Development:Interviews:Bruce Davidson

Originally published by Ludovic Hirlimann on septembre 13, 2006 9:18 AM at http://perso.hirlimann.net/~ludo/blog/archives/2006/09/camino_interview_4_bruce_davidson.html

Camino Interview #4 : Bruce Davidson

Ludovic Hirlimann: Please introduce yourself, including age, Place where you live, what you do for a living and what you do for Camino ?

Bruce Davidson: I'm Bruce, I'm a software architect living in Bath in the UK. My work on Camino is intermittent, but most of the effort has been spent on fixing bugs or adding small features to the user interface

LH: How old are you ?

BD: 31

LH: How long have you been using Macs ? Camino ? and being part of the project ?

BD: I've been using Macs since Mac OS X 10.0 came out, but didn't really move across to them until 10.1 emerged.

BD: Camino was still called Chimera, and was at something like version 0.7 when I switched to using it full time

BD: I started fixing some Firefox bugs on the Mac in late 2004, but preferred to use Camino for my browsing

BD: Eventually decided it would be better making fixes to that, and discovered that ObjC wasn't too hard to learn. My first Camino patch followed a little while later.

LH: Was it hard to become join the developers of Camino ?

BD: Not too hard, although when I started they were mostly in US timezones, which made IRC less useful. The build instructions have also improved a lot since I first tried building Camino!

LH: What pushed you to join the developers ?

BD: A few bits of user interface that really bothered me. The context menu for mailto: links, and Camino always sending US English in the "accept-language" header come to mind.

LH: What is your current development setup ?

BD: A two year old dual G5 PowerPC

LH: What was your first computer like ? When was that ?

BD: And a good 20" widescreen display, essential for development First computer was an Acorn Electron, which far from having a widescreen LCD plugged into our minute TV at home.

BD: Wikipedia tells me it must have been 1983/84, although I can't remember that well!

LH: :-)

LH: What are you going to be working on in the Next few month Camino-wise ?

BD: I haven't got anything particular on my list at the moment, so will probably just help out on 1.1 bugs as and when (if!) I get the time.

LH: Does this mean you'll be reviewing code ?

BD: yes

LH: Are you involved in other Open source project ? If so which ones and why ?

BD: I've made isolated bug reports for other open source projects, but Camino is the only one in which I've invested significant effort

LH: Anything you would like to add ?

BD: Only to say how nice it is to see increasing interest in developing Camino; the project has been through some rocky patches in the past, but its still growing and getting better.

LH: thank you for your time

BD: You're welcome