom to the users, alongside providing user friendly, cost efficient products that are also accessible for the disabled people.
On the other hand, LibreOffice is a complex piece of software, consisting of ~10 millions of lines of code [1], which is somehow difficult for an average programmer to get involved in its development. This is something that can be improved through various means, including better tools and documentation, and of course, more helping hands.

How do you see office suites – desktop, mobile and cloud – evolving in the next 10 years?
As software/hardware platforms change, so does the application software, and office suite is not an exception. Being able to run on the mobile devices and cloud is one thing that we see today, but for the next decade, pervasive computing and internet of things seem to be the next platforms. So, being able to communicate with the user through new and challenging input and output channels like TTS, voice recognition and haptic technologies would be something feasible, and perhaps plausible. AI is something essential in this road-map.
I think it is very important for the LibreOffice community to accept these new platforms, and embrace the new ways of communicating with the users, providing the users the freedom and privacy they need in the new era.

Are you a LibreOffice user? Which is your opinion of LibreOffice as a user of desktop software?
Yes, of course! I use the latest Ubuntu LTS, and I am a LibreOffice user on a daily basis. In fact, I was an enthusiastic user of an early version of OpenOffice.org from Red Hat 9.0 in 2003 [2], and I have switched to LibreOffice when it was released.
I am a happy user, although there are glitches in text rendering for my own language (Persian/Farsi). I hope we can fix them sooner with the help of kind LibreOffice developers.

Why did you decide to apply for the position of Developer Community Architect?
For at least two reasons:
Firstly, I wanted to spend my time on a free software that will benefit the people, no matter their skin color, nationality, race and wealth.
And secondly, I wanted to get involved in an international community of developers, and try to attract more and more people, convincing them to use LibreOffice, and encourage them to contribute in the way they can.

Although you have just started working as Developer Community Architect, which is your opinion about LibreOffice source code?
Looking at the history of the code, it is more than 30 years now since the start, and I think there are hidden gems out there! You design a GUI with glade, and at runtime, you can get X, Qt, gtk, etc user interface out of it with visual class library (VCL). This is very interesting.
On the other hand, I think there are a lot of places for improvement, and the most important part of it is from the architectural point of view. Instead of a monolithic application, a multi-process architecture would provide advantages that are available today in some web browsers.

You are from Iran, a country with a huge historical heritage. Can you provide a short description?
Yes. Iran (previously called Persia), is a country from the west of Asia. Currently It spans from Caspian Sea in the north to Persian Gulf in the south. I am originally from Mazandaran, a lovely flourishing area in the southern coast of Caspian Sea with the well known Hyrcanian Forests.
Iran (Persia) has a long history of civilization. Alongside Italy (Ancient Rome), Persia was one the great civilizations of the ancient world. Now, the heritage of the ancient Persia, from the old landmarks to the distinguished scientists and figures spans over several countries. 24 UNESCO World Heritage Sites are currently inside today’s Iran [3], in which most of them are cultural sites, except 2 natural sites of Lut Desert and Hyrcanian Forests.
But besides the long history, it has kind people that want to have a good relation with all the nations worldwide. We also have nice looking Persian kitties that many people around the world love them. 🙂

Which is your operating system of choice, and your preferred development tools?
I use Ubuntu LTS. Debian-based distros are neat, and in case Ubuntu is a platform that I can describe as both user-friendly and developer-friendly. Advanced Package Tool (APT) and Debian Package Manager (dpkg) are great tools that were far ahead of their time, even compared to the commercial software tools from expensive proprietary operation systems. It is very interesting from a user’s viewpoint that you can install any package you like with a single click or a single command:
sudo apt-get install some-pacakge
And it is very helpful from a developer’s viewpoint that you can build a package with just 3 simple commands: Installing dependencies, getting the source code, and building the package is straightforward:
sudo apt-get build-dep some-package (install dependencies)
apt-get source some-package (install the sources)
cd some-package-dir; dpkg-buildpackage -b (build it!)
Let’s remember Ian Murdock (rip), the founder of Debian project and the original creator of these great tools.
I usually use Qt Creator IDE for most of my development work, but I occasionally use Visual Studio Code.

