About me (updated)

, Will Kahn-Greene | share this (mastodon)
Note: This is an old post in a blog with a lot of posts over a long span of time. The world has changed, technologies have changed, and I've changed. It's likely this is out of date, the code doesn't work, the ideas haven't aged well, or the ideas were terrible to begin with. Let me know if you think this is something that needs updating.

I'm a Miro developer employed by Participatory Culture Foundation. I wrote a post about me back in September of 2007 which covered a bit of what I do. A lot has changed since then as my role on the project has increased in scope and I've moved and various other things like that. This is an update.

What I do:

I'm involved in project management, release planning, release engineering, maintaining development infrastructure (bugzilla, git, wiki pages, documentation, build scripts, nightly builds, bogon deflector, syncing translations with Launchpad, ...), Ubuntu packaging, some testing, bug triage, user support, and I'm a liason between the Miro project and packagers and related projects.

I also do a lot of Miro development primarily on the Windows and Linux platforms. I keep track of bugs in Debian and Fedora and fix them upstream. I handle most of the incoming patches from contributors and try to help contributors where I can to make their lives easier.

I spend a ton of time on Miro work--probably between 60 and 80 hours a week.

How does telecommuting work:

I telecommute which makes it easier to work on Miro whenever I have a free moment (blessing and a curse). I work with the other Miro people through email, IRC, Bugzilla comments and weekly conference calls. We're all pretty autonomous and it works pretty well. I imagine this is in large part because we're such a small team. If the team grew, we'd have to adjust the way we do things accordingly.

Development setup:

I bought a Del 1420N with Ubuntu on it a couple of years ago and do all my development on that. I'm running a pretty stock Ubuntu Karmic with a bunch of virtual machines in Virtual Box to cover different versions of Ubuntu and Windows and also other Linux distributions. This is my primary development machine. It's yellow.

I also have:

  • a Macbook running OSX 10.4 for nightly and release builds (work machine)

  • an old Dell something running Windows XP for nightly and release builds (work machine)

  • a Mac Mini running OSX 10.5 for OSX development (work machine)

  • a Dell XPS M1210 laptop (terrible machine) for Windows testing (work machine)

  • an AMD64 box I built for AMD64 builds and testing

  • an ASUS EeePC 701 running Ubuntu Karmic UNR for testing on a netbook

  • a circa 2002 Gateway laptop running Debian Testing for testing

  • a Neuros Link (graciously donated by Neuros Technology) for testing

I'd really like to get a bigger monitor. The 1440x900 display I have now is small and cramped most of the time. I also need to build a better desk.

Ways you can get a hold of me:

irc: willkg on #miro-hackers on irc.freenode.net
email: will dot guaraldi at pculture dot org

Meet me for coffee:

I live in Massachusetts about 30-45 minutes from Boston. If you're in the area, I'd love to hang out for coffee. I head into Boston periodically for conferences and hanging out with family and friends. I'm definitely interested in hackfests or talking shop.

The rest of my world:

My web-site is at http://bluesock.org/~willg/. I curate Python Miro Community and Gnome Miro Community. I maintain PyBlosxom. I'm a member of the Free Software Foundation. I'm a lover, not a hater.

Want to comment? Send an email to willkg at bluesock dot org. Include the url for the blog entry in your comment so I have some context as to what you're talking about.