Daniel Holbach’s blog

And the last day of Ubuntu Developer Week is over now too. It’s a shame, but when can we do… watch out for the next one in half a year. In the meantime, there’s going to be a bunch of Packaging Training sessions as well, and Ubuntu Open Week, so it’s not like you’ll be twiddling thumbs the whole time.

Let’s re-cap Day 5:

• 16:00 – 18:00 UTC: Django And You (mhall119): First up was Michael Hall, who had booked a double session about Django goodness and brings in quite a bit of experience on the topic. He did a great job explaining the concepts behind Django, how to set up a basic project, lots of tips and tricks and what I liked best: he plugged the LoCo Directory a couple of times. Hope you’ll get interested and see how great Django is and how much fun projects like the Loco Directory are.
• 18:00 – 19:00 UTC: Adopt-An-Upstream (jcastro): Jorge was the best possible person to talk about one of the most awesome projects we have in the Ubuntu landscape: the essence of Adopt-An-Upstream is to be a tie between the Ubuntu project and others projects: you take on real responsibility by sharing information, by helping others making informed decisions and improve Ubuntu in a very real sense. Great session!
• 19:00 – 20:00 UTC: How To Help With Edubuntu (highvoltage): I’m glad we had Jonathan Carther with us who talked about Edubuntu, how it’s set up, how the team works and what the plans for the future are. Great!
• 20:00 – 21:00 UTC: Me, myself and QA (warp10, gaspa): Last sesion of the day and of whole UDW was about how to help with Quality Assurance in Ubuntu: basically making packages rock harder. Easy tasks, how to find them, what various terms like NBS mean, was all part of the session. Thanks a lot to the Ubuntu Italian Mafia Famiglia (no that name is not my invention ).

Again I’d like to thank everybody for helping out with making Ubuntu Developer Week rock as hard as it did. 350+ attendees, 25 sessions, lots of covered topics and everything happened in a very seamless fashion. Awesome. Thanks again!

Make sure to check out the logs if you’re interested in anything particular, they’re all on the wiki.

Day 4 of Ubuntu Developer Week is over and it’s a bit sad to see UDW draw to a close again. On a happier note: all the sessions yesterday were awesome. Let’s recap together:

• 16:00 UTC: Create An Application For Ubuntu With Quickly (didrocks): What a great and action-packed session it was! Didier Roche explained how to create apps without a fuss and how Quickly makes clever decisions for you, so you have to worry less. Seems like he was very happy about the session himself, the audience even forgave him to try to make French the official language of Ubuntu Development.
• 17:00 UTC: Improving Ubuntu In An Evening (vish): Vishnoo did a great job explaining the Hundred Papercuts project and what it is about. Participation was great and I can already see lots of people getting involved in the project. It indeed is a great way to improve Ubuntu in an evening.
• 18:00 UTC: Contribute To Ubuntu Server, Do Server Papercuts (ttx): Thierry Carrez was up next and his session about Server Papercuts was a great follow up to the Hundred Papercuts session. If you’re interested in server stuff, like making things work again, read up the session log. He explained quite well who to talk to, how to get in touch with the same and make Ubuntu servers rock even harder.
• 19:00 UTC: How To Help With Xubuntu (charlie-tca): As Xubuntu project lead, Charlie Kravetz has a lot of insight into Xubuntu and XFCE. Heaps of good questions, lots of interest in Xubuntu made the session fly by quickly. If you’re interested, get in touch with Charlie!
• 20:00 UTC: Merge Proposals: Life On The Sunny Side (beuno/mhall119): Unfortunately Martin Albisetti got ill and could not give the session, but luckily Michael Hall jumped in to run a Q&A session on merge proposals. We might repeat the session in a few weeks. Stay tuned.