Your personal message to the LibreOffice community, in your native language (and of course in English).
In Farsi/Persian:
پیام من به جامعه لیبره‌آفیس این است: لیبره افیس یک فرصت برای دسترسی به نرم‌افزاری آزاد، دوست داشتنی و بسیار مفید برای کارهای روزمره است. اگر می‌خواهید بهتر شود، باید خودتان کمک کنید؛ چون لیبره آفیس نرم‌افزار خودتان است!
In English:
LibreOffice is an opportunity to have access to a free, lovely and useful software for the daily tasks. If you want it to become better, you should help; because LibreOffice is your own software!

References
[1] LibreOffice at OpenHub: “507,456 commits made by 2,118 contributors representing 9,706,279 lines of code”, https://www.openhub.net/p/libreoffice
[2] Red Hat Linux 9 Features Latest Open Source Technologies, https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/press-redhatlinux9
[3] Properties inscribed on the World Heritage List (24), Iran (Islamic Republic of), https://whc.unesco.org/en/statesparties/ir

To get in touch with Hossein:

E-Mail: hossein@libreoffice.org
IRC: hossein at libreoffice-dev room in LiberaChat Network irc://irc.libera.chat/#libreoffice-dev

Hossein Nourikhah joins the TDF team as Developer Community Architect

Next week, Hossein Nourikhah will join the team at The Document Foundation, the non-profit behind LibreOffice, as Developer Community Architect. Hossein is a developer, university lecturer and FOSS advocate. He writes programs, teaches programming to students, and is an advocate for the use of free software applications, because they have a huge positive impact on the quality of our life by providing the essential freedoms that we all deserve.

Hossein has a B.Sc. in Computer Engineering (Software) from Isfahan University of Technology, and a M.Sc. and a Ph.D. in Information Technology from Amirkabir University of Technology, also called the Tehran Polytechnic. Since 2016 he has been an instructor at the Amirkabir University of Technology, teaching various courses including C/C++ programming, operating systems, software design, and many others.

Hossein started programming in BASIC and Pascal when he was 12, and after two and a half decades he is still involved in programming for fun and profit. He has worked with several programming languages, including C/C++, Java, Pascal, PHP and many more.

Industry experience

In addition to the university activities, including teaching and research, Hossein has several years of experience in the industry, working at various software/hardware companies as a C/C++/Java programmer – and lately as a software team manager and lead developer.

Hossein’s work experience ranges from web development with PHP to industrial application development with C++/Qt. He considers Qt a great platform for C++ software development, and he likes it very much as a clean and lovely tool.

Hossein has worked with many programmers as mentor, helping them to improve and reach their potential in software development by better understanding programming languages, libraries and tools. He feels great when he can empower other people, also because this helps him to expand his knowledge and understand things much better than before.

As Developer Community Architect, Hossein will be responsible for attracting new contributors to the LibreOffice project by identifying and onboarding new potential developers, building relationships between them and the community, and introducing them to TDF’s communication channels – where they will meet fellow co-hackers. He will encourage everyone’s contribution, and show community members ways to grow by bringing the more skilled contributors in contact with existing experts in the various fields for even deeper learning.

We’re happy to have him on board, and look forward to working with him!

Annual Report 2020: TDF and LibreOffice infrastructure

In 2020, the infrastructure team added new services, implemented a new Extensions and Templates site, and worked on a replacement for Ask LibreOffice

(This is part of The Document Foundation’s Annual Report for 2020 – the full version is here.)

LibreOffice’s infrastructure team is responsible for maintaining the hardware, virtual machines and services that enable the wider community to develop, market, test, localize and improve the software. The public infrastructure is powered by around 50 kernel-based virtual machines (KVMs) spread across four hypervisors, plugged to an internal 10Gbps switch, hosted at Manitu in St. Wendel (Germany), and managed with libvirt and its KVM/QEMU driver. The virtual disk images are typically stored in GlusterFS volumes – distributed across the hypervisors – except for some transient disks (such as cache) where the IOPS requirement is higher and the redundancy less important.

In 2020, the infra team added various new services, such as the new SilverStripe-based Extensions and Templates site. Some background to the technical and design decisions behind the site are here on the blog.

