Jon Sackett joined the Launchpad Registry team a couple of weeks ago. Here’s a quick run-down of who he is.
Matthew: What do you do on the Launchpad team?
Jon: I’m part of the Registry team; we maintain the people, teams and projects bits and pieces used by all the other parts of Launchpad.
Right now I’m mostly helping pay down technical debt, but I’m also helping with features that help those core objects be smarter about the way they use other applications.
Matthew: Can we see something that you’ve worked on?
Jon: Almost everything I’ve done has been internal without a real UI component.
Matthew: Where do you work?
Jon: I work in my home office in an apartment in downtown Durham, NC. Sometimes I change it up and work from my porch.
Matthew: What can you see from your office window?
Jon: The old brickface and industrial windows across the road. On days where I’m working from my porch I get a better view of the downtown
Matthew: What did you do before working at Canonical?
Jon: I worked as a Python/Django developer at a company called MetaMetrics, that does some really neat things in education with natural language processing.
Matthew: How did you get into free software?
Jon: I was introduced to Linux in college as a better environment for coding in my CS classes. Since moving into web programming and Python, I think almost every tool I use has come from free software.
Matthew: What’s more important? Principle or pragmatism?
Jon: In concrete matters (like code), pragmatism. It’s no use to anyone if your principles only prevent you from doing things.
That said, principles are still important; when you opt for the pragmatic approach, your principles can still influence how that plays out.
Matthew: Do you/have you contribute(d) to any free software projects?
Jon: Sadly, precious little. I have a patch in the Django project, and a couple of my own projects are available under a BSD license. One of the reasons I wanted to work on Launchpad was to do more with and for free software.
Matthew: Tell us something really cool about Launchpad that not enough people know about.
Jon: How completely well it supports the whole development lifecycle — I think a lot of people consider Launchpad just another code hosting service, and it’s so much more than that.
Matthew: Thanks Jon!
[Discuss Meet Jon Sackett on the Forums]
Originally posted here by Matthew Revell on August 24th, 2010 .