Community Spotlight: Klaus Purer (klausi)

By greggles on 2 Nov 2011 at 23:07 UTC

Klaus Purer is a member of the Drupal community who has been recently been extremely active with project applications. How active? In the last 30 days he has commented on almost twice as many projects as the next most prolific commenter. Even though he just got involved in the last month, he's tied for most reviews of the most projects in the last 6 months!

Klaus Purer (klausi) in a suit and tie

How did you get involved with Drupal?

I started to work with Drupal during my involvement with the students union at the Vienna University of Technology (Fachschaft Informatik) back in 2006. I was just a user at that time, posting articles and keeping the web site up to date. In 2008 I was looking for some work besides my computer science studies and ran into a job advertisement by jpetso. I found it very appealing because it mentioned “actively taking part in an open source project” and since I at least knew Drupal a little it was a great match. So I started at Pro.Karriere (now known as epiqo) as part time Drupal developer, I think I did my first patch for Comment CCK (porting it to Drupal 6). Another boost for my involvement was the Google Summer of Code program in 2009, where I did a project for the Rules module. Fago was a great mentor (and still is today).

What do you do with Drupal these days?

I finished my master thesis this year, which talks about the Web Service Client module. I’m working on eRecruiter, a Drupal 7 distribution for online job boards. I help fago to maintain Rules and sometimes Entity API, I really like to work with RESTWS and I sometimes have to do hackish, pure Drupal-work-around modules like Role Export. I am a Google Summer of Code mentor and I am proud what my student sepgil accomplished this year (Rules Link). I have some Drupal core patches here and there waiting for your review. You can find me on meetups of the Drupal Austria local user group.

What got you started in the project application review process?

I saw people whining online about the project applications issue queue and the huge backlog. I was curious how hard it could be to do a review, and I saw that it actually is pretty easy. Then I wondered how many reviews one person could do in 24 hours. I took some time in the weekend and slayed down around 130 issues. I got motivated by the progress and continued my work, now with the challenge to reach zero "needs review" issues. Haven't succeeded yet, but will go for it when I have time. I think it is crucial for the Drupal community to get more developers on board, so that not only the Drupal user base grows but also the developer base.

What are some of your favorite moments from that process?

I like it how fast projects can evolve from a crappy code base to a clean and polished version. It is great to see how people care about their work, want to learn and want to get it right. They are excited when they get approved and spread their motivation to others, even to myself.Another aspect is that I myself learn a lot being a reviewer. The most valuable things are the security reviews by greggles, that point out weaknesses in the code that could be exploited by an attacker. It really hurts when greggles shoots down an issue for security reasons that you RTBC’ed before, but I appreciate it as it grows my awareness about security issues and my knowledge how to identify them.

Are there any cool projects you’ve learned about through that process?

Yes, definitely. Of course people don’t do blockbuster modules like Views or Rules as their first Drupal module, but there are nice ideas like Fixed field, Guest, User Email Domain and many others that I have forgotten right now.

What changes do you hope will come in the project review process?

I would like to get more reviewers involved. We can automate the reviews a bit (I created a bash script to do some common checks, see PAReview.sh), but we need human approval anyway later in the process. There are plans to deploy some automation on drupal.org directly, but that long term effort does not solve the problem of lacking reviewers now. You can do a decent project review in 10-15 minutes, so if more people would just do one per day or one per week we would not have any problems.

It looks like you’ve been to several Drupalcons. What is your favorite part of these events?

The atmosphere of friendly human interaction. It amazes me how nice and welcoming all people are and how low the barriers of entry are. I like it that there are almost no hierarchies between the people and that you can talk to just anyone.

Tell us a little about your background or things that interest you outside Drupal?

I’m living in Vienna, Austria, and I’m a free and open source software enthusiast. I like to compare programming languages, so I hate PHP (if only Drupal were written in Python!). I’m interested in politics, ethics, philosophy and gender studies. I am a vegetarian and I support attac.

Where to find Klaus:

http://twitter.com/_klausi_
http://klau.si/
http://drupal.org/user/262198

Comments

Awesome work

zzolo commented 3 November 2011 at 00:44

Great work, @klausi!! Thanks for all the contributions.