Meanwhile, Discourse was investigated as a likely AskBot replacement, while several VMs for deployment tests outside the scope of infra were handed over (such as decidim). The infra team worked on Moodle (an e-learning platform), build bots, integration of the Weblate translation platform into the TDF development dashboard, and a crashtest box (sponsored by Adfinis).

Along with the new services, there were many notable upgrades too. Some machines are still running Debian GNU/Linux 9 (codename Stretch), but most are now upgraded to Debian 10 (codename Buster). Other updates include: Nextcloud 16 to 20, Gerrit 2.16 to 3.2, LibreOffice Online 6.3 to 7.0, and Mediawiki 1.31 to 1.35. Finally, OpenGrok, Etherpad Lite, Weblate and the Grimoire dashboard received updates too.

Notable refactoring/improvements took place in the online help backend, along with the backends for bibisecting and mailing lists. The team started collecting metrics for download counters and the update checker, and worked on improving IRC bots, the monitoring setup, and a distributed backup solution.

Documentation was improved to make onboarding of new infra team members easier, while the SSO (Single Sign-On authentication) system was expanded with more services: Gerrit, the new extension site, Discourse, Jitsi and Moodle.

Like what we do? Support the LibreOffice project and The Document Foundation – get involved and help our volunteers, or consider making a donation. Thank you!

Join the LibreOffice Team as a Developer Community Architect (m/f/d), 20-40h per week, remote (#202101-01)

The Document Foundation (TDF) is the non-profit entity behind the world’s leading open source office suite, LibreOffice. We are truly passionate about free software, the open source culture and about bringing new companies and people with fresh ideas into our community, especially as we are about to enter the second decade of our project.

To grow the LibreOffice community and to enlarge the associated ecosystem, together working on office productivity for over 200 million users around the globe 🌎, we’re searching for a Developer Community Architect (m/f/d) to start work as soon as possible.

As our future Developer Community Architect, you work with a great team of currently eleven to:

  • Attract new contributors by promoting the LibreOffice project

  • Identify and onboard them, by building relationships between new coders and the community

  • Introduce them to our communication channels where they meet fellow co-hackers

  • Affirm and encourage everyone’s contribution and show community members ways to grow

  • Bring skilled contributors in contact with existing experts in the various fields for even deeper learning

To succeed in this new role, you ideally already have some of the following skills:

  • Previous experience in remote work

  • Self-driven and an excellent team player, who is interested in working as part of our team

  • Patience and kindness to work with potential contributors of various skill levels

  • Been a long-time contributor to one or more FLOSS communities, with coding experience in at least one FLOSS code base – ideally LibreOffice, of course! 🙂

  • Demonstrable C++ coding experience of at least five years, or a comparable language like C#, plus active knowledge of at least one more language used in LibreOffice, like Python or Java

  • Excellent communication abilities, that help you transport your enthusiasm for LibreOffice and our community

  • A quick learner with good self-starting capabilities (demonstrable quick learning is a good compensation for immediate lack of LibreOffice knowledge!)

  • Experience in web development and/or mobile technologies is a plus

  • When possible again, willingness to regularly travel to Hackfests and conferences in Europe and globally. In the meantime, you are excited to create virtual events on a regular basis, with the excellent infrastructure offered by TDF.

  • Fluent written English for e-mail and chat, with good speaking and comprehension is a mandatory requirement. Fluency in another widely-used language like e.g. Spanish or Mandarin would be considered an advantage.

Here’s how a typical day in your new role might look like:

You start your day by looking in Gerrit for unreviewed patches. There, you help to onboard new contributors, by positively reviewing their code contributions, which also involves syncing the coding style of their patches with LibreOffice’s. Your goal is to work with them and help them grow their skills where needed, like C++ programming, design and coding, and encourage them to bring up their own ideas how to implement a new feature or fix a bug in the codebase – in short, you are their guide to make their ideas become a reality. Especially for new contributors, you will introduce them not only to our community culture, but also to our variety of tools, which you regularly review and make proposals to improve or unify them.

One way to attract new contributors is to lower the entry barriers. You design and define easy tasks (“Easy Hacks”) for coders, that help them to learn about the code, our toolchain, the LibreOffice build system and leads them step by step into growing mature in the repository, so that they can ideally work on more advanced tasks.

