New Lead Developer – Robert “ylee” Wiley

Today I would like to introduce myself and to remind the Bodhi Community that development of Moksha is continuing, and we are slowly preparing for a Bodhi 5.1 release. I need no introduction to people active in our community as I have been using Bodhi since 1.x and quickly became an active Team Member and quite active forum user.

Much of what I do is ‘behind the scenes’ and perhaps not obvious to the end user. This includes packaging applications and software development, but it also includes anything else I think needs to be done. To accomplish these tasks I have had to learn more about packaging deb files than I ever wanted to, learn PHP when the developer of our old software center stepped down and learn EFL programming in both Python and C. I have worked with developers of third party software to ensure compatibility with Moksha and worked some with the Enlightenment developers to get issues fixed.

As to me the only history that really matters is I have been programming since the days of punched cards – yes I am that old. So when I first started using GNU-Linux, I dove right in and found it rather liberating. I was already familiar with scripting and knew C and Python well enough as well as a few other languages. The first distro I actually installed was Ubuntu and since then I have more or less stuck with Debian based distros.

With Jeff Hoogland’s new job, as well as his family, taking most of his free time lately, I have taken over most of the development work for Bodhi. I do owe some gratitude towards Štefan “the waiter” Uram who helps and who did most of the work needed to keep our themes functioning as well as make some improvements to Moksha and our modules. Rather impressive as when Štefan first started helping he did not even know C.

Jeff isn’t gone, but his main role these days is helping with the new releases and what may be called management. We are a small distro and a small team so none of our roles are formalized, and often overlap. Historically Jeff has created our ISOs by himself and this is unlikely to change. Nonetheless I have assumed what may be called the role of “Lead Developer” and for the past year or more as I have worked on Moksha.

I wanted to give a short update here on the website since things have been rather quiet since our 5.0.0 release some time ago. Look here soon for another post that is going to be on my plans for Moksha development and where we are at on our work for Moksha 0.3.1.

Also keep in mind that as always – Bodhi is a fully volunteer driven project. While donations are not, and never will be required, to use Bodhi – they help us keep the lights on and will allow me to make more time to spend on Bodhi tasks.