Meet an Open Source Developer – Lex Vorona

Lex Vorona is a data enthusiast, Russian translator, and advocate for open source software (OSS).

As he continues his decades-long involvement in Linux user groups, he’s also a software engineer on the Data Identity team at Sonatype. You also might remember him from our holiday post, where we covered his creation of a few LoFi audio representations of software packages.

As part of our ongoing series for World Open Source Day, we had a conversation with Lex about his journey in OSS development so far. Let’s dive into his story where he covers discontinued tech, Linux-powered devices, and his involvement with a NASA project.

What do you think is the most important aspect of open source?

It’s the sense of community. Whenever you contribute in any capacity, you get this wave of appreciation most of the time. Although that could be good or bad, because I think some of the high-profile maintainers get burnt out because they would get those feature requests, and people get really upset that nothing is done about them for years. But the sense of community is great.

How did you start becoming more involved with open source?

My first contributions actually happened when I was in university. I was working on, essentially, a research paper, which actually turned into a series of research papers. And I was not studying computer science. I was pursuing an optical electronic engineering degree. So, I wasn’t even writing that much code. But I was using OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Word to get the papers out. And my very first contributions were translations.

I would notice that there were translations missing for new versions for the Russian language. That was a very good experience because Ubuntu Canonical already had Launchpad out. So, it was very easy to (Read more...)