Filip Strömbäck

I have been programming for a long time. In the last 10 years or so, I have been digging around quite a bit into the building blocks of Linux systems, for example Debian and Ubuntu. I find the openness of these systems very attracting, as it is sometimes very helpful to be able to inspect the source code of parts of the system to track down bugs, and other strange behaviors. I work as a teacher and a researcher at Linköping University in Sweden. In both of these roles, the values behind Free Software play an important role. For teaching, Free Software makes it possible to learn from existing software, both by inspecting their source and by modifying the code. In research, the benefits of free software is that it makes results and artifacts available to the public, so that they can utilize the results and also further build upon them.

As a part of my research, I have built a visualization tool for concurrent programs in a programming language (that started as a hobby project). I have been developing the language for almost 10 years at this point, and the visualization tool for about 4 or 5 years now. During a conference, I was approached by Gunnar Wolf regarding if I would be interested in packaging the tool for Debian. As of now, I have maintained the storm-lang package with Gunnar Wolf as a sponsor for slightly more than two years.

The development of the system (particularly the Linux version) has also resulted in me finding and helping addressing issues in some other libraries, such as Mesa and Skia (the issues were fairly minor, but my code caused the Intel driver in Mesa to crash in certain cases, debugging with the dbgsym-package let me narrow down the issue quite well so that the upstream maintainers could quite easily propose a fix that is now included in Debian, I believe). This example highlights that I find it valuable to try to give back to the community where I can.