I start with a short introduction.
I am Oliver and live near Stuttgart, Germany. My first contribution to JabRef was in July 2011 where I added a functionality to copy the BibTeX key only. I got more and more involved. First code and now more and more infrastructure (homepage, binary hosting, …) work. I try to bring up good issues to newcomers to JabRef.
Since JabRefs internal data format is BibTeX, I believe that JabRef is one of the most suitable tool to manage references - at least for LaTeX. I see the potential of JabRef to become the leading collaborative reference management software. Thus, I try to to push work on issues improving the user experience especially reference and PDF collection.
In the last months, it turned out that JabRef is more than a toy project, but simpler than other Java-projects (such as Apache Tomcat). Thus, it forms a good basis for teaching newcomers coding, collaborative coding, using coding platforms (such as GitHub), etc. I’m very happy that a complete coding introduction courses are based on JabRef. See https://github.com/unibas-marcelluethi/software-engineering for one example.
All work in JabRef is in my free time and I do not get paid for it at all. The work in JabRef is rewarding for me since we are IMHO a great community, have really good ideas and provide and get great freedback to each other.
As professional work, I was researcher in the fields of BPM, Cloud Computing, and software architecture. In that time, I laid the foundation to be top 3% at StackOverlow. Now, my professional working field is researching for Mercedes-Benz AG.
Find more pointers to my research, open source projects, and professional work at https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6962-4290.