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Interview: Philip Tellis

Philip Tellis will give a talk about YUI-Flot at FOSDEM 2010.

Could you briefly introduce yourself?

My name is Philip, I'm a developer from India who has been living in the US for the last two years. I've been working on FOSS for over 10 years. My first love has always been writing and modifying code, and Free and Open source software gives me a very large playing field. I'm also lazy, so I write code to automate everything that I'd rather not do myself. When I'm not writing code, I like to cycle or cook.

What will your talk be about, exactly?

The talk is related to the YUI-Flot charting library. I will cover some of the features of the library, how to use it and any differences from Flot for jQuery, then look at other alternatives for JavaScript charting, and finally touch on what I learnt while working on the library.

What do you hope to accomplish by giving this talk? What do you expect?

I have two goals for this talk. The first is that developers looking for a JavaScript-only charting library for YUI will have something to use. The same goes for developers who may need to port code from jQuery to YUI. My second goal is that some of the things I learnt while working on this will help other developers.

What were your reasons to start with YUI-Flot?

I was working on a project that uses YUI and required charting. The only charting library available for YUI at the time was based on Flash, and since I work primarily on Linux, this caused a lot of problems for me. A friend introduced me to Flot, and I really liked how pretty it was, so decided to port it to YUI and use it in my project.

How many developers are working on YUI-Flot?

It's primarily me, while a few other people have forked it on github. There's also the main Flot development team, and I periodically pull in new code from there.

Is YUI-Flot a one-to-one mapping of Flot from jQuery to YUI or are there differences?

It is largely a one-to-one mapping. There are different ways to do a few things mainly because jQuery and YUI differ in how they handle events. I've also added one or two features that are not part of Flot itself, and will go into these in a little more detail during my talk.

How will YUI-Flot evolve in the near future? Any new features coming?

In general, I write code to scratch my own itches. If I need a feature, I code it up. Some things that I'm looking to add in the near future are:

Have you enjoyed previous FOSDEM editions?

This is my first time at FOSDEM, and in fact my first time to a conference in Europe. I've heard a lot of good things about the developer community, primarily the FOSS community in Europe, and am looking forward to meeting you. I also enjoy Belgian Beers and hope to sample a few while I'm there.

Creative Commons License
This interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Belgium License.