We are grateful to our next interviewee whom has contributed a lot to cleaning up the code-base, improving the efficiency of icon theming, and getting stuck into making LibreOffice something more beautiful. Anyhow without further fuss:

Joseph and Abelita

I’m Joseph Powers, JoeP on IRC, based on the American West Coast in Las Vegas, in my very early fourties, married to a wonderful woman: Abelita – a beautiful Philipina lady. I spent around four years in the US army working on computer repair, and now I work in the Entertainment industry, and live in Vegas – sadly not in the old Irish Powers’ family pile.

What was your very first program ?

I started program in high school on the Apple IIe. I’m a little bit of a math geek so most of my early programs where related to graphing math equations. I quickly moved on from BASIC and when into Pascal when my parents purchased an PC-XT for me.

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

Currently I’m employed by a Hotel/Casino group out of Las Vegas, Nevada. At work I mostly customize and maintain interfaces to our Info/Infinium supplied Human Resources, Payroll, General Ledger, Accounts Payable, Fixed Assets, and Project Accounting software running on an IBM i system. The current environment is mostly RPGLE, DB2, & CL with a little JSP work (HTML, Java, & CSS).

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This is the first in a series of developer interviews. Our hope is that these will build understanding of the growing community working to improve LibreOffice, make connections with others, and show that it is indeed possible to get stuck in and contribute to the code. Clearly the views expressed here are the un-edited views of the interviewee themselves, and not The Document Foundation, yet hopefully over time they will provide a useful flavour of the community.

We are grateful to our first interviewee whom, while being a superstar, is also a rather private person – not a social networking user or a blogger, and we respect that. Hopefully we’ll get to know him better in person at the various LibreOffice conferences of the future. He also appears to be too modest – having done some outstanding work, as an example finally removing the VOS library (deprecated for a decade) from LibreOffice, and finding and fixing various threading issues in the process. Anyhow without further fuss:

Programming is about people: so please ! tell us a bit about yourself:

I am Norbert Thiébaud (shm_get on IRC). I’m French but I live in Dallas, Texas (USA).

What was your very first program ?

Oh, that was quite some time ago… somewhere in fall 1983. I don’t remember what it was about, but I know it was in Basic AppleSoft, and it was on paper since I didn’t yet own a machine to run it. I would squat the local electronic shop to experiment with the expo model 🙂

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

I work for an ISV (Independent Software Vendor). We write tools in the Change Data Capture field: Capturing database logs ( IMS, DB2, Oracle…), moving them around, transforming them and applying to some other database), mostly on Mainframe and Unixes.

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The Document Foundation is happy to announce the third beta of LibreOffice 3.3. This beta comes with lots of improvements and bugfixes. As usual, be warned that this is beta quality software – nevertheless, we ask you to play with it – we very much welcome your feedback and testing!

Please, download suitable package(s) from our mirrors.…