--
zzolo

Awesome contributions

Daglees

he/him

English

commented 3 November 2011 at 09:41

Awesome contributions Klaus!

Keep it up. :)

i'm a bit late, just wanted

linuxpimp commented 22 September 2012 at 23:15

i'm a bit late, just wanted to thank you for your contributions, you have just saved me :)

Great work Klausi. Keep up

asifnoor commented 3 November 2011 at 09:40

Great work Klausi. Keep up the good work.

Thanks for the great

StryKaizer

Dutch

Belgium

commented 3 November 2011 at 15:00

Thanks for the great contributions, and thanks for the awesome contribution for our team in the Drupalcon London quiz ;)

qft:

if only Drupal were written in Python!

Thank you for WS Client

Beulette commented 3 November 2011 at 11:54

Last weeks, I was working with WS Client for important projects for a National Museum of Natural History, thank you for all the work you did on this module !!! It really, really helped !

I think I'll try to get involved in projects too ;), that's bad I didn't before !

Klausi has made a huge impact

greggles

he/him

English

Denver, Colorado, USA

commented 3 November 2011 at 13:15

Klausi has made a huge impact on the project application process. Not only did he play an enormous role in dropping the number of "needs review" applications he has kept busy with it.

Thanks so much for your enormous initial effort and the ongoing work!

--
Morris Animal Foundation

Klausi is badass.

fubhy commented 3 November 2011 at 17:57

Klausi is a badass.

Thanks for the project

jamesdixon commented 3 November 2011 at 21:59

Thanks for the project reviews on my project Klausi! Your review script seems to find more than the Coder module. Have you considered contributing parts of your script to the Coder module (ie the javascript coding standards check)?

Yes I looked into Coder but

klausi

he/him||they/them

German

🇦🇹 Vienna

commented 7 November 2011 at 16:20

Yes I looked into Coder but it did not satisfy my needs. Bash & grep was just so much faster for me to come up with something. However, I will support anyone who wants to migrate rules from my script to Coder.

Klausi++

Itangalo commented 4 November 2011 at 09:42

Klausi++

thanks Greggles

tregeagle commented 5 November 2011 at 08:24

Inspiring for me to read about Klaus, thanks for posting Greggles. I shall endeavor to contribute more...

Inspiring work Klausi!

thomasdegraaff commented 7 November 2011 at 11:33

I'm quite new to Drupal, and am creating a website for the Dutch Ubuntu LoCo. Now I wrote some code that other LoCo teams might like to use, so I decided to put it in a module for convenience. As I'm not a schooled programmer, the concise and helpfull feedback of Klausi is really helping me to learn how to create a correct and secure module, and inspires me to improve the code. I am really amazed by the effort put into the reviewing process. Without this reviews it would have been impossible for me to learn so quickly how to write a good module.

Thx. Klausi!

you rock +1

patrickd commented 7 November 2011 at 17:49

you rock +1

Module development

sohan commented 9 November 2011 at 05:49

Hello Klaus,

You are doing great. I am new to Drupal development, current working to develop a custom module. In this module i am displaying two radio buttons and want to generate form, based on checked radio button. If i check first radio button, i should get a textfield and submit button as a form . If i check second radio button, i should get a drop down list (filled dynamically from database), a text box and a submit button as form .

I am getting problem, how to get checked radio button value and to generate form on based on that value.

Please help
thanks

I don't think you will get

patrickd commented 9 November 2011 at 08:56

I don't think you will get help here.
Please create a separate support thread for this.

Thank-you

Diogenes commented 10 November 2011 at 11:14

While I didn't ~~whine~~ post about how long the review process was taking, I may have privately groaned about how long the wait time was.

Thank you klausi, for this splendid effort and leadership by example. Yours was my first ever code review, and though I'm a little embarrassed by what you found, you were spot on with every point.

You are demonstrating how it can and should be done. No doubt others are saying "hey, I can help (do that) too". At least I am.

Success with life
-Dio