So today is the last day of UDW. I know you’re as sad as I am, but I’m sure you’ll enjoy the last day. Here’s why:

• 16:00 UTC + 17:00 UTC: Django And You – mhall119
  • Description: Michael Hall will run a double session about everybody’s favourite Web Framework. Django is a great way to build a dynamic website very easily. Sit back, relax and enjoy a session from one of the very busyLoCoDirectory hackers.
• 18:00 UTC: Adopt-An-Upstream – jcastro
  • Description: Jorge Castro is back again and will tell you how to adopt-an-upstream: how to take care of the one project you’re deeply interested in and make Ubuntu users and the upstream project even happier.
• 19:00 UTC: How To Help With Edubuntu – highvoltage
  • Description: Edubuntu is alive and kicking, but needs your help! Jonathan Carter will show you how!
• 20:00 UTC: Me, Myself And QA – warp10, gaspa and BlackZ
  • Description: Andrea Colangelo , Andrea Gasparini and Lorenzo de Liso are not only all from Italy, but are also deeply interested in making Ubuntu applications shine. How to take a package and make it rock from a quality assurance point of view is their topic. Join in and help to make Ubuntu rock!

Ubuntu Developer Week is not just amazing as always: this time it’s even better. The sessions are great, there’s loads of interesting details that were talked about but what’s even more important: we have loads of people attending who ask great questions and the first are already jumping in there and work actively on Ubuntu. That’s exactly what gives Ubuntu Developer Week it’s unique feel. I LOVE IT!

Yesterday was Day 3, so for those of you who did or could not attend, here’s what happened:

• 16:00 UTC: Operation Cleansweep And Reviewing Patches (nigelb and bobbo): Nigel Babu is spearheading an initiative which has the goal that there’s no unreviewed patches left by the end of it. To achieve that we set up a process that’s very easy to follow and involves QA people, Ubuntu developers, Upstream and Debian developers. Nigel and David Futcher did a fantastic job talking about the effort. Make sure you join in on the fun!
• 17:00 UTC: Forwarding Bugs And Patches Upstream (pedro_ and nigelb): Pedro Villavicencio Garrido is one of the best people to talk about evaluating bug reports and patches and being in touch with loads and loads of upstream developers about them and thus forwarding valuable information to software authors. His session was very informative, up to the point and it seems like there’s going to be even more people hanging out in #ubuntu-bugs soon.
• 18:00 UTC: Daily Builds And You (jcastro and dholbach): Jorge Castro and I talked about Daily Builds afterwards. This is a very exciting new technology in Launchpad that is currently in Beta stage. If you want up-to-date software you care about out there and users using and testing it, read the log. I think Jorge and I were sounding something between a comedy duo and an old couple every now and then – I hope you forgive us.
• 19:00 UTC: Make Your Applications Shine With Application Indicators (tedg): Ted Gould has been working on indicators in the panel for quite a while now and it was great to have him around to explain what’s going on and how to make best use of the technology. If your heart beats for Desktop stuff, you wrote a Desktop application or just want to know what’s going on and how things are evolving, make sure you check out the log.
• 20:00 UTC: Kernel Triage (JFo): Imagine there’s millions of users using all kinds of different hardware. Imagine there’s failure reports or some kind of hardware not working exactly. How do you deal with the feedback of those users? This is exactly that Jeremy Foshee talked about. As you can imagine there’s a lot of lessons the Kernel team learned already and lots of experience that went into the session. If you like all things hardware and want to give Jeremy a hand, be sure to check out the log.

As always: thanks a lot everybody who makes Ubuntu Developer Week happening. You know who you are and you’re awesome!

