Universe Contributors Application for Nick Ellery (nellery)

[Nick Ellery]

Hello everyone,

My name is Nick Ellery.  Please consider this as my application to
become a Universe Contributor.

I started out contributing to Ubuntu around the end of the Hardy cycle. 
At this time, I submitted patches to the Documentation Team.  I soon got
into bug triaging, where I became a member of the Bug Control team, and
eventually gained Ubuntu Membership on June 4, 2008 - just under two
months after I began contribution.  I soon got much more into bug
triaging, eventually setting up several Bug Days.  With these
contributions, I soon became a member of the QA Team.

Nearer to the end of the Intrepid cycle, I decided it was time to get
involved with development.  I had been around for a fair amount of time,
getting to know the community and its processes.  I signed up for the
mentoring program, and was lucky enough to get Nicolas Valcarcel as my
mentor.  I started out by submitting debdiffs for bitesize bugs.  Soon,
I had contributed some trivial bug fixes, as well as package upgrades.

I consider the Intrepid cycle to have been my learning experience.  I
learned a lot, and most importantly, important practices, such as
testing, test building, and cooperating with Debian.  I had also gained
knowledge with the sponsoring process, feature freeze exceptions, and as
mentioned about, package upgrades.

Now, in the Jaunty cycle, I have been working mainly on merges and sync
requests.  I've gradually started working on less trivial merges, and I
soon hope to be doing much more advanced work.  I've found a small
liking with science-related packages, and contributed work in that
area.  I recently joined the MOTU Science team, and hope to become even
more active in that area.

As with all new contributors, I've made a fair share of mistakes. 
However, that's only resulted in me learning from my errors.  When I
first started out merging, I made many mistakes, such as simply copying
and pasting old merge changelog entries, or missing out on a minor
change.  I've learned from these, and I believe that minor mistakes are
becoming much rarer.

For the future, I plan to continue on merges and sync requests until
DIF.  At this point, I will start contributing more to bugfixes, and
perhaps get into FTBFS fixes.  I also plan to get more active in the
MOTU Science team.  I have also recently adopted some Debian packages. 
I hope to become an active Debian Maintainer as well.

I'd like to thank all of my sponsors.  The following is a list of those
whom I'm CCing, however I'd like to give out a big thanks to everybody
who has sponsored any of my uploads, and those who gave me advice.

James Westby (james_w)
Daniel Holbach (dholbach)
Nicolas Valcarcel (nxvl)

My Launchpad Page: https://launchpad.net/~nick.ellery
My Wiki Page: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NickEllery

Thank you for your time,
Nick Ellery