Hey folks, it’s good to be here. I’m the GSoC student working on improving search in GNOME Shell. My mentor for this summer is Rui Matos (rtcm). The project wiki page holds some more info.
I’ve been an almost exclusive user of open source software since 2008, starting out with Xubuntu on a severely out of date desktop, hacking away at my first simple programs for class. I tried Kubuntu after that, but settled on Ubuntu and the GNOME environment around the beginning of 2009. That’s how it stayed for a while, Ubuntu humming away on my little netbook. Eventually though, I grew distasteful of the decisions Ubuntu was making and migrated to Debian, but stuck with GNOME.
I was excited by GNOME 3 when I first heard about it in late 2009 and followed its development closely, through all its redesigns and delays. I began running jhbuild in the spring of 2010 to get the latest Shell and continued to do so until GNOME 3.0 started filtering into Debian experimental.
So I’m not new to GNU/Linux, GNOME, or free/open-source software in general, but I’ve never really given back in any way that I felt was significant. One reason is that I never felt my skills were up to par – and still don’t in many ways – but I thought the best way to improve was to actually do something, even if I had to stumble through it. With help from Marina Zhurakhinskaya (marina), I eventually got a suitable proposal written, submitted, and ultimately accepted. GSoC is a daunting, but exciting task, one I intend to measure up to.
Feel free to leave a comment, send a message, or find me on IRC. I’m usually lurking in a bunch of #gnome-* channels, but mostly #gnome-shell (and now #soc) on irc.gimp.org (GIMPNet).