Ubuntu - Tag - Mihir Soni

Wrapping Up: Last Commits to Ubuntu Touch

mihirsoni.123@gmail.com (Mihir Soni) — Fri, 03 Apr 2015 09:00:00 +0530

Hello,

Landed bug 1438910 on Calendar today — almost exactly two years since I first showed up to help close out bugs on the Calculator app back in July 2013. Between those two dates: a full app rebuilt from a half-finished blueprint, an Ubuntu Membership, a lot of design arguments over IRC, more Autopilot test debugging than I ever expected to do for a phone calendar.

The Calculator I Helped Ship Is Getting a Reboot

mihirsoni.123@gmail.com (Mihir Soni) — Wed, 24 Dec 2014 09:00:00 +0530

Hello,

Riccardo’s writing up the Calculator app reboot — scientific mode, a favourites/history feature, a cleaner design, all built on MathJs. Feels a bit strange in a good way: the app we scraped together the first release of back in 2013 is outdated enough now to need a proper rebuild.

He signed off the post with:

“If you need help, or have feedback, write me a mail or join #ubuntu-app-devel on Freenode and ping me (rpadovani) or Bartosk (gang65) or Mihir (mihir).”

The Bug That Followed Me Across Six Projects

mihirsoni.123@gmail.com (Mihir Soni) — Thu, 06 Nov 2014 09:00:00 +0530

Hello,

Landed DesignFixDefaultWeekView-5 today, but the thing that’s actually eaten most of my week is bug 1362962 — “Calendar icon usually shows the wrong date.” Sounds trivial. The little calendar icon in the launcher is supposed to show today’s date, and sometimes it just doesn’t. Except the fix touches indicator-datetime, ubuntu-ui-toolkit, qtorganizer5-eds, and a few other projects besides Calendar, and it’s been sitting near the top of the importance list across all of them for weeks now.

CI, Autopilot, and the Unglamorous Side of App Dev

mihirsoni.123@gmail.com (Mihir Soni) — Fri, 24 Oct 2014 09:00:00 +0530

Hello,

Landed dateSelectNewEventTest today, a day after calendarTestFix — both aimed at making the Autopilot suite actually reliable instead of flaky. Together with filesRestructure from last month, reorganizing how the test files were laid out, it’s been most of the last six weeks.

Not all of it is glamorous. Back in July I spent a good chunk of a day figuring out why Jenkins wasn’t triggering on a merge proposal at all — turned out the contributor needs to be added to the developer team first, something popey sorted out for me. Same week, David Planella walked me through .desktop file naming so the app actually deploys right from Qt Creator onto a device. There was also bug 1334833 — duplicated event bubbles showing up in the day view — that took more than one pass to actually pin down.

Designing the New Event Page (and Naming Things Is Hard)

mihirsoni.123@gmail.com (Mihir Soni) — Fri, 22 Aug 2014 09:00:00 +0530

Hello,

Posted screenshots today of the new dialog we’re building for repeat options on the event page — moving them out of the main form and into their own dialog, similar to how Google Calendar’s mobile app handles it. Nekhelesh and popey jumped on it in #ubuntu-app-devel almost immediately — popey pushed back on calling it “Repetition,” said it read confusing next to “Repeat,” and he’s right, going with the simpler word.

Building the Ubuntu Calendar App, Branch by Branch

mihirsoni.123@gmail.com (Mihir Soni) — Fri, 06 Jun 2014 09:00:00 +0530

Hello,

Landed bug 1327262 today, closing out the most heads-down stretch of Calendar work I’ve done so far. Three branches mark the spring: a fix for bug 1292076 back in April, the NewEvent-Refactoring branch in May, and now this one.

The new-event refactor was the big one. The original event-creation screen had grown organically as features got bolted on — repeats, guests, reminders, all-day toggles — and it needed to be pulled apart and rebuilt properly rather than patched again. Everything else this year is going to sit on top of that rebuild.

