TDF Community Blog

Tell us a bit about yourself!

I live in the north of Germany, in the city of Hamburg. Probably not so far away from where the first lines of what was called StarWriter where written, just a year before I was born.

I remember downloading StarOffice over a 64 kbit/sec line around the year 1997. And since it turned into OpenOffice.org I used it for a lot of home work in high school, student jobs and finally my bachelor thesis in computer science. For StarOffice and OpenOffice I mainly used Windows. But around the time LibreOffice started I had shifted to Linux as a daily driver.

My first contact with the LibreOffice community was when I got into a conversation with a few people at the Chaos Computer Club Congress around 2013. And as most of the last 15 years I’ll be around at the CCC too this year. As a hobby I’m engaged in politics, pushing Open Source, data protection, privacy as well as environmental protection topics. And to calm down I’m cycling, pursuing my interest for astrophysics and recently started doing Yoga.

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

In summer I’ve reworked some parts of the GPG / OpenPGP and X.509 integration in LibreOffice. Drastically improving the performance for users with large GPG keyrings like me. But also making the GPG and X.509 workflows in the LibreOffice UI more user friendly. Knowing there’s still much work left to do.

Beside I’m mostly working on the web integration of LibreOffice. I’m spending a lot of time with LOWA (LibreOffice Web Assembly) builds, improving them with my colleague Stephan Bergmann, and even committed my first patch to Emscripten to improve LOWA debugging.

My top priority is currently to work on ZetaJS, which wraps UNO into a native JavaScript API.
It’s being used to integrate LibreOffice into web apps without the need for a huge server running server side LibreOffice processes. I’ve also written some nice example use cases like this one.

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

I’ve worked with Linux for many years. Mainly as Ruby developer and web administrator. But I’ve always had a big interest into more classical technical environments. I really like strong typing. And I’ve collected some experience with big C code bases. Like when bisecting Wine to keep old Star Trek games running, or when debugging the amdgpu Linux driver for my notebook. Although not without great help from the AMD guys!

So when looking for new tasks, I remembered the LibreOffice guys I met at the CCC and I had some talks with Thorsten Behrens who kindly offered me a job at allotropia. For me LibreOffice is one of the flagship projects of Open Source beside the Linux kernel and Firefox. And I’m enthusiastically absorbing all the C++ insider knowledge I can get from my colleague Stephan 🙂

Surely I’m a little bit of a uncommon guy. In my old job I was usually the one who had an eye for what code did, which was written by people who left the company years ago. Maybe I should say something like “you can’t improve a software if you’re unwilling to understand the existing code base”. And I like to call LibreOffice “your friendly code base from the 90s” 😉

So there’s much archaeology I can do in LibreOffice. But I also love, that because of the code base being Open Source, many developers from 10, 20 or even more years ago are still in the community. So they might still remember what some code line was for.

I’ve always preferred decentralized solutions. And I know quite well how to get around with IRC, mailinglist and Bugzilla. So I’m probably not the regular guy of today, who’s conveniently doing everything via GitHub. Nevertheless, I hope I’m forgiven when stumbling over a few conventions I didn’t know before 🙂

Beside I very much enjoyed all the nice conversations at my first LibreOffice Conference this year. And I’ve held a few conference talks about my work with ZetaJS and the LibreOffice-GPG improvements in the recent months.

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

Surely web, mobile and collaborative editing are important topics. I’m myself using Collabora Online even outside IT communities since years. But I like to see it work even better with low end servers like a Raspberry Pi, to enable everyone with a small home server to serve a LibreOffice-Online instance. So moving the actual LibreOffice binary from the server into the browser’s WASM engine and enabling P2P collaborative editing is definitely a long-term goal.

Besides that, I also see that machine learning, some call it AI, can help with a lot of simple tasks. Knowing that more difficult tasks like programming often end in quite disastrous results, machine learning might be a good opportunity to help beginners to create great documents quickly with LibreOffice. And free software like SpeechNote shows me, that there’s no need to run stuff through a questionable online service. But instead only the proper training models need to be provided.

Beside I always cherish rock-solid software. Nobody will continue to use an app which constantly crashes or stores data in a broken file, resulting in many hours of writing being lost. So as in many software projects, a big priority is always to just keep things running as well as they ran before.