interviewing Maxisma

Ladies and gents of the android world, i've litterally just finished speaking with Maxisma and boy does he have alot to say. now, i'm currently using androblogger to do this, so if things turn out wrong i'm going to need a new blogger app...
so without further ado, here's what was said.

Me:
i'd like to start by asking you to tell me a ittle more about yourself, your hobbies, programming history.. basically anything you find interesting about yourself :)

Maxisma:
I'm a 14 years old (on 18.09.09 15) guy. My hobbys are sports (swimming @german life rescue (dlrg) and squash), playing violin and modding android.
I started learning english when I was 8 in school I practised a lot in English online forums when I was 12. Today I know a lot more english expressions and words then my classmates. But I still have to learn the grammar better.
At the age of 9 I visited a course for HTML. When I was 11 I learned a bit about java applets on webpages, but I forgot almost everything.
Now I'm trying to learn java since it's the language most android apps are written in. I started to mod ROMs this spring. I started with replacing some apk's in /system/app and now i'm using tools like smali & baksmali to mod for example clock color. I have succesfully built android from source for my G1 and it was running great, but I decided to tweak cyanogens ROMs for the average user. I want everything to be as easy as possible

Me:
Awesome, you already answered a question I was going to ask. So we'll skip "who's work do you base your work on, or is it all yours from source?" And go straight to... Are there any developers you wish you could learn more from? Have any developers worked on your roms with you?

Maxisma:
I wish I could learn more from cyanogen, but he's a bit "quite".. He provides great changelogs, has released his source etc.. but When I ask him something on twitter, he won't answer most of the time Kb7qui designed the smartdialer from maxisma 2.3 for me, but that's all We can't really work together because of the different timezones That's the abd thing: I'm from Germany so I live in an UTC+2 timezone which is bad, because most devs out on XDA live in the USA.

Me:
Timezones are a pain, I'm in england, naturally plain old boring GMT Bit of a hard question, what keeps you developing? Naturally you have a nice stable build, so what motivates you to do more?

Maxisma:
I always want to improve everything. I want to customize android to fit my needs nearly 100 % And my "requirements" are raising all the time :D I don't really do this for the community: I make the builds for me and I release it, so people who like it can use it I'm tired of people who says "I want this, and this.. and this.. blah blah" ;-)

Me:
A bit of a perfectionist then, glass is only half full kinda guy? Which do you prefer to work on? AOSP, Rogers, or the annoyingly-slow-without- swap Hero? Any particular reason behind your choice?

Maxisma:
I like to modify the aosp roms, because it's nearly complete open source. You can build new versions of it directly from the source, not ike the Rogers or Hero versions I think the mass wants heavily modified Rogers builds, but the Rogers builds aren't as customizable as the aosp build. Soulife for example does a great job on this.

Me:
Cool, I'll be honest, I've never used one of your roms, but I'm always up for a trial. If you could describe your rom in 10 words, what would they be?

Maxisma:
Fast, experimental, full of features,good looking and yeah that was it ;-)

Me:
ok ast question me thinks unless you want to ask me some If you could work alongside another developer, who would it be and why?
As a little side question, can you recomend a good blogger app. Androblogger seems ok, but it's very limited.

Maxisma:
I would want to work with cyanogen or stericson, they both are really good with java etc
You can use wptogo for wordpress ;-)

Me:
Well I'll be honest, Stericson did start an aweful lot of things so I think t would be cool to work with him too. Many thanks for your time

Maxisma:
Thanks for the interview ;-)


Well, personally i found that interesting. its a good start to what could be a huge project. If you're a fan of Maxisma's work and wish to make a small donation to him then please do so here
Keep your eyes open folks, my next interview should be online next week if timezone restrictions allow, but i'm keeping the interviewee a secret :)
hope you all enjoyed our little chat with Maxisma, and will keep coming back for more :)