[Development] Chief Maintainer election

[Volker Hilsheimer]

Hi all,

Here are a few things that might be useful to know about me:

My history with Qt starts in the late 1990s when I was working as a student assistant for Fraunhofer in Rostock, Germany. I was putting a few dialogs together with some Qt 1.x version, sent my first and only question to support at trolltech.com, and got a response from one of the early Trolls that I’d better start reading the documentation. In 2000 I discovered that Trolltech was looking for someone doing support, so I landed an internship in Oslo as the first support engineer, helping customers that sometimes also didn't read the documentation. I didn't finish my CS degree and instead became responsible for the Trolltech support organisation, maintained the Windows port of Qt, and developed ActiveQt as well as several Qt Solutions.

Durning the Nokia years I moved into a programme management role, coordinating the development of Qt with several of the mobile phone programmes, such as the N9. I left Nokia - and the Qt community - in 2011, joined a configuration management startup in Oslo, freelanced as a continuous delivery consultant for a bit, and ended up as the VP of Engineering with a mobile network operator. I didn’t get to use C++ a lot in those years, but being part of a failing startup, and of a team building and operating systems for 200 million users have nevertheless been useful experiences.

Since October 2018 I have been back with Qt and with The Qt Company in Oslo. Today I’m leading the Graphics & UI teams in Oslo and Oulu. During the last years, one of the bigger changes in how we work in the Qt project was the move from a forward-merging to today's cherry-picking process, which I had no small part in during the discussions at the Qt Contributors Summit in 2019. Recently, I’ve been working on the port of Qt TextToSpeech to Qt 6, and otherwise try to make small, incremental improvements and fixes.

I thoroughly enjoy working on and with Qt, and I want that future generations of developers also have fun when they build software with it. I enjoy facilitating, coordinating, and supporting as much as designing and coding. This is what I like about my job in the company, and this is how I interpret the role of the Chief Maintainer. Knowing that Qt is awesome technology built by amazing people is what motivated me most to accept the nomination.

In the short term, I would like to make sure that we follow up on the decisions and proposals from the upcoming Qt Contributors Summit. In the mid term, I believe that we need a general technical direction and roadmap that takes us beyond Qt 6.5, and I would like to work on that with the Maintainers, the KDE community, and other key projects. And I believe that we can and should be more open, inclusive, and engaging with the development of Qt, and that we in The Qt Company have a special role to play in that respect.

I’m looking forward to working with you all, and especially with Allan, no matter the outcome of the vote.


Cheers,
Volker



> On 2 Jun 2022, at 11:46, Lars Knoll <lars.knoll at qt.io> wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> The nomination period for the Qt Chief Maintainer election ended yesterday night. 
> 
> I’m very happy to say that we have two excellent candidates for the position with Allan and Volker. Both have been working with Qt for many years and know it extremely well. I am certain that whoever of the two will get elected will be doing a very good job, so I know already now that Qt will be in very good hands moving forward.
> 
> But since not all of you might know Volker and Allan very well, I’ve asked them to send an email presenting themselves and what they consider important for Qt and the role of the Chief Maintainer moving forward. So you will get a bit more of an impression from them during the day.
> 
> Elections will run from 3rd of June (starting at midnight CEST), until the end of the 16th of June (23:59 CEST). Everybody that is part of the Maintainer group on Gerrit (https://codereview.qt-project.org/admin/groups/a60ed457f6e3833c81023c72743ba73c7e23fb09,members) is eligible to cast a vote.
> 
> Daniel will follow up with more details on how to cast your vote a bit later today.
> 
> With that, I’d like to wish both candidates good luck, and am very much looking forward to see who will become our new Chief Maintainer.
> 
> Cheers,
> Lars
> 
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