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Kevin Ottens

Kevin

Kevin lives in Toulouse and has been Benjamin's teacher. He got a PhD in Artificial Intelligence before it was fashionable. He is also a Qt expert who has been contributing to KDE for over 20 years. That said he's learned several other stacks making him a programming language polyglot. Drop him in any code base without a compass and he will nonetheless draw the map. His hobbies include Aikido and reading as many books or articles of various styles and topics as he can.

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Portfolio

Weekly Web Reviews

An avid reader, Kevin has been collecting URLs to articles he reads for at least a decade. Instead of keeping them only for his own use he started publishing weekly web reviews on his personal website. This is now used as part of the technology watch of the enioka group.

KDE and Other FOSS Contributions

Kevin started contributing to the KDE community in 2003 and has been involved since then. He did a wide range of technical work like contributions to the Kontact application suite or Plasma Desktop. Due to this work he also worked on standardization efforts in the Freedesktop.org initiative. Last but not least, he took part in the software architecture conversations to split the old kdelibs into the KDE Framework product then led the transition effort for three years until the first releases.

Beyond his involvement as a developer he got involved in community management efforts like facilitating the conversations to create the KDE Manifesto; now one of the most central constitutional documents of the community. He also setup the KDE Project Incubator to help new projects join the KDE umbrella. Finally, he has been involved in the Akademy conference program commitee.

This all led to contributing on his work time to KDE, LibreOffice, Poppler, and more as requested by customers. It ranges from opportunistic bug fixing affecting a customer to full fledged projects. For instance he led teams to improve KDE software for Valve Corporation, Canonical, or the Sovereign Tech Fund.

Community Data Analytics and Open Source Strategy

Kevin has been around Free Software and Open Source communities most of his life. This led to attempts to study them through data analytics based on commits activity and mediated conversations like code reviews. Some of this work has been delivered as talks or articles on his personal website.

Such skills turned out to be valuable in a professional context as well. He gets a more precise picture of the team dynamics during project audits. He also helps building dashboards to help CTOs and Engineering Managers figure out how well their teams interact or if there are people at risk.

This completes well his other activities of helping customers conduct FOSS supply chain analyses of their applications: checking license compatibilities and if the communities of their core software dependencies are at risk. Those efforts cant be part of a larger support to customer to help them setup or run their Open Source Program Office (OSPO).

System Programming and Integration for Linux

Kevin is a seasoned engineer for Linux both in desktop and embedded contexts. This can involve a graphical user interface (GUI) but not necessarily as he also works with headless systems.

He thus has experience in various topics usual for such systems:

He can also work with more hardened systems either via sandboxed systemd services or leveraging snapd on Ubuntu Core based systems.

The wide breadth of his Linux ecosystem knowledge allows him to help customers frame the application and software architecture of their solutions.

3D engines and applications

Beyond system programming, Kevin is also experienced in graphics particularly by leveraging the GPU. As such he contributed to the Qt 3D engine both for its implementation and for its API design.

Those skills are transferable to web based frontends or the backend. For a Building Information Modeling (BIM) project with Vinci Construction Kevin worked on:

Enterprise Application Development

Kevin has seen a wide range of projects in his career which includes enterprise applications. As such he has understanding of several business domains covering retail, construction, logistics, security, and more.

These projects also required being proficient in various ecosystems like Java, Rust, or Python. Next to actual feature developments and mentoring customer teams, he conducted large scale optimizations, mended legacy code bases, and helped software architecture transitions after designing the target.

Trainings

Kevin is a technical person but mainly appreciates the human relationship side of his job and loves to share knowledge with others. He thus naturally dabbled in teaching even before he graduated. Over the years he trained hundreds of engineers across dozens of sessions.

He designed the enioka Haute Couture trainings and wrote most of the material. He's also responsible for training the other trainers for the whole company.

He practices sketchnoting which comes in handy to give more life to his training sessions. The topics he covers include agile practices, version control, code reviews, testing techniques, mending legacy code, design patterns, and software architecture.

Coaching

After years of conducting trainings, Kevin realized that supporting some of the customer staff with even more tailored experiences was needed. This is why he developed tech coaching skills aiming at engineering managers, tech leads, and lead developers. Very often such people end up in leadership position coming from a technical background. This can be a brutal transition which can be eased through coaching.

As part of his responsibilities he oversees the improvements to the method applied by the other coaches in the company.

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