Interviewing people behind communitheme. Today: Carlo

As discussed last week when unveiling the communitheme snap for ubuntu 18.04 LTS, here is a suite of interview this week on some members of the core contributor team shaping this entirely community-driven theme.

Today is the turn of Carlo, c-lobrano on the community hub.

Who are you? What are you doing/where are you working? Give us some words and background about you!

I am Carlo, I am an Linux user since 2007 and Linux Software Developer since 2010.

I mainly do embedded software development, I worked for the Automotive industry and now for the Mobile Telecommunication one, so pretty far from my contribution here on Communitheme 🙂, but I love to learn and experiment new things in (sometimes totally) different areas, that’s why I have some knowledge of front-end development which is responsible for my presence here.

What are you mainly contributor areas on communitheme?

I am one of the UI Communitheme developers, my main role is to translate designer’s ideas and mock-ups into code, but since roles are not strictly bounded in our team, I also propose my own perspective from a user point of view. I also take care of the issue tracker, opening and triaging new bugs and fixing some.

How did you hear about new theming effort on ubuntu, what made you willing to participate actively to it?

I started contributing to Ubuntu Desktop about one year ago, since I wanted to stay closer to this great community. It begun with small fixes on ubuntu-theme, longing for more free time to contribute to other projects too. Later I joined the Ubuntu HUB just in time to see the announcement and I thought it would have been fun being part of such a team.

How is the interaction with the larger community, how do you deal with different ideas and opinions on the community hub, issues opened against the projects, PR?

One can learn a lot from the interaction with the community, probably even more for a project that concerns UI. Everybody has his/her own taste and vision and he/she is encouraged to express it, so it is funny to see how sometimes new changes are received with enthusiasm in a message and almost with disgust in the very next one. It took me a little to understand how to elaborate these feedbacks. The community, however, has always been very supportive and appreciates our work and this is highly rewarding.

Since there is no such a thing as a bug-free product, I only try to inform how to properly report a new bug, so that we can solve it as fast as possible, and there is a lot to do, so any PR is more than welcome. From an operative point of view, with GitHub is really easy to test a PR and it takes only few minutes (well, that depends on how big is the change, so better propose small ones).

What did you think (honestly) about the decision for not shipping it by default on 18.04, but curating it for a little while?

I expressed my though on Ubuntu HUB as well: Communitheme was not ready. It was already enjoyable for most of the users, but important issues were known already, and there were untested areas that could have exposed some new problems. In light of the big changes we did during last month, the decision was right and also let us work with a lot of freedom.

Any idea or wish on what the theme name (communitheme is a codename project) should be?

I am usually bad at naming things and honestly I did not think much about the name. Of course I think it should continue to recall the idea of community and maybe be a short name easy to remember (I am not even sure how to pronounce Adwaita, for example).

Any last words or questions I should have asked you?

I am happy nobody mentioned impostor syndrome 😄

Thanks Carlo!

Next interview coming up tomorrow, stay tuned! :)