Becoming an Ubuntu Member

mihirsoni.123@gmail.com (Mihir Soni) — Thu, 03 Apr 2014 09:00:00 +0530

Hello,

Got approved as an official Ubuntu Member today. It’s not tied to any single project — the Membership Board looks at whether your contributions have been sustained and meaningful, in whatever form they take.

Nine months in now: closing out the Calculator app’s first release last year, then most of this year rebuilding the event-creation flow in Calendar. Part of putting the application together was rounding up testimonials on my wiki page — David Planella, who runs developer relations for Ubuntu, added one a couple of days ago saying I’d “been key for core apps such as Calculator and Calendar to be available on Ubuntu phones, tablets and desktops.” Generous, but it’s roughly what membership is supposed to recognize.

Someone Else's Take on Why We Do This

mihirsoni.123@gmail.com (Mihir Soni) — Mon, 25 Nov 2013 09:00:00 +0530

Hello,

Riccardo published a piece last week on why people should contribute to Ubuntu Touch, and he name-checked me in it:

“After I have joined the calc team I met also mihir_ (Mihir Soni) and boiko (Gustavo Boiko): Mihir is another community contributor and we worked together to create the final version of the calculator which is the default in Ubuntu Touch, a very cool app!”

From Calculator to Calendar: Switching Core Apps

mihirsoni.123@gmail.com (Mihir Soni) — Fri, 04 Oct 2013 09:00:00 +0530

Hello,

Joined the Ubuntu Calendar Developers team today. With Calculator in a stable place, I wanted to pick up something with more open ground, and Calendar has plenty — the blueprint for it has barely gotten past the display-event view, and the edit flow is still mostly unbuilt.

It’s a different kind of work than Calculator. That was bug triage on something that mostly worked; this is building event creation, editing, and recurrence from a design spec that’s still being argued over in the #ubuntu-app-devel channel on Freenode. Expecting a lot more time in QML and Autopilot tests than I was spending before, and a lot more time in IRC hashing out UI decisions before anything gets built.

Shipping the First Ubuntu Touch Calculator

mihirsoni.123@gmail.com (Mihir Soni) — Mon, 16 Sep 2013 09:00:00 +0530

Hello,

The Calculator app is closing in on its first real release, and the last few weeks have been about closing out the high and critical bugs standing in the way. Nothing glamorous — crash bugs, layout issues, edge cases in the calculation engine — just the grind of getting something from “mostly works” to “ships.”

It’s the first time I’ve taken an open source project from active bug triage through to an actual release, working entirely in public on Launchpad, with review from people I’ve never met in person. Riccardo in Italy and Boiko, who’s deep in the telephony app, have both been steady presences in the channel the whole way through — feels less like a project now and more like a small, scattered team that just happens to talk mostly through a chat window.

Translating Ubuntu Into Gujarati

mihirsoni.123@gmail.com (Mihir Soni) — Wed, 07 Aug 2013 09:00:00 +0530

Hello,

Joined the Ubuntu Gujarati Translators team on Launchpad today. It’s a different kind of contribution from the Calculator app bug-fixing I’ve been doing — instead of QML and merge proposals, it’s Launchpad’s translation tool, going string by string through Ubuntu’s interface and deciding how something like “Settings” or “Cancel” should actually read in Gujarati, not just what it technically means.

It doesn’t get anywhere near the attention app development does, but it’s the difference between Ubuntu being usable for someone comfortable in English and someone who isn’t. My own family runs on a mix of Gujarati and English at home, so it was an easy thing to want to help with.

How I Fell Down the Ubuntu Touch Rabbit Hole

mihirsoni.123@gmail.com (Mihir Soni) — Mon, 15 Jul 2013 09:00:00 +0530

Hello,

I’ve been an Ubuntu user for years, but this month I actually started contributing to it. Back in February, Canonical put out a call for community developers to help build the core apps for the newly announced Ubuntu Phone — apparently over 1,500 people expressed interest. The Touch/CoreApps wiki page has been the entry point since: pick an app, join its team, get involved.