I, Evan Broder, apply for Ubuntu Core Developer.

Who I am

I'm Evan Broder. I like anything that involves computer systems and OS, and have a tendency to enjoy playing with virtualization projects.

I graduated from college last year and started at a San Francisco-area startup. We're using virtualization to revolutionize how large enterprise IT departments manage their employees' workstations. I'm the lead developer on one of our products, an OS based on the core Ubuntu stack that runs our management software. I focus mostly on integrating our software with the underlying components in the OS.

My Ubuntu story

I don't remember when I started tried Ubuntu - I think it was around Breezy or so. But I've definitely used every version since Dapper, and about 6 months ago I finally saw the light and started using Ubuntu on my primary laptop. While I was at MIT I was a heavy contributor to the student computing organization and their VM hosting service and Debian- and Ubuntu-based distribution used on the public computer lab machines.

While at college, I began contributing to Ubuntu through backports and then moved on to fixing bugs that affected the SIPB projects I was involved in (primarily things like Xen, OpenAFS, and krb5 mixed with a little bit of everything).

Since graduating, I've been fortunate enough to attend the last three UDS's (UDS-N, -O, and -P). I found UDS to be incredibly motivating for me - I feel like I'm still riding the high from October. I really appreciated that it's possible for someone to show up and usefully contribute to the development process.

Examples of my work / Things I'm proud of

In the last year or two I've done a lot of work on tools to help the backports project:

• backportpackage - A script for automatically generating test backports and test building them

• backport-helper (plus some follow-up patches - [1], [2], [3]) - Part of ubuntu-archive-tools that looks for and runs approved backport requests

I also recently set-up the harness for http://lintian.ubuntuwire.org/ and have been working with Lintian upstream to fix some issues affecting Ubuntu ([1], [2], [3], [4], [5])

Areas of work

I've mostly given up on trying to qualify specific areas I work on - it tends to be a little bit of anything and everything.

I have a particular interest in backports and SRUs, because I like that they're one of our most direct ways we can improve Ubuntu for our users. I wrote up and advocated the new policy to allow backports uploads pre-release, which I hope will be a way for us to limit the pain our freeze process can cause for new contributors.

Things I could do better

Plans for the future

General

What I like least in Ubuntu

Please describe what you like least in Ubuntu and what thoughts do you have about fixing it.

Comments

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Endorsements

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TEMPLATE

== <SPONSORS NAME> ==
=== General feedback ===
## Please fill us in on your shared experience. (How many packages did you sponsor? How would you judge the quality? How would you describe the improvements? Do you trust the applicant?)

=== Specific Experiences of working together ===
''Please add good examples of your work together, but also cases that could have handled better.''
=== Areas of Improvement ===

CategoryCoreDevApplication