I was asked recently by Murray Cumming whether I would be interested in becoming an official maintainer of cairomm, the C++ binding for the cairo 2D graphics library. I’ve been contributing pretty regularly to cairomm (and in fact, pretty much all of the changes between 0.4.0 and the upcoming 0.5.0 release were done by me).

Up until now, my main free software experiences have been as a user and infrequent bug reporter, and as a developer of my pet projects (see colorscheme). In the process of working on my colorscheme app, I learned a bit about the Gdk drawing API, and I didn’t particularly like what I found. So I’ve been quite excited by the new API provided by cairo, and in an effort to learn to use cairo, I began contributing tutorials and documentation for gtkmm and cairomm, and eventually started contributing code.

So I accepted the position of co-maintainer at this point. At some point I may take over completely since Murray’s got a ton of stuff on his plate. In any case, this is a pretty significant step for me, and I’m pretty excited about it. I’ve learned a lot in just the last year or so, and I expect I’ll continue to learn a lot as I take on additional responsibilities with cairomm. Hopefully we can get cairomm into a good, stable state as soon as possible so that it can be used extensively in the next gtkmm release.