Apart from the individual mentoring, an important part of your role is about knowledge sharing with the general public by writing and updating our technical documentation, like the developer guide, our wiki articles and also code comments. You master that thanks to your ability to write comprehensive texts for technical people.

The role you will fill gives you a lot of freedom and flexibility to shape our mentoring program. That requires you to work goals-oriented and with a laser-sharp focus to grow excellent LibreOffice core contributors. As our successful Developer Community Architect, you will come up with creative ways of finding and attracting volunteers who will stay in the community!

All jobs at The Document Foundation are remote jobs 🌟, where you can work from your home office or a coworking space. The work time ⌚ during the day is flexible, apart from very few fixed meetings. The role is offered both as part- or fulltime, with the option to grow the hours later, just as you grow into your role.

Are you interested? Get in touch! We aim to schedule the first interview within two weeks of your application. You can also approach us anytime for an informal chat to learn about the role or in case of questions – and you can directly join our virtual FOSDEM DevRoom on February 7 to see what’s going on in the community!

TDF welcomes applications from all suitably qualified persons regardless of their race, gender, disability, religion/belief, sexual orientation or age. Don’t be afraid to be different, and stay true to yourself. We like you that way!

We are looking forward to receiving your application, including information about you, when you are available for the job, and of course your salary expectations. Please send us an e-mail to mentor.application@documentfoundation.org by February 18, 2021. A final decision for the role will be made by March 18, 2021.

Note: We do not accept agency resumes. Please do not forward resumes to any recruiting alias or employee.

Get involved – Meet the TDF team

Joining a free and open source software project, such as LibreOffice, is a great way to build your skills, gain experience for future career options, meet new people – and have fun!

But sometimes, joining a large and well-established project can be a bit daunting at the start. So here we’ll introduce you to the small team at The Document Foundation, the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice. Most team members oversee certain sub-projects in the LibreOffice community – click on their names to learn more in interviews…

Note that this is just the team at The Document Foundation; the LibreOffice community is made up of hundreds of people! Most of the new features are implemented by developers in our ecosystem and volunteers.

Now that you know who we are, click here to get involved and join our projects!

Documentation Team Status

By Dave Barton

In recent times, the very small LibreOffice Documentation Team has been making real progress in revising and updating the user guides:

Release 6.4

Release 7.0
Calc Guide Published Work in progress
Base Guide Published Work in progress
Draw Guide Published Work in progress
Impress Guide Skipped Work in progress
Math Guide Published Awaiting volunteer contributors
Writer Guide Published Awaiting volunteer contributors
Getting Started Guide Published Awaiting volunteer contributors

While this progress in shortened documentation development time is fairly good, it can be substantially improved by having more contributors on the team.

It would be terrific if all contributors were a skilled technical writers, but in reality anyone with a reasonable command of the English language and an eye for detail can make a valuable contribution. No contributor is expected to rewrite entire guide books, although some of our most experienced, long term contributors do exactly that. In fact nothing is expected or demanded of any contributor, other than to let other members of the team know what they what they have chosen to work on.

In some cases, that might be to update a chapter of an existing guide, or reviewing the work of another team member. Reviewing can take the form of proof reading, or researching the accuracy of the guide information in relation to the software’s actual operation. By identifying yourself as a Docs Team contributor does not mean you are making any permanent or long term commitment – many contributors come and go over long periods according to the demands of their “real” life.

It can be seen in the documentation status above there are at least three guides where the input of new contributors would be very welcome. If you are interested in contributing these guides you can see the team guidelines here:

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/DocumentationTeamInfo/JoinDocTeam

Or to get a wider view of the Documentation Team activities visit this page:

https://documentation.libreoffice.org/en/join-the-documentation-team/ where you will also find information about maintaining the LibreOffice Help pages and the documentation wiki.

If you have any questions you are welcome to post them to: documentation@global.libreoffice.org  or you can also join our Telegram group for documentation at https://t.me/joinchat/ALeRuUFCxyZY0wzoddldWQ

The team also gather together in our open to all bi-weekly on-line meeting: https://jitsi.documentfoundation.org/tdfdocteam see: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/Meetings for dates and times.

Join us! Happy documenting!

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