Hi everyone, My name is Carl, or carsme on AUR/IRC, and this is my application to become a Package Maintainer.
I started my Linux journey in 2016, while studying engineering mathematics at Chalmers University here in Gothenburg, Sweden. At the time, I was struggling with motivation and direction in my studies, but things took a positive turn when my friend group introduced me to Linux. I started out on Ubuntu but quickly transitioned to Arch Linux as there was a strong "btw, I use arch" atmosphere in our group :) With this new discovery, technology suddenly started making sense and became understandable. I had tinkered with computers since I was a child, but this was the first time I felt that anything was doable, given some time and dedication. As such, tinkering with my system became my new favorite pastime. Shortly after this formative moment, I got a part-time job as a developer, which eventually became full-time and made me drop out of university. This put me on a path which I'm very happy to be on, and which led me to today, where I'm leading a team developing route optimization solutions for commercial aviation. I still tinker a lot, but now with a broader scope that includes the processes, technologies and tools me and my team use in our daily work. Arch Linux has been my daily driver for around eight years now, and I have since 2021 tried to get more involved in the project, mainly by maintaining packages in the AUR. This has been a learning experience and I've tried to continuously improve my process and my packages. Examples include: fixing namcap warnings, migrating to standards based Python packaging (PEP 517), migrating to SPDX license identifiers, and most recently, using nvchecker to check for new versions. Outside of tech, I really enjoy traveling and try to do so as often as possible. Specifically, hiking through new landscapes and sampling local cuisine. Most recent trips were to the Bavarian Alps and to Sardinia in Italy, both of which were fantastic experiences (with great food!). For reference, PKGBUILDs for all packages I maintain in the AUR are available here: https://github.com/carlsmedstad/aurpkgs I've also published some helper scripts I use: https://github.com/carlsmedstad/aurutils-extra For my other OSS-contributions, primarily bug reports and minor patches, my GitHub profile is most likely the best place to get an overview. As package maintainer, I intend to initially bring the following packages (+deps) into [extra], provided no one has any objections: * espanso * opentofu * powershell * protonmail-bridge * rdiff-backup * watchman Regarding (co-)maintenance of what's already in [extra], I'd like to adopt some of the currently orphaned Python and Ruby packages, for example: * python-joblib * python-oscrypto * ruby-treetop Additionally, I did a quick search for packages with only one maintainer among those I regularly use, and ended up with the following candidates for potential co-maintainership: * aerc * handlr * istio * python-black * sqlfluff Hopefully that gives a good picture of who I am and where I'd like to start my journey as a package maintainer, if accepted. My sponsors are Levente Polyak (anthraxx) and Christian Heusel (gromit) and I'm very thankful for their feedback and encouragement so far. Thank you for taking the time to read this, cheers! -- Sincerely, Carl Smedstad PGP: 888285CF6ED6758F
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