I, Cody A.W. Somerville, apply for core-dev.

Who I am

My Name is Cody Somerville. I'm from Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. My day job is being the release engineer for Canonical's OEM Solutions Group and at night I hack away at Xubuntu as the project lead.

My Ubuntu story

I've been involved in Ubuntu for a number of years now. Initially, my efforts were focused on community development, documentation, and marketing. In winter 2008, I was both elected as the Xubuntu Project Lead and successfully applied to become a MOTU. Since then, I have been working on a combination of technical and community challenges.

My involvement

• Xubuntu Project Lead
• MOTU
• Universe SRU Team

Examples of my work / Things I'm proud of

• dbus-launch hangs at session start waiting on socket output in libxcb (lp: #232364): With assistance from the X Team, I was able to identify that an architectural in libxcb caused Xubuntu (and in some cases Ubuntu) desktops to intermittently freeze on start due to a race condition. Knowing very little about the components I was working with at the time, I was able to correctly resolve the issue thanks to my personal resourcefulness, ability to rapidly learn about new topics, and my strong working relationship with my peers.

• update-grub ignores non-xen kernels if the system is a domU (lp: #291256): I noticed that update-grub ignored non-xen kernels if the system was a domU - an undesired behaviour if you're attempting to build images for non domU systems. After researching the history of the changes that introduced this behaviour, I prepared a patch which was accepted. This is another example of my ability to rapidly learn about a new software system and produce a well-rounded technical solution via consultation with domain experts and personal resourcefulness.

• dput: dput is an important tool as it allows us to easily upload our updates to packages to the repository. This is why I added several new features to dput as well as fixed several outstanding bugs. Primarily, I added the ability to pass an argument to a host configuration (ie. no longer create a new configuration stanza for each ppa you want to upload to, just type: dput ppa:<launchpad-id> <changesfile>) as well as added support for the sftp transport.

• notification-daemon using 237MB of memory (lp: #67129): While at UDS Prague, I noticed that notification-daemon was leaking memory - and it seems other people had noticed too. I used memory profiling tools to help track down a number of memory leaks and supplied a patch to the Maintainer, Michael Vogt, who accepted it and also used it in an Hardy SRU.

• amsn: I'm a big fan of providing a well rounded experience to our users. This is why I've adopted certain popular packages such as amsn in previous release cycles to help further that goal. For example, in my amsn 0.97+final-0ubuntu4 upload during the Hardy release cycle, I was able to close five bugs which consequentially did just that. I still keep an eye on amsn bugs to this date and answer the odd question drive-by contributors to the package shoot my way.

• Xubuntu & Xubuntu Strategy Document: I wrote the Xubuntu Strategy Document; a document which details Xubuntu's core goals, core community structure, and core set of processes. I believe this is a good example of my leadership skills and in particular my ability to clearly articulate a vision and direction. Since becoming the project lead, I've been able to grow the Xubuntu community and establish a solid cadre of contributors with clear, easy to understand delegation that results in the production of a high calibre derivative of Ubuntu with minimal "manpower" every six months.

Areas of work

• Xubuntu packages
• Liaison work with other Ubuntu development teams such as the Ubuntu Desktop Team
• Misc. work in universe

Things I could do better

One area I'd like to improve is the packaging of libraries from scratch.

Plans for the future

I plan to continue my involvement with Xubuntu but I'm also interested in branching out and exploring new areas. In particular, I've always had a desire to get more involved with the Ubuntu Server team to help develop an innovative server distribution with a particular focus on enterprise deployment.

Furthermore, almost none of the engineers in my team are Ubuntu developers. I'd like to assist them in the process of becoming one through by being able to help sponsor all the great bug fixes and enhancements that are being made for our OEM customers.

Finally, I'd also like to help enable Ubuntu Developers (MOTU and Core Developers) by investing personal efforts into tackling both low and higher hanging fruit in our tool set. Not only will this include further improvements to standalone tools such as dput, but also the launchpad platform.

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