Re: Looking to help with gnumeric

[Michael Devine <mdevine cs stanford edu>]

Hi folks,
I responded to Tino, and he suggested that other people might be
interested in reading my answer.

> Hi Michael,
> I'm interested: what drives a person like you to aquire an interest in
> OSS and gnumeric in particular?
> just curious.
>
> Tino

Sure thing.  There are a couple of reasons:

1.) I love tinkering with computers and computer software.  I started
out with an intense love of Windows and all the tweaking it allowed me
to do in comparison to the Macs I was using in school.  When I was first
introduced to Linux in 1999, I realized that it was great for tweakers,
but still a pain in the butt to use at times.  As things have gotten
more usable, I've grown to love Linux more (Red Carpet is one of my
favorite things on earth because it lets me tweak what I want to tweak,
and ignore the details on the rest).  I run Linux at home, my last two
jobs have run Linux at work.  It is now my platform of choice.

2.) I like to write code in my free time.  I just recently reworked my
personal web page in PHP.

3.) My senior project in college was a graphing calculator application
for Palm OS.  It allowed the user to define functions for use in
calculations and in the graphing window.  It did 2d plots in rectangular
and polar coordinates, as well as 3d-rendered plots that could be
rotated in rectangular, cylindrical and spherical coordinates.  I
learned a lot about graphics and floating-point math on this project,
and continued learning more about floating-point math during my time at
Transmeta and VMware.

4.) Gnumeric is my spreadsheet of choice, and I want to help make it
better, faster, easier.

5.) It's about time that I started giving back to the OSS community.

6.) I just moved to rural New Hampshire in the US, I don't have a job,
and I figure OSS will help build my resume and help me make contacts. 
(Many of the engineers at Transmeta knew each other previously due to
their work on the Linux Kernel and other projects).

That's just sort of a brain dump of reasons, but that's sort of what
I've been thinking.

I'm looking forward to working with the group.

Mike Devine