Day 4 starts in just a few hours, so here’s what’s happening today:

• 16:00 UTC: Create An Application For Ubuntu With Quickly – didrocks
  • Description: If you ever had a great idea for an application that makes the life of users easier and didn’t want to waste hours of getting everything set up, you’ll be absolutely right here. Didier Roche will show you how to get it done quickly.
• 17:00 UTC: Improving Ubuntu In An Evening – vish
  • Description: All you got is an Evening of Love for Ubuntu? Vishnoo will show you how to make an impact in just one evening.
• 18:00 UTC: Contribute To Ubuntu Server, Do Server Papercuts! – ttx
  • Description: Thierry Carrez works hard making the Ubuntu Server experience even smoother than it already is. Helping with Server papercuts is a great and easy way to get involved in Ubuntu Server development, so if you’re interested and would like to help out, be there!
• 19:00 UTC: How To Help With Xubuntu – charlie-tca
  • Description: Xubuntu is alive and kicking, but needs your help! Charlie Kravetz will show you how!
• 20:00 UTC: Merge proposals: life on the sunny side – beuno
  • Description: Martin Albisetti will talk about merge proposals, how they work, why they make your code better and how you can easily learn more by using them.

Hope to see you there and please help spread the news!

Jim Campbell did a great job in putting together a survey about our packaging guide. If you used the guide in the past, like it, and/or want it improved, please check out his announce.

Another day of Ubuntu Developer Week has passed and what a great day it was. Let’s re-cap:

• 16:00 UTC: Packaging Like A Ninja (shadeslayer): Rohan Garg brought a lot of fun to UDW by teaching us all how things work in the Kubuntu team. If I counted correctly he even handed out three orange ninja belts.
• 17:00 UTC: «I Don’t Know Anything About Translations» (dpm): By the looks of it, David Planella managed to resolve the problem of not knowing very very well. He gave an excellent overview over translations and how to work with them and answered what felt like a thousand questions.
• 18:00 UTC: Developing With Qt Quick and QML (Riddell): As a seasoned KDE-hacker Jonathan Riddell knows what’s going on in the KDE and Qt world and which technologies get you good results quickly. He gave great insight into making your KDE apps rock very easily.
• 19:00 UTC: How To Work With Debian (Laney and Rhonda): Wow, what a great session. I’m particularly excited to see people from Debian and Ubuntu collaborate like that and see that much interest in getting the most out of our work for both projects. Great session, lots of info, lots of good questions.
• 20:00 UTC: Setting Up A Small Validation Dashboard (zyga): The last session of the day was held by Zygmunt Krynicki who presented an interesting way to see how low-level changes affect the whole system and measure performance. The questions indicate that there’s a deep interest in solving this problem across the board.

Again, I’d like to thank everybody who made this day a success.

We have Day 3 ahead of us, so let’s see what’ll happen today:

• 16:00 UTC: Operation Cleansweep – Reviewing Patches – nigelb and bobbo
  • Description: Operation Cleansweep is in full swing, the goal is to review around 2000 patches and help to push them into the right direction. Nigel Babu will give a session that will explain very easily how to help with this fantastic initiative.
• 17:00 UTC: Forwarding Bugs and Patches Upstream – pedro_
  • Description: This session together with the one before will give you all the tools to effectively help Ubuntu, Debian and other upstream projects. Pedro Villavicencio will deliver this session and has great experience: he does a great job working primarily with the GNOME project.
• 18:00 UTC: Daily Builds And You – jcastro and dholbach
  • Description: Hold tight for Jorge Castro’s session about the latest piece of awesome of our Launchpad infrastructure. Daily Builds will change how we interact with projects a lot because it helps to bring the latest awesome to testers and enthusiasts very easily.
• 19:00 UTC: Making Your Applications Shine With Application Indicators – tedg
  • Description: Application Indicators clean up the panel and are easy to use. Find out how to use them in your application for a great user experience.
• 20:00 UTC: Kernel Triage – JFo
  • Description: Interested in the core parts of Ubuntu that make hardware work? Jeremy Foshee will take you on a tour through kernel wonderland and show you how to help out.

AWESOME!

What a fantastic start of Ubuntu Developer Week. At times we had 350+ visitors and the amount of great questions was simply overwhelming. Awesome. I also noticed the first few participants actively helping out after the sessions. This makes me incredibly happy.

