GullFOSS

« May 2008
Sun	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat
				1	2	3
4	5	6	7	8	9	10
11	12	13	14	15	16	17
18	19	20	21	22	23	24
25	26	27	28	29	30	31

Today

Since this is my first posting here at GullFOSS, I like to introduce myself. My name is Christian Lippka, I'm 33 years of age. I started working on StarOffice by joining Star Division in 1997 as a c++ user interface developer. Today I'm the technical lead here at Sun for the Impress and Draw applications and I'm also the co-lead of the OpenOffice.org graphics project. You may already know my team from the very special musical presentation made by my people manager, Kai Ahrens here at GullFOSS.

Besides writing specifications, doing planing, coordinations with my team and other teams and sometimes even a little implementations in c++ (if I'm lucky), I feel kind of Santa these days. As the default engineering owner for draw and impress issues, many (feature) wishes pass my personal issue tracker intray. They range from suggestions like “hey Santa, wouldn't it be cool if impress or draw could do this or that?” to the more desperate “hey Santa, I need this feature! Without this feature, impress/draw is completely useless for me!”. Like Santa, I would love to fulfill all your wishes, but I don't have that many Elves.

Please know that I take all your suggestions seriously and I do my very best to further improve impress and draw so you enjoy working with them to get your tasks done. But without unlimited resources, we have to keep focus, we have to do it by priority and sometimes we have to do some invisible, long lasting ground work before we can build a new twenty storys high feature building. Expect more technical details on what's cooking in the draw and impress team here at GullFOSS in january.

As for most of you celebration time is ahead, I like to give you a moment of zen. If you ever used a MS Windows system before, you may have stumbled about MS Paint. And some years ago I would have agreed with you that it is a totally useless application. Crappy user interface, not nearly as many features as applications I had used in the past, for example Corel Draw or Adobe Photoshop. But please watch this video, featuring a song of one of my favorite bands, and see what skill and creativity can do with even the simplest of tools...

Whatever holiday you celebrate the next days, I wish all of you a happy time and see you next year!

tags: