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Looking for new maintainers for some of my projects

  • December 8, 2011
  • Jannis Pohlmann

I am looking for a new maintainer for some of the open source projects I started over the last couple of years. Due to taking a full-time position as a software engineer, I will have less spare time to hack in the near future than I had while being a student. I will continue contributing to Xfce but I would like to focus on core development (thunar, tumbler, garcon etc.). As a consequence, I am looking for people interested in maintaining the following projects:

Most of these are smaller projects but some of them (like thunar-media-tags-plugin and xfce4-mixer) have many users. xfce4-mixer is particularly interesting, I think. It’s code base is of medium size and it lacks integration with notification daemons, key bindings for muting and altering the volume of a selected channel. Also, the per-channel widgets could be arranged in better ways than they are right now. PulseAudio support has been requested several times but that is an entirely different story. xfce4-mixer is mainly intended as a mixer for GStreamer. A PulseAudio mixer would better be written from scratch. But if anyone is up for the task - why not!

If you are interested in maintaining any of the above (yes, you are free to rename jptemplate to something that does not carry my initials!), please let me know in a comment or send a mail to xfce4-dev@xfce.org! 

(You will need knowledge of C, GLib and GTK+ for the Xfce projects and VIM script for jptemplate. But in particular panel plugins are really simple, so the code base should be easy to understand even for a GTK+ newbie who is willing to read API manuals.)

Joining Codethink

  • December 2, 2011
  • Jannis Pohlmann

I already hinted at the end of my studies in earlier posts related to my thesis. After submitting that thesis I moved 400km south of Lübeck to enjoy a few quiet weeks, record music and work on Xfce. However, I only stayed there for two weeks before I was set to fly over to Manchester, UK. The reason: I will be joining Codethink in January!

Having spent the last three weeks in and around their office, the city of Manchester and one of its suburbs, I can confidently say that this was a great decision. Codethink is a social and diverse company with a strong background in open source, with bright people, and a nice overall atmosphere and attitude. We had plenty of enjoyable evenings, chats, not to forget the brilliant food. I managed to feel at home already, but sadly, I had to leave again yesterday.

Like many people in Codethink, Manchester appears to be a city that likes music, a place where almost everyone is either a die-hard music fan or even a musician. I found a room right in the hart of the northern quarter at 10 minutes walking distance to the office, surrounded by record shops, live music venues and pubs. Rehearsal spaces are expensive but nearby. I could list various additional reasons for why I’m really happy. This simply is a good move.

About three years ago I was about to cancel my studies and look for a job. In the end I decided to carry on. Last week my Diplom (the German equivalent of an MSc) certificate arrived. Despite many doubts throughout these years, I managed to graduate with honors. It’s funny that this grade will have no impact on anything and is only really useful for proving to myself that I can pull through if I really want to. But then again, I had a great and chilled time being a student. So in retrospective, I guess I only ever had doubts because I was impatient and eager to make a difference in what was supposed to be the “real world”. 

Now, with Codethink, I can.

Looking for a full time job in Open Source

  • August 29, 2011
  • Jannis Pohlmann

Two years ago I was really close to canceling my studies and looking for a job instead. In the end I continued studying, passed the final exams of my Diplom (the German old-school equivalent to a Master’s degree) with excellent results and started working on my graduate thesis. Today, I am 1 1/2 months away from the submission deadline and it is clear that I will make it.

So, this time I’m serious: I’m looking for a full time employment in Open Source software development, engineering or management starting November this year. Hiring me will get you an experienced and talented hacker with a natural intuition for software architecture and aesthetics as well as a scientific and painstaking approach to software planning and implementation.

Through my work at the university and within the Xfce and Lunar Linux projects, I have gained experience in/with

  • many programming languages (including C, C++, Ruby, Python, Vala, Lua, XSLT, TeX, Java, Bash and a couple of others),
  • many frameworks (the whole GTK+/GLib stack including D-Bus, a bit of Clutter, XLib and Qt/QML, SWT/JFace, the FOX toolkit as well as web frameworks like Sinatra and Rails; some knowledge about the Linux kernel, its facilities and kernel-userspace communication mechanisms included),
  • many developer tools (GNU compilers, Autotools, VIM, NetBeans, Eclipse and others),
  • many software versioning systems (Git, Subversion, CVS and Mercurial), and
  • various areas of computer science and software engineering (complexity theory, signal processing, graph drawing, micro-controller programming and sensor-based networking, software planning, testing etc.).

I feel equally at home developing for the desktop or for the web. Granted, my main area of expertise is user interface and middleware development on Linux, which my fellow Xfce hackers and I have successfully participated in, but I’ve always found web development with Ruby to be a refreshing change.

There are many other things related to open source that I love doing. Over the past years I’ve enjoyed being able to improve the transparency of the development and release management of Xfce. Streamlining the release process and providing tools for making release management fun was an initiative I am particularly proud of. The same goes for community efforts like the Xfce Foundation, which we’ve launched in early 2011 and which I am currently heading as president.