So here’s a re-cap of day 1:

• 16:00 UTC – 18:00 UTC: Getting Started With Development (dholbach): This two-hour session was one of the most action-packed sessions I ever ran. So many great questions, so much fun and so much topics covered. Thanks a lot everybody. We managed to set up an initial Ubuntu development environment, talk about Ubuntu development processes and Ubuntu in the bigger picture. In the second part we had a look at a couple of packages that fail to build and succeeded in fixing a few of them. Awesome!
• 18:00 UTC – 19:00 UTC: Widgetcraft (apachelogger): Next up was Harald Sitter who did a great job explaining how to write KDE widgets by using the Plasmoid infrastructure. Lots of real-life examples, lots of excitement and slides for your reading pleasure.
• 19:00 UTC – 20:00 UTC: Desktop Team Overview (seb128): Sébastien Bacher did a great presentation of what’s going on in the Desktop Team and how you can help out. Maybe we should have an additional “Ask Séb” session, next time. Heaps and heaps of interested Desktop people kept him quite busy.
• 20:00 UTC – 21:00 UTC: Authoring Upstart Jobs (slangasek): Last on day 1 was Steve Langasek who dived deep into Upstart’s features and how to make best use of them. I foresee lots and lots of good use made of it.

Thanks a lot to everybody who helped to make Day 1 such a success. Awesome!

So what’s cooking for Day 2 you ask?

• 16:00 UTC: Packaging like a Ninja – shadeslayer
  • Description: The Kubuntu team has lots of ninjas on their team. Rohan Garg is one of them and will show you how to join the team.
• 17:00 UTC: «I Don’t Know Anything About Translations» – dpm
  • Description: If you’ve heard yourself saying exactly that at least one time, Translations Mastermind David Planella is here with the remedy: one hour of translations goodness.
• 18:00 UTC: Developing With Qt Quick and QML – Riddell
  • Description: Jonathan Riddell will bring you up to scratch with the latest goodness for developing Qt applications. Qt Quick and QML will bring a lot more fun to your life.
• 19:00 UTC: How To Work With Debian – Laney and Rhonda
  • Description: Debian is the most important project to Ubuntu. Being able to work effectively with Debian will make your life easier. Iain Lane knows this quite well and will give an excellent session about this. Rhonda from the Debian Project will round it up with some comments looking from the other side at it.
• 20:00 UTC: Setting Up A Small Validation Dashboard – zyga
  • Description: Zygmunt Krynicki will talk about a tool he is writing for Linaro and how to make use of it in other places. Dashboard is a tool for visualizing results from unit tests and performance benchmarks. Dashboard can be applied virtually everywhere where performance or regression monitoring is required.

Totally looking forward to it!

… it’s Ubuntu Developer Week time!

Starting from 16:00 UTC today, we’ll have one week of awesome sessions revolving around development, packaging, hacking and in general making Ubuntu better.

I’m very excited for the event to kick off, so let’s see what day 1 has for us:

• 16:00 UTC + 17:00 UTC: Getting Started With Development – dholbach
  • Description: As always we’ll start the week with a session on how to get you started. In this session Daniel Holbach will get you set up, talk about helpful tools and make sure you get the big picture overview first.
• 18:00 UTC: Widgetcraft – apachelogger
  • Description: Ever wanted to create your own amazing Plasma Widget? Now is your chance! Harald Sitter will show you how to create such a magical program and how to get your own fan club.
• 19:00 UTC: Desktop Team overview – seb128
  • Description: Sébastien Bacher will talk about how the desktop team is building your favorite desktop, what the common tasks are that the team is working on and what you could do if you want to contribute as well
• 20:00 UTC: Authoring Upstart Jobs – slangasek
  • Description: As you all might’ve heard upstart is Ubuntu’s init system for quite a while now. Upstart offers a bunch of nice features, which you can easily make use of, after Steve Langasek showed you how.
  • Preparation: Skim the init(5) manpage and bring your questions with you

I hope to see you all there and be sure to tell your friends!

Only a few days left until Ubuntu Developer Week! I’m really excited and hope you tell all your friends to come there too!