Hack Week Engineer Spotlight: Jiawei Sun

Although SUSE Hack Week has ended, the spotlights continue! Check out today’s feature.

Today’s Hacker…

Name

Jiawei Sun

Title

QA engineer

Q: Hi Jiawei! It’s great to chat with you today. Give me a few details about your background, your role at SUSE, any interesting facts?

A: Hi Ruby. I’m a QA engineer from the QA APACI team. I joined SUSE just over one year ago. This is my second hack-week in SUSE, and this is my first time to submit a project.

In my free time, I like cooking with my family. I not only love delicious food, but I also enjoy the process of cooking. Photography is another hobby for me. Photography combined with art and human technique, I find it extremely fascinating. I like to use my camera to record my travel, catch a special moment for me or for my family. And what I love most is using my camera to record the delicious food cooked by myself.

Q: You mentioned that this is the first time you’ve submitted a project for SUSE Hack Week. How exciting! What did you decide to focus on for your project?

A: Our project is SUSE photography Space. It has two sub-object, one is a photography skill sharing session, the other one is a lite edition photography manage tool for Linux.

As we know, because of mobile internet and society, network AppS are more and more popular, the photography is very popular right now. People use their cellphone camera to record their daily life, their happiness and special time, and use their camera or professional DSLR to record spectacular scenery in their travel. We even have a new word “iphone-photography”. People need photos to be more and more clear, so the pixels of cameras needs be increased, and each photo needs more storage space. But some issues have followed, we will have lots of picture in our cellphone or camera. Sometimes they will be hundreds, it will be a little mass in our device if we don’t manage them periodically. And it will be an impossible mission to find the certain phones you need in a short time.

So my colleagues and I submitted this project for hackweek 15: we would like to develop a lite edition photography manage tool. Users can use it to manage their photos by serial tag, such as date, location, and device information (Maybe Face Recognition with next version). And the expert user even can use the tag such as shutter speed, aperture and focal length. Although this is a small tool for a Linux platform, it will be a small piece for linux ecosystem. The Empire State Building was built piece by piece, and that is the way we work in SUSE. We make the pieces together and build our own open source Empire State Building.

Q: I could definitely benefit from such a tool and this sounds so cool. Would you say it’s the coolest project you’ve worked on?

A: Yes I would. I think the project SUSE photography space is a really cool project. We shared our photos, our experience and skill on photography. Took cool photos and made awesome time-lapse videos and uploaded them to flickr. And also we developed our own photo management tool. It will help us to show the other side of engineering, the emotional and artistic side. We are a continuous innovation team, I’m sure we always will have cooler projects next time.

Q: SUSE is the open OPEN source company. What does “open” mean to you?

A: First of all, “Open” means open minded, we have infinite imagination and possibilities here. If we have a cool idea, we can do it during Hackweek. And the company will supply all resources to help us make it out.

Secondly, “Open” means flat, SUSE is a flat organization. Everyone has the channel to express opinions. The mangers and directors’ office are always open to us, we can directly seek their support and help anytime.

And third, “Open” means open opportunity. In SUSE I can study the any new technology which I like. I can contribute to an open source project which I’m interesting in. It’s always an opportunity to improve myself here.

Q: Did you always know you wanted to be an engineer growing up?

A: I did. I work with a group of talented engineers, some of them are experts in their field. I think I can learn a lot from my colleagues. A short-term objective for me is to make more contributions to open source community, help improve the quality of upstream. A long-term objective is to be an expert in my field.