This post is not just about the past though, it’s also about what lies ahead. Things I am particularly interested in with regards to the future include

  • mobile platforms and applications (iOS and Android are not good enough, I think we need open alternatives),
  • multi-touch interfaces on Linux (yep, this is on the way, but there still is a lot of potential work to be done, I guess),
  • cloud-based applications (I know I can store files and data on the web, but where are the mind-blowing features that go beyond availability of personal data everywhere?), and
  • environmental and power saving applications (living responsibly will become important soon enough; how can we generate awareness and support environmental causes with the help of software?).

I am excited and curious what my role will be in all this. Anway, I guess this is enough information about me for now. After all, this is no biography but a job-search post. ;)

If you read this and you happen to be Microsoft or Apple, do not even bother to send a headhunter. I prefer to work in the open and I believe in Open Source for many reasons. This ecosystem that we’ve created over the past two decades provides a great way for people from all around the world to collaborate on projects they care about, in an honest and tolerant way. I think that’s an inspirational model from which our entire society can and hopefully will benefit. Why would we want to have it any other way?

If you are a member or leader of a company dedicated to Open Source software and are interested in hiring me, please let me know. Linked below are my resumé, software projects and email address. I’m looking forward to talking to you!

Download my resumé/CV — A list of references is included. Feel free to contact them; they are aware of being listed and I’m sure they will be happy to answer any of your questions.

My software projects — A list of open source software projects I am or have been working on.

Email address: jannis@xfce.org

Final exams, diplom thesis and thunar-volman

  • July 17, 2010
  • Jannis Pohlmann

I guess it’s time for an update.

This week I passed the last of four final exams in computer science and human-computer interaction at my university. Not only am I pleased that nine months of learning are over; I am also blessed with excellent grades. And while my understand of good grades is similar to that of money (nice to have it but nothing to focus on and/or brag with), I have to admit that this time I’m at least a little proud of myself. Five years at the university are slowly coming to an end, the first friends are leaving town and it will soon be time to take the next big step in life.

I cannot leave this city before writing another thesis, however. Thus, I am currently looking for a Diplom thesis at the university or at companies related to open source technologies. If you happen work for such a company with interesting thesis ideas or opportunities, please let me know. The thesis is supposed to take about 6 months, ideally starting early in September. After that it’s time to pack my stuff and look for an employer. I’m hoping for a position in open source software development. Areas I’m particularly interested in include Linux, mobile computing, desktop-related technologies as well as renewable energy, environment protection and open government. I’m here to make a difference.

On to something else. A few weeks ago I was offered sponsoring in order to work on thunar-volman for a few days. I accepted the offer, so for the entire next week from 2010-07-19 to 2010-07-26 (including the weekend) I’ll do some sponsored work on porting Thunar and thunar-volman to udev and GIO! The goal is to finish all major features (storage devices, cameras etc.).

Yesterday I did some warm-up hacking on tumbler to verify that if I’m still up to the task. The results: a new ffmpegthumbnailer-based video thumbnailer plugin (written by Lionel Le Folgoc), a new PDF/PostScript thumbnailer plugin based on poppler-glib and a new tumbler release (0.1.2). The master branch contains another commit adding arbitrary URI support to the PDF/PostScript thumbnailer but for that you’ll have to wait until the next release.

That’s it for now, I’ll be a lot more active next week. Take care everyone!

Xfce 4.8 Schedule Changes

  • January 26, 2010
  • Jannis Pohlmann

As the Xfce release manager, I’d prefer to be the bringer of good news. Unfortunately, we have to make some adjustments with regards to the Xfce 4.8 release schedule.

You may well remember last year’s chaos with the 4.6 release date. We’re trying our best not to repeat that and if it should happen again, we’ll at least keep you posted about the issues as good as we can.

So, what’s the deal with 4.8?

One thing that hasn’t changed much is that our development team is very small. A hobby project of this size requires a certain amount of time to be invested by each individual developer. Time not everyone has as much has he would like to dedicate to Xfce.

Today, Brian announced his absence for the coming months due to his new job, leaving 2-3 of our core components (xfdesktop, xfconf and xfce4-session) more or less unmaintained (aside from bugfixes). The good news is that Jérôme (who has recently started to improve xfce4-settings and port xfce4-session to libxfce4ui) and Daniel (the maintainer of the thunar-shares-plugin) have offered their help with xfdesktop and xfce4-session.

Brian is not the only one having little time at hand though. I’m preparing myself for my final university exams, so ideally I’d be sticking my nose into lecture notes all day long. I still have the time to write mails like this but there hasn’t been much activity around thunar and related projects lately.

Again, I’m really happy to see people volunteering to help because that’s what we need right now. There’s a lot left to do before we can release 4.8. Let me get to that now.

