Featured: Milian Wolff, KDE

22.04.2011 19:02
Anika Kehrer

Milian Wolff from Berlin works on the editor Kate and the development environment KDevelop within the KDE project. The student of physics gets annoyed by people, who pick only half the truth and present it as fact.

Talk "Massif Visualizer - Memory Profiling UI", Wednesday, 11.05.2011, Room Europa II, 4 - 5 p.m: Even though memory gets cheaper and cheaper, it is still a good idea for many developers to investigate time in optimizing the memory consumption of their applications. One way to do that is by using the powerful and widely known Massif tool of the Valgrind suite. While Massif and Valgrind have been around for a long time, a decent visualization UI for the generated data fields was still missing - until recently. To Milians talk

Backstage with Milian

Milian, as a KDE developer you're part of a really big and distributed community. How exactly do you "meet" the others?

On one hand virtually through IRC and mailinglists. On the other hand - and thanks to financial support from the KDE association - we arrange so-called Hack Sprints. These are meetings of developers, who work on sub projects. So you meet the others face to face, exchanging experiences and discussing things. Then, there are some conferences (LinuxTag, FOSDEM, Froscon, KDE Akademy, DesktopSummit, ...), where KDE is always represented by some members - that's another opportunity to meet the community.

KDE is a desktop system, something people rarely know it exists independently of an operating system. What is your experience of explaining KDE to someone?

It is mostly not that hard to give laymen a rough picture: The kernel takes care for the hardware. What you see on the screen are a couple of applications. KDE is simply a (large) collection of applications, that look similar and complement each other.

Apart from KDE and the whole Tekkiverse - which part of life do you find really fascinating?

I'm studying physics, and in general I find natural sciences very interesting. At the same time, I am a strong atheist and like to discuss with relegious people, trying to understand their way of thinking. Apart from that, I love listening to music.

You're a student of physics. How does your typical day look like?

I'm working on my thesis at the moment, that means a lot of LaTeX writing. I'm working as a Software Engineer at KDAB as well. That means basically: programming in Qt/C++.

Why did you choose to present a talk at LinuxTag 2011?

I'm living in Berlin and like to take the chance to promote KDE in general and my pet projects in particular at conferences.

Milians Data Sheet

Place of birth: Berlin

Place of living: Berlin

Age: 22

Favourite programming language(s): C++

Favourite FOSS operating system flavour(s): ArchLinux

A day is perfect for me, if ...
... I'm on free time, have a lie-in, enjoy the sun with friends and music, and even on the next day there's nothing to pressure me.

It really annoys me, when ...
... people dig only half the truth and present their result as fact.

FOSS and Linux in 3 sentences:

  1. FOSS is a name für projects like LibreOffice, Firefox, Linux etc., where everyone can participate.
  2. Linux is a software project which implements the interface between software and hardware, the so-called kernel.
  3. About which would you like to learn more? :)

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