Michael Meeks is a British

software developer Software development is the process of conceiving, specifying, designing, programming, documenting, testing, and bug fixing involved in creating and maintaining applications, frameworks, or other software components. Software development invo ...

. He is primarily known for his work on

GNOME A gnome is a mythological creature and diminutive spirit in Renaissance magic and alchemy, first introduced by Paracelsus in the 16th century and later adopted by more recent authors including those of modern fantasy literature. Its characte ...

OpenOffice.org OpenOffice.org (OOo), commonly known as OpenOffice, is a discontinued open-source office suite. Active successor projects include LibreOffice (the most actively developed), Apache OpenOffice, Collabora Online (enterprise ready LibreOffice) a ...

and now

LibreOffice LibreOffice () is a free and open-source office productivity software suite, a project of The Document Foundation (TDF). It was forked in 2010 from OpenOffice.org, an open-sourced version of the earlier StarOffice. The LibreOffice suite co ...

. He has been a major contributor to the GNOME project for a long time working on its infrastructure and associated applications, particularly

CORBA The Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) is a standard defined by the Object Management Group (OMG) designed to facilitate the communication of systems that are deployed on diverse platforms. CORBA enables collaboration between s ...

Bonobo The bonobo (; ''Pan paniscus''), also historically called the pygmy chimpanzee and less often the dwarf chimpanzee or gracile chimpanzee, is an endangered great ape and one of the two species making up the genus '' Pan,'' the other being the comm ...

Nautilus The nautilus (, ) is a pelagic marine mollusc of the cephalopod family Nautilidae. The nautilus is the sole extant family of the superfamily Nautilaceae and of its smaller but near equal suborder, Nautilina. It comprises six living species in ...

and GNOME accessibility. He was hired as a

Ximian Ximian, Inc. (previously called Helix Code and originally named International Gnome Support) was an American company that developed, sold and supported application software for Linux and Unix based on the GNOME platform. It was founded by Migu ...

developer by

Nat Friedman Nathaniel Dourif Friedman is an American technology executive and investor. He was the chief executive officer (CEO) of GitHub, and former Chairman of the GNOME Foundation. Friedman is currently a board member at the Arc Institute, and an advisor ...

and

Miguel de Icaza Miguel de Icaza (born November 23, 1972) is a Mexican programmer, best known for starting the GNOME, Mono, and Xamarin projects. Biography Early years De Icaza was born in Mexico City and studied Mathematics at the National Autonomous University ...

in mid-2000 , continuing at

Novell Novell, Inc. was an American software and services company headquartered in Provo, Utah, that existed from 1980 until 2014. Its most significant product was the multi- platform network operating system known as Novell NetWare. Under the le ...

SuSE SUSE ( , ) is a German-based multinational open-source software company that develops and sells Linux products to business customers. Founded in 1992, it was the first company to market Linux for enterprise. It is the developer of SUSE Linux Ent ...

and then

Collabora Collabora is a global private company headquartered in Cambridge, United Kingdom, with offices in Cambridge and Montreal. It provides open-source consultancy, training and products to companies. Collabora's initial focus was instant messaging ...

. Meeks is a

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, n ...

hacker A hacker is a person skilled in information technology who uses their technical knowledge to achieve a goal or overcome an obstacle, within a computerized system by non-standard means. Though the term ''hacker'' has become associated in popu ...

who has contributed a lot of time to decreasing program load time. He created the direct binding, hashvals, and dynsort implementations for

GNU Binutils The GNU Binary Utilities, or , are a set of programming tools for creating and managing binary programs, object files, libraries, profile data, and assembly source code. Tools They were originally written by programmers at Cygnus Solutions. ...

and

glibc The GNU C Library, commonly known as glibc, is the GNU Project's implementation of the C standard library. Despite its name, it now also directly supports C++ (and, indirectly, other programming languages). It was started in the 1980s ...

. Most of this work was focused at making OpenOffice.org and now its fork LibreOffice start faster, and was later subsumed into the "-hash-style=gnu" linking

optimization Mathematical optimization (alternatively spelled ''optimisation'') or mathematical programming is the selection of a best element, with regard to some criterion, from some set of available alternatives. It is generally divided into two subfi ...

. His work on iogrind also allows applications to be profiled and optimized to first-time (or 'cold') start far more rapidly . He supports

and

Evolution Evolution is change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. These characteristics are the expressions of genes, which are passed on from parent to offspring during reproduction. Variation ...

as the free software solutions for document editing and groupware. Previously he worked for

Quantel Quantel was a company based in the United Kingdom and founded in 1973 that designed and manufactured digital production equipment for the broadcast television, video production and motion picture industries. They were headquartered in Newbury, ...

gaining expertise in real time AV editing and playback achieved with high performance focused hardware/software solutions. Meeks is a

Christian Christians () are people who follow or adhere to Christianity, a monotheistic Abrahamic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. The words ''Christ'' and ''Christian'' derive from the Koine Greek title ''Christós'' (Χρι� ...

, which he says made him think about the moral aspects of his own illegal use of non-free software and converted him finally to free software.

References

External links

Michael Meeks's Twitter feed
{{DEFAULTSORT:Meeks, Michael Alumni of the University of Cambridge British Christians British computer programmers GNOME developers Living people People educated at Christ's Hospital Technology evangelists LibreOffice Year of birth missing (living people)