A Weekend CoderA Weekend Coder

Peter Lundblad tries to keep his open-source work in perspective. "I try to avoid coding at least one evening per week, and some weekends, of course, are filled with other things," says the Swedish software engineer, who is married and has three children. "I have a life as well, even if it might seem hard to believe."

Lundblad is one of many Europeans participating in open source projects. U.S. project organizers say 40% to 50% of their contributions come from overseas, primarily Europe, Australia, and Asia.

For six years, Lundblad has been a software engineer at Sorman Information and Media, a Swedish firm that supplies technology documentation services and technical support to Swedish aerospace, automotive, and military manufacturers. In his spare time, he's a prolific contributor to one of the most successful recent open source projects, Subversion, the change management system for distributed development teams.

Lundblad, who is blind, uses a Braille display and synthetic speech to code and read E-mail. He spends 15 to 20 hours a week on Subversion, he says, working most evenings until midnight. On weekends, he stays up later. "I've learned to manage without too much sleep per night," he says.

He joined the project in 2003 because he needed version control software at work and realized Subversion was designed for distributed teams. Sorman's software engineers are distributed across several cities in Sweden.

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