[kde promo] Fwd: Interview for Behind KDE

Hi everyone,
I have received my interview back from Frank. It would be awesome if
someone could review/edit this one, as well as the one from Anne
Wilson I sent to the list a while back.

Thanks!
Jayson

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Frank Reininghaus <frank78ac <at> googlemail.com>
Date: Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 7:36 AM
Subject: Re: Interview for Behind KDE
To: Jayson Rowe <jayson.rowe <at> gmail.com>

Hi Jayson,

thanks again for your interest in my KDE contributions and for your patience!

I've attached answers to your questions and a recent photo of me. My
answers include links to two bug reports because I think it might be
interesting for potential new KDE contributors to see how exactly my
involvement began.

If you have any further questions or you notice something that could
be improved language-wise (quite possible because English is not my
mother tongue), please let me know.

I'm looking forward to reading more interviews on the Behind KDE site!
I've always enjoyed getting more information about KDE contributors
there, and I think there are still many people who do very important
work for KDE, but whom I don't know much about.

Best regards,
Frank

2012/7/22 Jayson Rowe <jayson.rowe <at> gmail.com>:
> Hi Frank,
>
> I'm working to bring back the "Behind KDE" series of interviews, and
> I'd love to have you be one of my first interviewees. If you are
> interested in participating, could you please answer the questions in
> the attached file, and return them to me, perhaps along with a photo
> you'd like to have of yourself on the BehindKDE website?
>
> Thanks for your time,
> Jayson Rowe
>
> --
> -jayson

-- 
-jayson

Could you start by telling us a little about yourself?

I’m 33 years old, and I live in Aachen, Germany.

What do you do for a living?

I work as a physicist at RWTH Aachen University. After I got my Ph.D. in theoretical physics a couple of years
ago, I spent some time teaching maths and physics at a school, but I decided that teaching at university and
doing research is more fun.

What do you do for KDE?

I maintain Dolphin and try to keep it in good shape. Moreover, I have contributed patches to some other parts
of KDE, mostly kdelibs and Konqueror.

How did you get started contributing to KDE?

I have been a KDE user since about 2001. A few years later, I became interested in contributing to a free
software project, but I couldn’t really find a good point to get started until 2008, when I took part
in two Konqueror bug days organised by the Bugsquad. Working in a team to clean up the bug database and to
find reproducible and easy steps to trigger a bug was a very nice way to get to know the applications better,
and also to get in touch with other people working on KDE. After the second bug day, I found the root cause of a
[bug that looked not too difficult to fix|https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=138606]. I digged
into the code and came up with my first patch.

After that, I became interested in file management and started to triage incoming Dolphin bug reports.
After [my first Dolphin bug fix|https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=169103], I quickly found out
that the code is very nicely written and that it’s fun to work with Peter Penz, the original author and
past maintainer. I continued to go through bug reports and fix bugs, and when Peter unfortunately decided
to end his work on Dolphin, I took over maintainership from him.

How much time do you spend working on KDE?

It’s hard to tell, but I would guess it’s about an hour per day on average. Sometimes more,
sometimes less. I spend this time reading and writing bug report comments (I receive up to 50 mails from
bugs.kde.org per day), reviewing patches, and working on code.

What keeps you motivated?

It feels good to work on an application that is used by many people every day. And it’s fun to work with
other people to make Dolphin better!

What are some of your future goals for your involvement with KDE?

Preserving and improving Dolphin’s stability is very important for me because I think that this is
what users appreciate most about an application.
I also want to make Dolphin more attractive for potential new contributors. Working in a team, discussing
patches and finding the best solution for a problem together is much more fun than doing it all alone. The
KDE 4.9.1 release will actually contain some very nice bug fixes that are the result of the joint effort of
quite a few people. I hope that this will be the case for all future releases.

What are some of your hobbies and interests outside of KDE?

I like travelling, hiking, spending time with friends, and running. I even ran two marathons, but that was a
couple of years ago, I’m not sure if I would be able to do it again today.

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