moderately inappropriate

First in a series

Well, this morning I figured I would try a little something I had on my mind for the last day or two. The Mono project is huge, really really huge. There are a lot of developers, many who do things that aren't considered front page news (myself included). What I figured I would do, is once a month, or maybe twice, I would try and profile one of these 'Unsung Heros' and give the effort they put into making this project wonderful a little bit of press, for lack of a better word.

This time, I am going to introduce you to a guy named John Luke, or as many of us better know him, jluke.

This guy has his hands in some many different pieces of the project. He does a lot for the documentation effort, something which is so very important to attracting people to mono, and in particular, he attempts to document the little things about Gtk# that can drive people up the wall.

For example, about 2 weeks ago, I was experimenting with a right click context menu popup, pretty basic stuff if you ask me. After getting it set up what seemed to be correctly, all I would get from the right click was this little 2x2 menu with no menuitems, no text, and no 'click-ability'. This was extremely frustrating.

I then posted to the gtk-sharp mailing list asking if anyone else had seen this, and wondering what the potential fix might have been. The general consensus was that everyone had seen this behaviour, but no one knew quite how to fix it.

Most developers would have let it go at that, however a week later John Luke not only replied to the list that he had figured it out, and gave a code sample, he then also updated the Gtk# documentation to show this example, so as to prevent this happening to any other newbie Gtk# developers.

This is not the only example of John Luke's tenacity, and general determination for this project, but it is one that obviously affected me, and it shows what makes him, in my opinion, a unsung hero of Mono.

Posted by tberman at October 7, 2003 11:33 AM