GunnarHj
RIP, this user passed away
Short about me
My name is Gunnar Hjalmarsson. I was born in 1958, and live in Gothenburg, Sweden. I hold a Bachelor's degree of Business Administration in Accounting from the University of Gothenburg, and has worked with the audit and business consulting firm PwC for about 25 years, of which about 15 years as a partner. I have worked as an authorized auditor and financial reporting advisor.
I converted from Windows to Ubuntu in July 2010. I like to share my ideas for improvements of free software that I benefit from, so I started to explore the world of Ubuntu almost instantly.
Previous computing experience
I have no formal computing or IT education. The computing skill I still have was gained from learning some web programming and developing a couple of web site scripts. The largest of those scripts is the GPL licensed webring program Ringlink, which I wrote and maintained in consultation with an enthusiastic - at the time - user community.
The only programming language I'm quite comfortable with is Perl. By participating in e.g. the comp.lang.perl.misc Usenet group for several years I got valuable knowledge of good programming practice - at first hand Perl related, of course, but also generally applicable. I'm the author of a couple of simple CPAN modules.
Ubuntu contributions
Most of my work in the Ubuntu community so far has been i18n related. During the Natty development cycle I helped to make the Ubuntu model for dealing with languages and locales more distinct (see GdmLanguageSelectorDissonance for an early problem description). My first merge proposals were mainly about changes to the language-selector and gdm packages, and quite a few bugs filed against those packages have been solved. The language/locale related architechture in Ubuntu is changing, and as a consequence I have lately worked with more packages, e.g. accountsservice and lightdm, in an effort to help rendering the code more maintainable while preserving the functionality.
In the form of a tutorial I help other users customize the guest session feature. Through a few changes to the gdm-guest-session source code (now inherited by LightDM), the customization ideas in the tutorial can be applied without any hassle at upgrading.
Gained experience along the road
Needless to say I have learned quite a lot about Ubuntu. I have got a grasp of things like the tools for development and communication, the packaging basics, the concept of upstream and downstream, release schedules, backporting, the many specialized teams, etc., etc. Python programming is now familiar to me, and I have improved my shell scripting skill. As regards C ... well, since a few merge proposals with changes to C code have been approved, I suppose that my skill has been improved to something slightly above 'the hello world level'. 
Application for Ubuntu membership
In the summer of 2011 I applied for Ubuntu membership, but wasn't very successful. The EMEA membership board let me know that they would like to see some testimonials, especially as regards my co-operation skill and the sustainability of my contributions (notes from the meeting). Consequently, and since I now plan to apply again, I have asked a few developers to write down below whatever they can and want to tell about my contributions and whether they think I should become an Ubuntu member.
Testimonials
Martin Pitt
Gunnar has been a very enthusiastic and active contributor to a lot of i18n related places in Ubuntu. He worked on a lot of language-selector improvements and bug fixes, got changes into gdm, lightdm, accountsservice, and also a couple of non-i18n related other bug fixes. He also did some great work documenting and rethinking i18n handling in general. All those have been very significant contributions to Ubuntu, so I advocate him to become a well-deserved Ubuntu member. Gunnar, thanks for your work!
-- pitti 2012-01-10 06:54:19
Julien Lavergne
I had the pleasure to work with Gunnar on i18n problems on Lubuntu. He was very useful, helping us to fix some issues we had, in a proactive way. It's very nice to have people like him, who care about i18n and derivatives. i18n is very critical for a distribution which want to be used by everybody. For this, I think he deserved to be an Ubuntu member.
-- gilir
David Planella
I've been truly impressed with Gunnar's enthusiasm and perseverance in working towards a better internationalisation experience in Ubuntu. He's not only contributed to code to language-selector, but also triaged, filed and fixed bugs, participated in and sparked discussions on how to improve the choice of languages in Ubuntu. His work has had impact on the users of any language, and while doing this, he's fully embraced the Ubuntu spirit. I would recommend him for membership without a doubt. Thank you Gunnar! -- dpm 2012-01-20 14:39:18
Robert Ancell
As maintainer of LightDM I've interacted with Gunnar on a frequent basis regarding i18n. He's shown himself to be a very effective communicator via email, IRC and Launchpad. The patches he has worked on have been well thought out and he is persistant in bringing them to high quality so they can be included. Gunnar has shown good ability to effectively know the area he is working on and this has given me a lot of confidence in his work. I look forward to his membership.
Accepted!
I'm proud to tell that I have been accepted as an Ubuntu member by the EMEA membership board. The testimonials above, with their acknowledging and praising of my contributions, made it possible. Thanks! -- gunnarhj 2012-02-15 05:21:36
Member of Ubuntu Development Team
On 2013-04-22 my application for upload rights for two packages I often work on was approved by the Developer Membership Board, and with that I'm now a member of Ubuntu Development Team.
GunnarHj (last edited 2024-02-12 12:23:29 by sh-yaron)