As some of might have heard, thunar was ported to GIO this summer. Through GVfs, GIO brings new features such as SMB, SFTP, FTP browsing which some people use one a daily basis already. Now, GVfs has turned out to be problematic for us for various reasons. At first it shipped a HAL-based volume monitor with a hard-coded dependency on gnome-mount. Today it ships a volume monitor based on gnome-disk-utility (uses DeviceKit-disks itself) which proves to be inconsistent and somewhat incompatible to the HAL mounting code in exo.

The result: thunar-volman (not part of the core but important for thunar nonetheless) and xfdesktop will have to be ported to udev (the mounting being done with GIO, ideally). I’ve started working on this but this is far from being finished.

Question to the other developers: Didn’t xfce4-session use HAL for logging out and stuff? We might have to look into replacing those portions of code with something based on ConsoleKit, I guess?

HAL/udev is not the only issue however. With Xfce 4.8 we’ll be replacing libxfcegui4 with a new library called libxfce4ui. Not all core applications (again, xfdesktop being one of them, I think) have been ported to it yet. In most cases, this is no big deal and probably could be resolved within a few days though.

Then we have garcon, the much improved menu library that is supposed to replace libxfce4menu. At the time of writing the only feature it is lacking that is crucial for 4.8 is file system monitoring. We’ll probably implement basic monitoring like we had in libxfce4menu. Work on this hasn’t started yet.

Also, xfdesktop needs to be ported not only from ThunarVFS/HAL to GIO/udev but also from libxfce4menu to garcon.

So, as you can see there is quite a lot of work ahead of us. Taking into account the little free time some of us have these days, we’ve decided to postpone the 4.8 release until June 12th instead of April 12th. The entire release phase in our schedule has been moved by two months in time, as you can see on the official schedule wiki page:

 http://wiki.xfce.org/releng/4.8/schedule

To be honest, I wouldn’t consider this new date fixed either. It all depends on how much we can do until the feature freeze on April 1st. I’m optimistic that meeting the deadlines is possible though.

For all of you who can’t wait until June, try out our development releases which are announced on http://identi.ca/xfce. I have at least something good to share: For a few weeks now I’ve been running Fedora 12 with a mixture of Xfce 4.6 packages and development package from the upcoming 4.8 series and the new components have proven to be very stable already.

I’m especially happy about the new panel which works almost flawlessly (except for a few dual head issues) and not only supports real transparency and more comfortable launcher creation based on garcon, but is also compatible to panel plugins written for Xfce 4.6. (Good work, Nick!)

So, I guess this is it. A mixture of good and bad. I hope nobody is too disappointed. As always, we’re doing the best we can.

Cheers!

News Update

  • June 4, 2009
  • Jannis Pohlmann

A lot of things are going on lately and it turns out I'm way to busy to update my weblog on a regular basis. So, this is just a short post to keep you all updated.

Last two weeks

  • I took a new student job at the university, at the Institute of Theoretical Computer Science, which I love most. I'll be working on haplotyping algorithms.
  • I went to Barcelona and had a great time at the Ubuntu Developer Summit overall. Stephan and I were very productive. One evening during dinner we discussed our development and release process and later started writing it down. The result is a beautiful document that still needs a bit of polishing. I hope it'll serve as a good foundation for the development and release process of Xfce in the future. Several others commented on it and it looks like we'll give the proposed concept a shot after we've switched to git and all that.
  • Even though the week in Barcelona was great for Xfce, I was disappointed with how it went with regards to the cooperation between Xubuntu and Xfce. I talked it through with Stephan and after I got back, I resigned from my position as the Xubuntu Xfce4 Liaison.

At the moment

  • I've started to implement the so-called thumbnail management D-Bus specification. My implementation is called Tumbler and it will hopefully start serving thumbnails for other apps soon. I'm planning to use it in Thunar, Stephan has expressed interest in using it in Ristretto and when discussing the specification and the existing hildon-thumbnail implementation, Philip van Hoof told me that Hildon/Nokia might be interested in dropping hildon-thumbnail in favor of Tumbler if it's flexible enough. I'm working on it as much as I can and I'm hoping to do a release within the next few weeks.
  • I'm still working on the Transifex installation for Xfce. It's already running but I still need to import all the projects, releases and of course create accounts for maintainers automatically.
  • The migration of Xfce to Git is still work in progress. Brian has most of the repository issues sorted out and is now waiting for me to finish the commit mail script. I have two or three possible implementations lying around but I need to have a look at that again.
  • Jim needs the documentation repository next week, so I'm about to set it up.
  • Our Buildbot server has arrived in Sweden. Today I set up the firewall. Samual is taking care of setting up the Buildbot host VM and other things. We're considering to move a lot of the services not related to development (like the Xfce websites) into separate VMs on that server too, in order to make the current server a development-only machine.

Besides that I'm trying to catch up with the work and personal stuff that piled up while I was away last week. And I really should go and sleep.